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- Hacker News
- When China eventually catches up on conventional lithography, the goalposts will simply shift to silicon photonics and optical logic, a transition DARPA laid the publicly visible groundwork for decades ago through programs like POEM and PIPES while keeping the mature implementations strictly classified until needed.by SadErn
- Yeah, and Chinese (before that: Japanese) cars will always be crap.
Times change, believing in your never ending superiority is foolish.
by don_esteban - Are these tippy top-secret Skunkworks Final Boss Wunderwaffen with you in the room right now?
More and more there seems to be some wishful thinking that the USA has another hidden generation of SR-71 or Stealth tech type surprises squirrelled away for a rainy day. Find this hard to believe when the best brains of the generation got hoovered up by hedge funds, click merchants, and now token slingers.
Is there anything to stop the Chinese doing a silicon photonics end run independent of cracking EUV at scale? Or is getting EUV right first on the critical path? This part is a genuine question.
by segfault99 - How does this compare to EUV?
- It's about 14x worse if you just look at the wavelength of light.by bob1029
- Unpopular opinion:
if you do not want to pay $500 a month for Claude Max, maybe let China keep pushing engineering optimization. The U.S. and China should compete.
by m00dy - The US does not want to compete with China. There’s no profit in it when compared to the riches available from having a captive marketplace.by voakbasda
- nvidia clone in next year or two?
btw photo on that article is actually intel at Oregon
by ck2 - ASML dropped; it used to be the undisputed leader of immersion DUV
Interesting in so many ways that theinfo kept the company anon but Reuters exposed it (allegedly)
Aside: what we know for sure is that Chinese are catching up to Japanese in putting dad-style puns in their brands
- do you mean like Xīn Kǎilái 新凯来 "new triumph" could also sound like 芯凯来 "chip triumph" ?by totetsu
- Basically game over for compute wars in ~5 years if PRC serious, PRC doesn't need EUV to win compute game. If they hammer DUV tools and commoditize semi (i.e. remove 50-80% margins along every step of supply chain) they will simply be able to sell chips at fraction price of west, even accounting for multi pattern inefficiencies. TCO may still swing leading edge favor depending on infra / energy price, but as far as compute race goes, PRC can hammer power, fabs, DCs all at much lower input costs. The bottleneck has always been semi tooling.by maxglute
- I would not be overestimating this achievement, but not underestimating either. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. China had access to the latest EUV tech for some time already, so they had abilities to reverse-engineer that tech. Eventually, the verdict will be clear only after we see actual chips produced using these machine, and when we learn their real yield.
- China is still far behind modern lithography. It took ASML almost 2 decades to get from immersion DUV (and EUV prototypes) to commercial EUV machines.by AsyncBanana
- This, these news organizations have no f'n clue. China this, China that, it's all part of the 10 billion China spends on b.s to feed the Americans that they are behind or they are useless and that they don't stand a chance....
China is on the verge of collapse walking the razors edge.
by sleepyguy - OK, China will do it in 5 years then.by zelphirkalt
- Sure, and spent most of it experimenting with something nobody knew would work in production or not, and needed a lots of breakthrough ideas that are now known as the machines exist.by xiphias2
- True but also catching up to an existing tech is a much different game than creating it from scratch. Hiring people who have the right knowledge can speed that up.by Reptur
- But isn't it easier to copy some existing approach than to create it from a green field? ASML tech is presumably highly protected, but China is also very good in spying, hacking etc.by _ink_
- All of this can be traced back to the 2018 blacklisting of ZTE, and the continued willful ignorance of China's capabilities, and of the history of industrialization and technological progress.by try-working
- It doesn't make me upset that China seems able and determined to catch up on the litography technology - what else are they supposed to do?
What does make me upset is that Europe has the technology and seems unwilling or unable to get it's act together and make some chips. China seems to have managed this part too, only without access to the latest chip making technology!
by rich_sasha - Sadly the only thing that European leaders are really trying to copy from China is internet censorship and privacy eroding regulations...by greatgib
- don't worry, im hearing that von der Leyen and all the EU politicians are hard at work and are about to shake hands and announce another package of funds that will disappear into the void in order to make the EU the "powerhouse" of AI, chips, datacenters, technology, jobs, space, everything.
just wait, this time it'll make a dent. lots of hand shaking and smiling for the cameras. it's gonna be a new era
by r_lee - The rulers of the West know their days are numbered because of how rapidly China is advancing. Rather than make Europe better, they’re currently looting it. It would not surprise me (though it always seems unlikely, doesn’t it?) that a war breaks out sooner or later, although at China’s scale they know how to quell uprisings the size of any European country without a big fuss. Besides, they’ve already taken over a lot of Europe. So as the saying goes, resistance is futile.by turgidpost
- After living and working in China 10yrs and fundamentally experiencing the growth rate and culture, it's been a bit horrifying to watch the Western world consistently decide withholding tech from China and giving them no other option but develop their own tech, is a good idea. They are the ultimate long-term planners and I have no doubt the existing gaps will be relatively short lived before China closes them.by bobjordan
- I don't see how the alternatives ends any differently? We manufacture in China, they copy the products with lower margins then western companies can't compete on price.by gedy
- China is single-handedly propping up Iran, NK, and Russia financially. If you ahem removed the top 1000 leaders of the CCP tomorrow, those three countries wouldn’t be able to continue their population repression and the world would be an immeasurably better place. Iran killed, what, 20k of their own population earlier this year? Russia has lost 10x that this year alone. Blocking tech from China directly hampers their funding of these countries. Am I wrong?by jimbob45
- On the bright side, they'll basically reinvent the PARC era where actual innovation came because of the inherent limits of the technology at the time. The open weights models coming out are a sterling example.
The bloated american windbags in more ways than one need to be demonstrated again why sloth and bloat and craven "manifest destiny" is just negligence to intelligence and social benefits.
by cyanydeez - > (...) it's been a bit horrifying to watch the Western world consistently decide withholding tech from China and giving them no other option but develop their own tech, is a good idea.
This is a very ignorant and even cynical comment. You purposely omitted the fact that "the western world" was collaborating with China to the point where major corporations were developing tight partnerships, but only to see those partnerships being used to steal trade secrets about outright clone whole product lines.
To make matters worse, China is simulaneously demanding "the western world" transfers all tech to china while refusing to collaborate or even allow western companies to operate within their country.
Shall we talk about the extent that China has been targeting ASML industrial espionage?
https://www.asml.com/en/news/press-releases/2019/asml-disagr...
- I worked in China for 9 years and I really don’t think it makes much of a difference. China is not dumb enough to think that just because they can get it from the west today they can get it from them tomorrow. They were always going to develop their own semiconductor and jet turbine tech and industries, among other. They didn’t do it just to spite the west for not selling them the chips they wanted.by seanmcdirmid
- Withholding technology is the only tool we have. If we let them have the tech it's not like they'll start depending on us. They will simply replicate the machinery and then someone else will be writing a comment on Nacker Hews in this alternative Earth about how we were such fools in the West to simply let them have our technology thinking that would make them depend on us. In fact, we have this evidence because all the news about Hygon Dhyana being based on a nerfed Zen 1 had all Internet commentary shaped like "We're such idiots to let them have this. We are the eternal morons!"
Literally every non-embargoed technology they have access to they instantly build and enhance. They have industrial and manufacturing iteration ability far beyond what we have. They won't be grateful to us, they won't be dependent on us, they won't be supplicants. They are well on the trajectory to being an equivalent world power with divergent objectives and thinking that handing them R&D is going to slow a negative outcome for us is wishful thinking.
Sometimes the only plan available is not a great plan. That's just how it is. The world sometimes gives you constraints that don't have a happy solution. You race down the precipice on whatever you have. And look what we earned for it: almost a full decade before they got here. That's amazing.
The US only had the bomb exclusively for 4 years before the USSR got that. We had 18 months before they got nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles. We got 8 years of EUV that China couldn't match us in. Precious 8 years and ongoing.
by arjie