> To what extent are Intel chips designed and manufactured in China? Presumably, they are primarily designed in the USA and manufactured in Taiwan.
Intel has fabs all over the world, including many in the US and some in China[1]. Whenever people talk about chip manufacturing they seem to only think about high-end cutting edge processes, when in fact the majority of quantity of chips produced are at non-cutting edge fabs that are spread all over the world and made by many companies that you haven't heard of, but also Intel.
However this was never about Intel manufacturing chips in Xianjing, it was about the long long tail of supply chain that goes into these ships from mines through to chemical supply companies up to industrial machinery supply and everything in between.
That is a great question. I am not familiar with how much the production of these CPUs are dependent on ASML, TSMC etc. I think think China is kind of forced to have its own supply chain after the Obama era ban on Intel chips in Chinese supercomputers.
Doesn't really matter if your entire supply chain is in China. Globalist economic ideologues forget to mention this. You stick your supply chain in a totalitarian state with artificially cheap labor costs, and you pretty much have to do as they say.
Good luck sourcing chips for future military systems.
This is dangerously careless thinking which completely disregards the complexity of supply chains.
Modern IT infrastructure needs lots of different kinds of chips, not just CPUs. Most of them aren't manufactured in the US. If chips stopped shipping from Taiwan tomorrow, then sure, people would scramble to switch to other manufacturing, and presumably some of the gap could be filled from existing products or of Korea, but getting a design up on a new process can easily take a year, often more. Not to mention that building up raw fab capacity takes time as well.
The impact on supply chains in the short term would be devastating even if the long term can be gotten under control. If the short term includes a war with China, then, well... it certainly complicates any sort of military scenario.
The problem is that Intel is already more than 2 technology nodes behind. Catching up could be exponentially expensive, especially if all orders are now going to Taiwan.
For existing PoW hardware (even GPUs) it seems like proximity to the Chinese supply chain is more important than capital. I don't see why that would change.
I know I might seem like a flat-earther with this, but I don't understand the chip crisis either. The explanation that many chipmakers went bankrupt after the automobile industry scaled down their orders seemed logical to me. But now that time has passed and we still have a chip crisis makes me think that there is something else.
We know that ASML doesn't ship high tech machines to China, it only ships low tech ones. China in return holds the world hostage by not producing enough chips. With enough subsidy, I think we could ramp up production to meet demand.
I also don't understand that the key companies are monopolys. It all seems a bit planned to me. Place the chip manufacturing company in Europe, chip factory in Taiwan, assemble in China. I feel like someone planned to distribute these technologies and infrastructure to avoid having one country having it all.
I know I cannot support my argument, but this is a gut feeling I have.
OTOH, nobody can reasonably explain why there are unsolveable real bottlenecks in the supply chain and why it would take years to resolve. Throw resources and people at it. This is not just one company with limited resources and a single goal. We should fund the semiconductor industry.
So rather than making China dependent on a U.S. supply chain, clearly the USG should block products and motivate China to spend billions to develop their own native chip design and manufacturing. Good thing they don't know how to make stuff.
Any bets on how long until Chinese chips are the cutting edge on the planet?
China is decades behind and will stay so because the industry is not standing still either.
The chip machines need maintenance which the Chinese cannot do themselves. They don't have the knowledge. They'd need ASML (European company) for that.
China's manufacturing firms add a ton of value in the tech supply chain. It's not like fashion where processes are lower-skill and can easily be transitioned between countries and regions based on shifting headwinds.
It will be very difficult, expensive, and painful for chipmakers to untangle China from their supply chains. It's not all bad though, having a shorter supply chain closer to consumer markets can do wonders for lead times and for the configure to order model that's increasingly expected by shoppers.
Call me crazy but I think long term (10 years +) the Intel strategy of fabricating chips domestically is the correct choice. There's a ton of geopolitical pressure in this direction. The US simply doesn't want to be dependent on Taiwan for chips, for obvious reasons.
Intel knows this and is trying to become the TSMC of the west. And frankly they're the only ones that can pull it off. I'd be surprised if 10 years from now the majority of their revenue comes from selling processors rather than fabricating them for AMD, NVIDIA, etc. Why compete when there's plenty of steak for everyone?
I don't believe there's a single part of the semiconductor supply chain that is exclusively available from China.
I agree with you. But the parent comment reminds me of when Apple started making computers in Austin and HN was full of people saying, "No, you can't build computers in America because America doesn't have any screws, and can't possibly figure out how to make its own!"
Time and money solve all problems. Even supply chains.
Not only that, Intel produces most of its chips in the US. The one plant they have in China used older processes, had to be approved by the US government and should have been repurposed to make memory chips. If you sense a pattern...
Woah there, this really comes down to a mine in China that providers the silicon for the chips that Intel built, that are located inside of AWS data centers.
Developing chips is a marathon. AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and company are decades ahead of everyone else due to the fact that they buy what they want and have been building them for decades.
Nothing is stopping a Chinese company from making their own GPU/CPUs (which they are)- it will just take years, if not decades, to reach feature parity. That's not even considering how much work China needs to do to be able to tap out chips at 32, 14, and 12nm
I have a question for you. Do you know that, or why, China stopped submitting new entries to the Top500, while numerous sources are claiming China brought online exascale computers with custom architectures?
Mining chips don't just simply pay for themselves. If it was cheaper to get the chips fabbed at Samsung or TSMC at any other lithography they'd be fabbed there. The company that made the miners isn't even Chinese. That it was fabbed there means that not only was there yield leftover from whatever state project was required, it was also commercially competitive.
It seems Intel wanted to use an expansion to an existing facility in China to quickly increase production:
Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, has proposed using a factory in Chengdu, China, to manufacture silicon wafers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private. That production could have been online by the end of 2022, helping ease a global supply crunch. But at the same time, it’s been seeking federal assistance to ramp up research and production in the U.S.
No doubt that US sanctions are causing them problems.
While I think it will be a long time before China can fab their own 5nm chips, I would be surprised if they don’t quickly get to where they can make inferior but still serviceable CPUs, memory, GPUs, etc. It would seem like very poor execution to not make this a priority.
I am in the USA, and I wish that we were more self-sufficient but unfortunately we are not as motivated because probably no one can mess with our supply chains.
The mining industry needed those money not Intel. It's the mining industry that's been neglected the last 20 years or so.
It will take at least 10 years to get anything resembling chinese supply chain in place.
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