- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
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Barred from making advanced chips, suddenly making what they can make becomes the issue. Sounds like what we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire media spectrum.
I’ve worked in this space. This is interesting because the legacy chips are similar to generic drugs under capitalism: nobody wants to produce them because they have near-zero profits. “Unfortunately,” many legacy chips are still essential building blocks to make higher-end ones work in any electronic system. It’s basically trivial for China to corner the market here. It would be a hilarious page in history if NATO couldn’t build weaponry using SOTA chips because they ran out of 555 timers that NATO countries refused to produce due to lackluster profits.
Indeed, and the reality is that older chips work just fine for most applications. The main advantage of newer chips is in lower heat and power consumption which primarily matters for mobile devices. SMIC just announced that they can already produce 7nm that Huawei announced they’re going to use, so it looks like China is able to produce small batches of high end domestic chips for this niche use case now.
If this lowers electronic prices worldwide, I see this as an easy win-win situation for anybody except the Northwestern manufacturers. Turns out the capitalists don’t like it when free market doesn’t go their way.
US and the west systematically try to isolate China from the global chip market.
China then tries to improve their domestic chip manufacturing so they don’t need to rely on volatile western supplies.
The west:
They really want to force China to take over Taiwan as soon as possible.
