from the winning-battles-while-losing-the-war? dept.
Huawei to stop making flagship chipsets as U.S. pressure bites, Chinese media say:
Huawei Technologies Co will stop making its flagship Kirin chipsets next month, financial magazine Caixin said on Saturday, as the impact of U.S. pressure on the Chinese tech giant grows.
U.S. pressure on Huawei's suppliers has made it impossible for the company's HiSilicon chip division to keep making the chipsets, key components for mobile phone, Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei's Consumer Business Unit was quoted as saying at the launch of the company's new Mate 40 handset.
[...] "From Sept. 15 onward, our flagship Kirin processors cannot be produced," Yu said, according to Caixin. "Our AI-powered chips also cannot be processed. This is a huge loss for us."
Huawei's HiSilicon division relies on software from U.S. companies such as Cadence Design Systems Inc or Synopsys Inc to design its chips and it outsources the production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), which uses equipment from U.S. companies.
Also at PhoneArena.
Previously: Arrest of Huawei Executive Causing Discontent Among Chinese Elites
Huawei Soldiers on, Announces Nova 5 and Kirin 810
U.S. Attempting to Restrict TSMC Sales to Huawei
TSMC Dumps Huawei
Huawei on List of 20 Chinese Companies that Pentagon Says are Controlled by People's Liberation Army
Related Stories
Huawei Arrest Tests China's Leaders as Fear and Anger Grip Elite
The arrest of one of China's leading tech executives by the Canadian police for extradition to the United States has unleashed a combustible torrent of outrage and alarm among affluent and influential Chinese, posing a delicate political test for President Xi Jinping and his grip on the loyalty of the nation's elite.
The outpouring of conflicting sentiments — some Chinese have demanded a boycott of American products while others have expressed anxiety about their investments in the United States — underscores the unusual, politically charged nature of the Trump administration's latest move to counter China's drive for technological superiority.
In a hearing on Friday in Vancouver, Canadian prosecutors said the executive, Meng Wanzhou of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei, faced accusations of participating in a scheme to trick financial institutions into making transactions that violated United States sanctions against Iran.
Unlike a new round of tariffs or more tough rhetoric from American officials, the detention of Ms. Meng, the company's chief financial officer, appears to have driven home the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China in a visceral way for the Chinese establishment — and may force Mr. Xi to adopt a tougher stance against Washington, analysts said. In part, that is because Ms. Meng, 46, is so embedded in that establishment herself.
Previously: Canada Arrests Huawei's Global Chief Financial Officer in Vancouver
Related: New Law Bans U.S. Government from Buying Equipment from Chinese Telecom Giants ZTE and Huawei
Australia Bans China's Huawei (and maybe ZTE) from 5G Mobile Network Project
Washington Asks Allies to Drop Huawei
Huawei Clarifies Android Update Situation, Commits to Android Q for Last 2 Generations
Huawei last night launched an information campaign about the status of software updates on existing devices in the face of the company's troubles with the U.S. Commerce Department.
The important news is that Huawei is confirming to and committing to continues[sic] security and Android platform updates, specifically the upcoming release of Android Q.
In general the news is no surprise as certification and approval happens several months before the actual software update. With Huawei receiving a reprieve on updates, it means in general business continues as usual for the moment being.
Huawei Announces Nova 5 & Nova Pro in China: Introduces New Kirin 810 Chipset
Today Huawei announced the brand new Nova 5 series of smartphones. The company released the new Nova 5, Nova 5 Pro and Nova 5i in China with availability later this month. The new Nova 5 and 5 Pro are particularly interesting because they now represent Huawei's lowest priced devices with OLED displays, also featuring high-end cameras and SoC options.
The new Nova 5 and Nova 5 Pro are interesting phones because they are essentially the same device, with the peculiarity of having different SoC options: The Nova 5 in particular is the first phone to now introduce the new Kirin 810 chipset. The new chip features a combination of 2x Cortex A76 CPUs at up to 2.23GHz and 6x Cortex A55's at 1.88GHz. In terms of GPU, Huawei has opted for a Mali-G52MP6 running at 820MHz. It looks like the Kirin 810 is extremely well positioned to compete against Qualcomm's Snapdragon 730 SoC which was announced just back in April.
Previously: Huawei Working on its Own OS to Prepare for "Worst-Case Scenario" of Being Deprived of Android
Google Pulls Huawei's Android License
The Huawei Disaster Reveals Google's Iron Grip On Android
Huawei Calls on U.S. to Adjust its Approach to Tackle Cybersecurity Effectively
Google Doesn't Want Huawei Ban Because It Would Result in an Android Competitor
US poised to restrict TSMC's chip sales to China's Huawei
The United States has been aiming to curb the supply of chips sold by contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) to China's Huawei Technologies Co. through planned heavier sanctions against the Chinese telecom equipment giant, according to a Reuters report.
The report said while tensions between Washington and Beijing have been escalating with both sides blaming each other for spreading the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the Trump administration has a plan to introduce new measures to further restrict global chip sales to Huawei.
Under the proposed new rules, the report, dated Thursday (March 26) in Washington, said foreign companies that use U.S. production equipment to roll out their chips would be required to obtain a U.S. license ahead of sales of certain chips to Huawei, which was blacklisted last year.
Boon for Apple, AMD, Nvidia, etc. or a disaster in the making?
Also at Tom's Hardware.
See also:
AMD is set to become TSMC's biggest 7nm customer in 2020
Report: TSMC's Reducing Its Reliance on Huawei Amid US Government Scrutiny
Related:
AMD Says TSMC Can Meet Epyc Demand; Launches New, Higher-Clocked 64-Core CPU
How China Plans to Lead the Computer Chip Industry
TSMC reportedly stops taking orders from Huawei after new U.S. export controls
Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest contract semiconductor maker, has stopped taking new orders from Huawei Technologies, one of its largest customers, according to the Nikkei Asian Review. The report said the decision was made to comply with new United States export controls, announced last Friday, that are meant to make it more difficult for Huawei to obtain chips produced using U.S. technology, including manufacturing equipment.
Huawei hits back at US as TSMC cuts off chip orders
Huawei rotating chairman Guo Ping has hit back at the US government's stricter export controls intended to stop the Chinese tech giant from obtaining essential chips, following reports that its biggest supplier has already cut it off. "We still haven't figured it out," Guo said on stage at Huawei's annual analyst summit. "The US government still persists in attacking Huawei, but what will that bring to the world?"
"In its relentless pursuit to tighten its stranglehold on our company, the US government has decided to proceed and completely ignore the concerns of many companies and industry associations," Huawei adds in an official statement. "This decision was arbitrary and pernicious, and threatens to undermine the entire industry worldwide. This new rule will impact the expansion, maintenance, and continuous operations of networks worth hundreds of billions of dollars that we have rolled out in more than 170 countries."
"We expect that our business will inevitably be affected," Huawei's statement continues. "We will try all we can to seek a solution."
See also: Huawei Braces for Latest U.S. Hit, but Some Say Loopholes Remain
TSMC Accepts US Kill Order & Suspends Future Huawei Contracts
Previously: U.S. Attempting to Restrict TSMC Sales to Huawei
Washington in Talks with Chipmakers about Building U.S. Factories
TSMC Will Build a $12 Billion "5nm" Fab in Arizona
Huawei on List of 20 Chinese Companies That Pentagon Says Are Controlled by People’s Liberation Army:
The Pentagon put Huawei Technologies and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology on a list of 20 companies it says are owned or controlled by China's military, opening them up to potential additional U.S. sanctions.
In letters to lawmakers dated June 24, the Pentagon said it was providing a list of "Communist Chinese military companies operating in the United States." The list was first requested in the fiscal 1999 defense policy law.
This list includes "entities owned by, controlled by, or affiliated with China's government, military, or defense industry," Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement.
[...] The companies on the list are:
Aviation Industry Corporation of China
China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation
China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation
China Electronics Technology Group Corporation
China South Industries Group Corporation
China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation
China State Shipbuilding Corporation
China North Industries Group Corporation
Huawei Technologies Co.
Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co.
Inspur Group; Aero Engine Corporation of China
China Railway Construction Corporation
CRRC Corp.; Panda Electronics Group
Dawning Information Industry Co.
China Mobile Communications Group
China General Nuclear Power Corp.
China National Nuclear Power Corp.
China Telecommunications Corp.
Given how inter-connected the world is, how practical would it be to avoid all such Chinese companies?
Huawei confirms a June 2, 2021 launch for HarmonyOS
Huawei has set a date for the launch of its first-party operating system, HarmonyOS, in its native China. The software may have originally been intended to replace Android on its smartphones, but may also ship with other new products such as the MatePad Pro 2 and Watch 3, which are also now expected to debut on the same day.
Huawei's HiSilicon Develops First RISC-V Design to Overcome Arm Restrictions
In a bid to overcome US restrictions on its Arm designs, Huawei's HiSilicon has turned to the open-source RISC-V architecture and has even released its first RISC-V board for Harmony OS developers. Due to being blacklisted by the U.S. government, Huawei and its chip division HiSilicon do not have access to development and production technologies designed in America. The restrictions include many Arm processor architectures, including those used in various microcontrollers that Huawei uses widely.
[...] The Hi3861 is aimed mostly at the IoT market, whereas HiSilicon's development efforts were historically aimed at high-margin smartphones, tablets, PCs, and embedded systems. But Huawei needs computing platforms to use for its other devices, so the HiSilicon Hi3861 is just what the doctor ordered at this time.
Huawei Expected to Develop a 3nm Kirin SoC but Release May Happen in 2022, Suggests Latest Trademark
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:10AM (11 children)
China holds the US by the balls. It wouldn't take Beijing many sanctions or tariffs to collapse the US economy.
I'm surprised they haven't reacted to Washington's shenanigans anymore than they have. But I guess it's just a matter of time before they finally have enough...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:22AM (2 children)
Xiaomi, BBK and Lenovo are still making phones.
If anything it'll benefit China in the long term thru building their own fabs around Risc-V or some other architecture not owned by Nvidia.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:54AM (1 child)
It will be interesting. SMIC is basically around the 14nm-10nm range [eetimes.com] compared to TSMC process nodes. That's definitely worse compared to bleeding edge 7nm/5nm TSMC flagship smartphones, but perfectly acceptable. The manufacturers can make some tradeoffs to remain competitive, like making larger SoCs on the older nodes to compensate for less area reduction. Or integrate a big ass heatsink [anandtech.com] in the phones and clock the cores higher.
The preparations to escape Android/Google are well underway. There's Harmony OS [wikipedia.org], and maybe a fork of LineageOS [wikipedia.org] could be used. RISC-V instead of ARM, or just bootleg ARM?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday August 09 2020, @10:49AM
Mobile aren't general compute. They follow the Gables/Roofline SoC model where memory bandwidth and accelerators* do more to determine the real world bottlenecks than raw compute: https://research.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/papers/hpca19_gables.pdf [wisc.edu]
And it's not confined to mobile. TSMC still can't compete with GlobalFoundries on some graphics and even general compute mid-end (AMD) SoCs due to costs and yields. So, once you factor all the SMIC versus TSMC factors in, it might end up being more cost-effective to do even mid-high end chips in a larger nodes even without any high-frequency, larger dies shenanigans.
*No not AI. Rather, it's special instruction and circuitry for decryption, signal processing, audio processing, image processing, video decoding, etc...
compiling...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:52AM (3 children)
Also if you look at the headline:
that doesn't mean they've actually stopped, it just means that they're claiming they'll stop. Given the sentiment expressed on places like Weibo, "we'll eat grass before we let the US win the trade war", and they will actually do that, I see this more as a negotiation strategy than an admission of defeat. They're not going to give up just like that. The US' strategy would work against a country like Australia (to pick a random example) where people are married to their creature comforts and won't want to give them up, but not against somewhere like China.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 09 2020, @01:05PM (2 children)
My understanding is that TSMC was allowed to finish fabbing their existing orders for Huawei, which included a "5nm" Kirin SoC.
TSMC Confirms Halt to Huawei Shipments In September [anandtech.com]
Huawei’s 2021 flagship could use a third-party 5nm chipset [gizmochina.com]
That story suggests they will buy SoCs (Dimensity 1XXX?) from MediaTek starting in 2021. Assuming they are allowed to.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday August 09 2020, @01:13PM (1 child)
Sure, and even beyond 2021 I'm sure they've got a plan B. And C. And D. They wouldn't give up just like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @01:18PM
The plan is America having a new president in January.
(Score: 3, Informative) by crafoo on Sunday August 09 2020, @01:26PM (2 children)
Not really. They own so much US bonds that such an action would collapse their economy as well. Their move now is to build these specialized software tools in-country. Most likely by stealing the code from US software developers. Something China is very, very good at.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @06:31PM (1 child)
Insightful up until
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @11:38AM
100% correct. Most of these algorithms are public research and just need implementation. Trump's idiotic politics do nothing but handicap American companies from actually doing business in China. Out company already has "not for US" support contracts from HUAWEI where only non-Americans work on these things. Needless to say, our American workforce is decreasing while EU offices are hiring.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Monday August 10 2020, @03:09PM
Why would they? The US continues to throw money at them like there's no tomorrow. Until domestic manufacturing becomes a thing again, China doesn't even have to put any effort into it. Everyone else willingly teabags the tightening vice while shouting "harder daddy!"
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday August 09 2020, @12:23PM (10 children)
With this whole "purge Huawei" from the network does that mean that eventually they'll block phones made by Huawei from the network to or is it just network equipment? I have not really been keeping up with the issue at all.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday August 09 2020, @01:31PM (9 children)
Yes.
Thing is, the Chinese interlocked companies are going to realise that with the US going after them they're better off cooperating against the common enemy than competing with each other. So instead of a bunch of separate vendors and suppliers competing against each other the US will be facing Chinese versions of Japan's keiretsus gathered together in mutually cooperating, defensive formations. Just like German hostility turned the USSR from a barely-functioning dictatorship to an independent global superpower, so the US' hostility will turn Chinese industry into an independent global superpower.
Once US pressure has forced them to decouple their industry from any dependence on the rest of the world, they can face any country in the world on their own terms. We (company I work for) have already seen this, doing teardowns of Chinese-supplied gear we've seen standard parts replaced with equivalents for which the data sheets are only available in Chinese and then replaced with stuff for which we can't even find data sheets. It's like something out of Second Variety/Screamers, the first generation is known, second generation is recognisable but not known, third generation is some unknown alien derivative that's gone way beyond what the originals did.
Even worse, the rest of the world will at some point be forced to make a choice between dealing with the US and dealing with the entire rest of the world. As things are going now, it's getting easier and easier to decide that the better option is the huge, open market that's the rest of the world, not the shrinking, closed market that's the US.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 09 2020, @06:55PM (6 children)
I was pretty much with you, right up to the "huge, open market".
China is NOT an "open market". The whole country runs a protectionist racket intent on dominating the world market. All trade secrets belong to the Party, but the Party need not share any of it's secrets. Intellectual property is not to be respected, unless the Party owns the IP.
Do political debates really matter? Ask Joe!
(Score: 4, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday August 09 2020, @10:57PM (5 children)
I am not sure how you factor in the US company I work for then.
It owns 20 manufacturing sites in China and makes something like $2 Billion in profits from China.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 10 2020, @01:04AM (4 children)
Every "secret" your company owns, is co-owned by the Party. Not directly, of course, but indirectly. Your company doesn't own 20 manufacturing sites in China, it co-owns those sites with sister Chinese companies. Your company can be booted from China entirely, and the party, working with those sister companies, will keep right on keeping on.
Do political debates really matter? Ask Joe!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 10 2020, @01:48AM (3 children)
I'm sure you're right, but those are the terms the company agreed to when they set up in China, and presumably they thought those terms were reasonable at the time.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 10 2020, @02:27AM (2 children)
Key words, "at the time". The whole world thought that China was going to be easy to exploit, so they agreed to very unreasonable terms. It turns out that the Chinese were a lot smarter than our people thought they were!
Do political debates really matter? Ask Joe!
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday August 10 2020, @02:54AM (1 child)
I don't think that's true.
I don't think anyone would be stupid enough to agree to terms on the basis of "they don't really mean it" or "they say they're going to take all our stuff, but I don't really think they will".
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday August 10 2020, @12:16PM
Interesting that your company is doing tear downs.
From what I understand on the whole doing business in China thing, is that you sign in to the Party's terms or you don't sell to a billion people or the world's second biggest economy. It's that sight of treasure that makes companies sign virtually anything. I would take care assuming the terms were good for your company (not that they would have even cared).
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @07:31PM (1 child)
" Just like German hostility turned the USSR from a barely-functioning dictatorship to an independent global superpower"
just like Germans trying to rid themselves of the treasonous, parasitic Jews caused the international criminal Jews (and race traitor Anglo capitalists) to start dumping money into the USSR war machine to use it as a weapon against the Germans (along with the other goy slave states, the USA, UK, Poland, etc) . The very same Russia that they had destroyed through subversive revolution a few years before.
FTFY
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday August 09 2020, @10:52PM
Wow.
You should read a history book.