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
(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.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(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.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(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!
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(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.