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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: 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...