Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by guai888 2014 days ago
With the success of Apple M1, TSMC and Samsung will grow faster than Intel. Taiwan,Korea,Japan and US will control the semiconductor industry in the near future unless a game changing technology is introduced. Taiwan semiconductor companies's stocks are going banana after US slap sanction on SMIC. UMC stock has not changed much in years jumped 250% in last few weeks. (UMC invented foundry as service, then TSMC copy them)
2 comments

How near is your near future? Isn't China planning to achieve major progress until 2025? They aren't bound by patents in the same way as western companies. Why should they not be able to reproduce the knowledge? For nuclear energy, solar cells, moon rockets and high speed trains, they have already been successful.
China is weak in semiconductor industry and they simply do not have the capability to overcome the obstacle in 5 to 10 years or maybe never. Let me give two examples of obstacle. US has monopoly in the software tools that engineer use to design IC. Japan has the chemical that semiconductor fab foundry need to make IC. US now has slapped sanction on China's top fab foundry SMIC with intention to kill China's semiconductor industry. China's semiconductor companies's stocks are dropping stone while Taiwan semiconductor companies's stock are rising like crazy so a lot people are pessimistic about semiconductor companies in China. Semiconductor is a very expensive game to play. China has big domestic market but it is not large enough to sustain a semiconductor business. This is very different from other industries.
Only knowing HN comments about IC design tools, I got the impression that they don't seem to be that good. Which means that China could come out ahead because they can work with better tools if they make them by themselves.

And as far as I know, China is a huge supplier of chemicals for biological engineering. If they know that much about chemistry, is the gap still so big that they cannot transfer their knowledge?

WW2 resulted in diverting a substantial amount of resources to R&D and hence the explosion in innovation & science everything from Radar, automobiles, computing, nuclear energy, not to mention jet engine and computing.

Today China is on a one sided war of technology dominance while the rest of us are sleeping or bickering over patents & tech protectionism, anti competitiveness and blocking acquisition.

China has the scale, money, leadership and capability to pool resources on a literal war footing to develop what it can not buy. Let us not fool ourselves.

It's worth noting that the Chinese state is able to pool resources and direct a national effort in a way countries like Japan and the U.S. are not. It may take longer than 10 years but they'll get there.
The bureaucracy in China is insanely crazy. I doubt that they have passion to wait longer than 3 years. Not to mention 10 years.
I'm only half kidding when I say Apple doesn't consider themselves a US company. They consider them Apple.

It's not like they are cooperative like US automakers, and they have done China's will.

China CCP is a snake. Get in bed with them and they will bite you one day. It is just their nature. Apple will learn one day.
If you look at Apple's apple, you will notice that it is already bitten. It was not the snake, but Eve.
Wasn't it Alan Turing ? (Though I guess he's kind of an 'Eve' of computing...)
No more so that any other big country. At least they don't bomb thousands of people a month.
Yep, they keep them in concentration camps, which is totally different.
China also has concentration camps.
I'm talking about China, like it vs the US.

Edit: I've missed one "while" before they.

China==USA is an incredibly HN bad take