I like how every such video has to have a high contrast portrait of Xi Jinping. Like he is himself trying to solder these microchips in his basement.
🤣
It still lacks burning fire, Chinese flag, and caption “China will collapse in 30 days”.
“How China’s CRUMBLING chip sector spells the end of China’s economic BOOM!”
What people are missing is that China doesn’t need to make the best semiconductors, at least not at first, since there already exists a market for them and will buy them up at any performance level, and not just in China. Does Iran or Russia or Venezuela care if Chinese semiconductors are only 80-90% as good when the alternative is no chips?
Exactly, even 20nm semiconductors work just fine for the vast majority of applications. the main advantage of 5nm and lower is in reduced power consumption, and there are a few domains, like mobile devices, where this is relevant. Given that China can already produce 5nm chips, seems to me that they’ve effectively closed the gap with the west in practical terms.
The other aspect of all this is that we’re now running into physical limits of what’s possible using silicon substrate. There is herculean effort involved in making 1-2nm chips for diminishing gains, and then there’s no room to grow after that. So, western companies don’t really have room to grow going forward.
Incidentally, China is researching alternative computing substrates such as graphene, and Chinese researchers even managed to produce a 12 inch wafer using MoS2 substrate already. I think this is the real path forward, and it could make silicon look like vacuum tubes overnight. Even a crude chip on a different substrate could have far better performance than anything possible on silicon with decades of optimizations to follow.
I wouldn’t say there is no room to grow after 1-2nm chips, I’d say that is where things get interesting, since we could be working with science-fiction level technology after that point. But I do agree with there being diminishing returns at first.
There’s no room with silicon because you start getting into problems like quantum tunnelling which makes it basically impossible to isolate signals on the chip. It’s basically like trying to make an ever smaller vacuum tube, at some point you hit a limit. Where things get interesting is where we move away from using silicon. There are a number of substrates that we know are possible, and have been shown to work in the lab. It’s not a question of whether it’s possible, but just a question of putting this stuff into mass production. This is why that MoS2 wafer is so exciting. It’s the first alternative substrate that looks like it might be possible to mass produce in the near future.
Even western science fiction starts to look dated when you read a but about these new materials in initial development.
I remember how one time Charles Stross talked about how hard it is to write near future sci fi now because by the time you finish the book there’s a good chance that real life has already outpaced it.
can you gimme the link I wanna read that
It will always surprise me how fucking racist the west is, they truly believe they are superior lol
Sounds about white lol
11M views. 11M well-informed Westerners casually parroting this arrogance.
Now I wonder how many of those responsibly-up-to-date Westerners have seen the videos about how weong this one was?
I bet lots of people still think that chip sanctions are totally working
I took a tour around the comments (I know I know, youtube comment sections are the one thing worse than reddit) and…there are actually some people who are like “Yeah, that backfired pretty hard”.
The biggest cope I see is “Oh yeah well uh…they can’t do it profitably enough so it isn’t sustainable!”. Like R&D stopped the second they had a working chip and isn’t actively lowering the cost already.
As a point of order, Vox has 11M subscribers, the video has 5M views. Still ridiculous though.
There’s always a bizarrely high viewcount on things like this that make me a bit suspicious as to how legitimate they actually are though.
China bad.
Now give me views and money.
