Huawei has been largely driven out of the Western smartphone market by strict US sanctions, but the Chinese technology giant is not giving up. Several months ago, the company launched a 5G smartphone onto the market for the first time since the start of the sanctions, which is now causing a headache for the USA.
No country on its own is able to build high end chips. Currently you need at least Germany for technology, the Netherlands for the machines and Taiwan for manufacturing. In total over 300 companies just build parts for the machine.
No, China on its own won’t be able to get close or even surpass.
Nevertheless, quite impressive that they went from being 10 years behind (18 nm) just two years ago to 3 years behind (5 nm). We have to wait and see if the claim of Huawei having 5 nm is actually true, but if so, they are closing the gap really fast – which of course makes everyone wonder how. And the track record of China and trade secrets makes it not a far stretch to at least consider theft. But of course it could also just mean that they are really good at reverse engineering.
They just released an 8 core x86 processor with DDR5 support running at 3.7GHz, which is basically the equivalent of 5 year old technology compared to historical intel and AMD CPUs. China also carries the entire RISC-V linux development because its an open standard unlike x86 and ARM.
They most definitely will eventually catch up, especially since China already knows how to keep the process non-reliant on globalization. Something chip companies do not like admitting is a weakness.
The real crime here is the USA acting shocked and surprised at any of this. They peddle every industrial advantage and then do a complete 180 when someone else tops them because it means its a market competitor and they can’t just keep making morbillions in X industry.
Even the NSA does this. They sat on EternalBlue for probably a decade thinking “oh yeah no way someone’s gonna find this insane exploit”, and lo and behold someone leaked their exploit.
Its always strategic advantage until it isn’t.