I love the fact that the burger government measures money in warplanes, no matter which department.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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They are one of our more dollar-intensive ordnance delivery vectors.
they are great at delivering ordnance into the open ocean during peacetime
Nah, I’d say that’d be fuel they’re better at dumping into the water than anything. The bombs go into dirt nine times out of ten during practice.
a new unit of measurement to join burgers and football fields
US nationalizes NVidia
the National Graphics Cards Corporation nerfs their top of the line cards, leading to gamer outrage
everyone agrees that the problem is that it's a state owned corporation and that socialism doesn't work
National Graphics Card Corporation mass produces affordable mid-range graphics cards and restricts sales to crypto and AI startups for “national security reasons”, causing graphics card prices to fall, but because Elon Musk doesn’t get 10 more fps when he upgrades to the 8090 Super Ti (tm) the West has fallen and it’s time to end those commie democrats and their big government
Chip manufactures should think twice about headquartering in the US. Why get caught up in a sanction war when you could just not.
Nahh, that doesn't work. ASML for example, is based in the Netherlands. The Amerikkkans just placed sanctions on "products using US technologies and patents"(which applies to like 99% of the stuff made in the world) instead.
This is one of the ways they fuck over Cuba btw. Its not enough to just not have any components made in the US or any money from a bank with significant US ownership (ie..most of them). You also can't use any US intellectual property, and the US has made it so that interlocking patents mean no components ever become public domain.
FREE TRADE 
"We are the reserve world currency"
"Wait, no, don't do THAT with the currency! THAT'S NOT ALLOWED!!!"
She wants to nationalize a company? Any chance the CIA pull the heart attack gun out of storage to remove her?
I was joking about the nationalization thing, she's just threatening export controls on Nvidia.
Might be the only way for them to keep nvidia american if they start to consider moving.
We nationalized a whole pharmaceutical company and nothing really came of it, why would this be different
Nvidia is THE leading firm in the GPU space and it's not even close. It would be like the US govt nationalizing Pfizer + GSK + J&J at the same time
China's already building their own microprocessors though
Right, but as I understand it China still has some catching up to do in terms of the technology and manufacturing? It's amazing what they've accomplished so far tho, and they'll probably fully catch up to and surpass Taiwanese manufacturing soon enough
Soon enough is not going to be as fast as you think. The issue is TSMC has a complete equipment and knowledge monopoly and we are not talking about a 5 or 10 year lead. We are talking more 15 to 20 on anyone that just wants to catch up at this stage.
I'm not sure that's true anymore. China has done pretty well at poaching TSMC engineers, and the US embargo has essentially forced China to eat it's own dog food and hothouse development. They've already regained capability far faster than the US anticipated. TSMC only has an institutional and hardware monopoly at this point I'd guess, Knowledge has already diffused into Mainland China.
Yeah. It's actually Russia that is around 10 to 15 years from catching up. I've been following both the Russian and Chinese state firms in charge of developing semiconductor fab tooling. The main Chinese firm is about to make a full two or three generation leap past ASML (the top western firm) in the coming 3 or so years. The Russian state firm in charge of this type of tooling hasn't made anything since shortly before the USSR fell, back when Russia still maintained semiconductor lithography tech parity with the US and only right around the time the Ukraine war kicked off have they started back up their r&d.
The new EUV light source and lithography machines China has going into trial production are more advanced than anything ASML (where TSMC & western fabs get their EUV light source) has in the works. China decided to leapfrog the western firms by skipping the inefficient method of vaporizing tin microspheres with a laser to make pulses of EUV light (extremely inefficient, low quality light) and instead is going with particle accelerators to generate continuous EUV light that is higher quality (greater culmination, narrower frequency range) and higher output (10 to 100 times brighter for given power input) while using less valuable fab infrastructure space. Because a particle accelerator lacks all the moving parts and is mostly solid state, it has many times greater mean time between failure compared to the ASML machines that have duty cycles around only 90% operational uptime and 10% maintenance downtime. Rather than needing to build/buy a dozen or more EUV machines to equip a fab at scale (one ASML light source per lithography station) and have them still be a production bottleneck, you can install a single one of the Chinese particle accelerator light sources to provide EUV light to more than a dozen lithography stations placed around the circumference of its ring.
edit:
another observation. the western lithography tooling firms seem to be at a tech development disadvantage because they make so much of their money from service contracts to maintain the machines they sell. I could never see ASML decide on their own to create the type of hardware Chinese state firms have in the works because the complexity and unreliably of their machines is a major source of revenue after they make the initial sale. Their board of directors and shareholders would never allow it. ASML would also never design a machine that can replace a dozen or more machines of the same cost even if it meant higher quality output for the end user. This is why I can't see them competing in the long run now that China has made development of advanced lithography tooling a national priority with full backing of the state.
Hey, nice to see someone with some industry knowledge posting! I would extrapolate the "service contract" model's inefficiency to the whole industry. It's not just lithography, it's also everyone from etch and defect metrology, to testing/binning and packaging. The big semiconductor names don't build any of the production tools. TSMC, Intel, Samsung, and the other fab owners buy all of their tools from other companies, and those other companies sell them service contracts in order to more effectively hoard their IP.
A state-owned enterprise that does all of its own service and R&D would blow the capitalist firms out of the water. I estimate that 80% of the workforce at any given fab is superfluous, and only employed to safeguard each company's IP. All of this increases production downtime, as the manufacturing technicians aren't allowed to know enough to fix problems themselves and have to wait on the service company's service engineers to show up to do anything more than the most basic tasks. On top of the actual manufacturing inefficiencies this model introduces, the capitalists from each company involved are taking their outsized takes from every transaction. Some of it goes to funding R&D, but a state owned enterprise would be able to redirect significantly more profits to R&D.
GOOD post
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China is currently producing 7nm and will have 5nm by the end of next year. China reaching 3nm is more likely within 5 years, then the final catchup will be 2nm. 5-10 years is the maximum.
I kinda doubt this is true. Gamers Nexus did a very interesting video recently ish about a Chinese made video card and it wasn't as bad as you would expect. It had a lot of driver issues but as a graphics card it was more on par with a 10 year old card. This is for rasterization of course not AI but the company in question hasn't been making cards for long, just a couple of years, and it is making headway fast. With the correct funding and interest I don't see any reason why China can't at least catch up to TSMC. Their processes are broadly understood, enough scientists with enough funding can figure it out.
Yeah. Moorethreads is the company iirc. To put things in perspective, Intel recently also got serious about competing with Nvidia and AMD on discrete GPUs. Intel already has decades of experience making integrated GPUs and has had multiple failed starts into the discrete GPU market but Moorethreads who started a couple years later than Intel's most recent push, is at about the same stage of development as them.
Like Intel, they are a lot closer to Nvidia/AMD on hardware (roughly 4 - 5 years) than benchmarks make it seem but are being held back by just how much work it takes to bring the software driver stack up to the same level as Nvidia/AMD. Both Intel and Moorethreads are around 10 to 15 years behind Nvidia/AMD on driver software but this is a little misleading because both companies have decided to mostly abandon older graphics/compute apis (DirectX 9/10/11, OpenGL) to focus all their software development work on DirectX12/Vulkan. DirectX12 and Vulkan both have extensions that can handle software written for the older APIs at a 10 - 20% performance hit, which is a fair trade since newer software is more often than not DX12/Vulkan native.
With newer APIs like DX12 and Vulkan, less optimization happens at the graphics API/driver level with instead developers being given low level access to make the optimizations themselves. So, if they can get enough of these new GPUs into the hands of end users, developers will be forced to optimize games and applications for them. This is why both Intel and Moorethreads are just going into full scale mass production and selling their cards almost at-cost.
Intel is controlled by their US defense liaisons, accounting departments, and marketing departments. They will struggle where a company controlled by the manufacturing and design people succeed.
TSMC doesn't make their manufacturing tools. They buy all of their production tools from other companies (ASM, KLA, Hitachi, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, etc), they only create the facilities and chip designs. It's the same structure throughout the whole semiconductor industry.
They don't create the chip designs, they create the manufacturing processes, which aren't as difficult to catch up to as people think.
I work in manufacturing. If there's is a will, there's a way.
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she made some particularly pointed comments on the subject during the Reagan National Defence Forum in California on Saturday
Jensen Huang and Nvidia about to receive a firsthand taste of FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY
To do that, Raimondo said the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which manages export controls for the US, needs more funding from Congress. [...] “I have a $200 million budget. That’s like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on,” she said. “If we’re serious, let’s go fund this operation like it needs to be funded.”
Once there's serious money for Cold War 2: China Boogaloo - it's not going to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. There will be a huge turf war involving the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, etc. They will all want the lion's share of the money for themselves for what they'll call something like "strategic interests AI". And - of course - once they get that money they'll want huge increases each and every year to counter the threats from foreign advisories.
Petty shit. Nooooo we can’t let them generate weird hands!
PC Gamer got Melina writing their headlines now 😳
... the big plan for the near future, our grand strategic vision; a vision shared amongst the thought leaders of the West, is entirely predicated on Chinese people not figuring out how to make computer chips
fr is there a technical reason why they are acting like China can never make this shit?
The whole point of US sanctions is to decouple, i.e. force China out of the world’s market and keep their technology separate from the ones under US control.
China is going to have their own indigenous, perhaps even more advanced technology, but so long as the US control access to the world market, and forcing Chinese technological development to be sufficiently deviated from integration into the rest of the world’s (i.e. US controlled) technology, the US would have achieved their goals.
The perils for China come not from their inability to reinventing the wheel or not catching up with Western technology, it’s that China does not have access to the international market when their manufacturing industrial base is critically geared towards export market.
The major “hinge point” happened back in 2009 during the global financial crisis, when dwindling Western consumption resulted in China’s infrastructure development and the booming of property market instead of reorientating their economy towards internal demand (internal circulation). As such, China now has the capacity of housing 6T people for a population of 1.4T - absolutely nobody is going to buy those properties because there are not going to be enough people to live in there. All the capital flooded into real estate for a quick fix (profit) rather than creating a strong domestic consumer base.
This is why China is undergoing a property market crisis today and it’s going to take them a while to sort this out. But the worse problem is that China’s consumer base is too weak to absorb the loss of international market for high end products. This was something they should have foreseen back in the early 2000s, and failed to correct course from the very beginning.
America's only been partially successful at kicking China out of global markets, and China began correcting their trade a couple years ago. Now trade with Southeast Asia is huge. It is equivalent to or bigger than the EU or US.
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I wouldn't call it a "plan", it's more like one of the straws they're grasping at while flailing their arms around.
Well see, if we don't sell them chips to the gosh darned chai-neeeese they'll never be able to figure it out 
The US government has been taken over by Chinese government agents who are implementing economic protectionalism for the Chinese semiconductor industry through the most round-about method possible.
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