What Kind of Trade-&-Technology "Cold War" Should We Here in þe United States Be Trying to Fight?
& why are so many people so sure þt þe Kirin 9000 is a big deal, & do they know what þey are talking about? These questions flummox me...
& why are so many people so sure tþ þe Kirin 9000 is a big deal, & do they know what þey are talking about? These questions flummox me...
I must confess that it has never been clear to me just what the military applications of sub 10-nm node chips are supposed to be that would make them such a military game-changer. What you can do with a small chip. You can also do with four chips constructed at double the node length. There is the dream of real-time observation-decision-action robots on the battlefield destroying human-crewed vehicles before they can notice anything going on. But, otherwise, if it were decisive and could be done with chips at 5-nm scale we would've spent the money to do it with chips at 10-nm scale.
Yet military and national-security thinkers are obsessed as the modern day equivalent of pre-World War I specialty steels and chemistry that did interesting things with the creation of the triple nitrogen bond. I really do not know enough to have an informed view of this.
Can anyone here elucidate it for me?:
Ben Thompson: The Huawei Mate 60 Pro <stratechery.com/2023/the-huawei-mate-60…>: 'The rhetoric around this story has been completely over the top, on both sides: Chinese state media and social media is hailing the Mate 60 and the Kirin 9000 chip as evidence of China overcoming U.S. attempts to limit China's technological development; China hawks in the U.S.…well, they're saying the same thing…. Jonathan Goldberg: "Three large constituencies… want the Kirin 9000 [chip] to mean something more than it probably does…. Pro-China commentators.. want to show… China… resilient in the face of US "aggression"…. US China watchers who want to see more sanctions… a third camp who paint everything as a failure of the Biden administration…". The reality is that this chip isn't a big surprise, and what it says about the future of China's technological development, at least in terms of chips, is surprisingly little…
The Huawei Mate 60 Pro, 7nm Background, Implications and Reactions
Ben Thompson ends his piece with a somewhat contrarian take: His view is that the road to Chinese success in building the semiconductors of the future is to develop, organically, its own engineering community that can substitute for what ASML and Applied Materials make, rather than pursuing a path that depends on somehow getting access to the outside porducts of the chipmaking-machinery making firms, and that the Kirin 9000 takes the second road—with admittedly, dazzling success in the short run, if their yield percentage is anything at all, but to the long run detriment of the sector’s development.
Again: I am out of my depth here, and I want a reliable guide to What kind of trade-&-technology "cold war" should we here in þe United States be trying to fight? Aftrer all, the easiest way to disastrously lose a war is to pick the wrong one to try to fight.
Isn't making something more expensive to import called "infant industry protection?" :)
I tend to think that the small node, high-density, high-speed chips have to do with use of AI in future warfare. The need for compute power to do training and then inference on drone crafts, such as the loyal wingman concept. It seems this is where warfare is headed given the success of current drones in Ukraine.
That there is a need for CHIPs act would appear to me that there really is a palpable fear of the potential of the Chinese military within the US defense sector. That China has been on a technology hunt (and quite successfully) for the last two decades is well known. They had students learning some pretty super tech in US universities and have been repatriating and recruiting other scientists to China via the 1000 Talents Program. That there was so much technology exchange between the countries leads me to believe that the rise of Xi and the military buildup beginning in 2012.
So while the US has the stronger military for the moment, there appears to be a push and squeeze in the South China Sea by the US to provoke confrontation. However, military advantage may favor China in 10 to 20 years, so that nonmilitary means of managing China will be required.