DigitalFoogazi
6.4K posts
@PassCombo
Life is the art of ignorance
Huawei's latest announcement carries real significance, because China has, in effect, shown the direction in which advanced technology needs to move. And it has done so in cutting-edge semiconductors, no less. China has long been a follower. In semiconductors, Western technology played the role of the pioneer, while China was preoccupied with simply keeping pace. But by banning EUV exports to China, the U.S. manufactured a bottleneck at the lithography tool — and in doing so, it effectively forced creativity onto China. To circumvent the sanctions, China was pushed toward approaches the West had never needed to take. That is exactly what today's announcement represents. Where Nvidia co-designs memory, packaging, and logic to optimize TCO at the system level — doing it rack by rack — Huawei is doing the same thing at the chip level. I'll say it again: this is a genuinely striking approach. Memory makers are already struggling with cost scaling. As linewidths shrink, the resources required to keep shrinking them — capital, manpower, time — are climbing exponentially. So the day will come when the West, too, must make packaging, logic, and memory collaborate from the node-design stage. And it won't be far off. China, through the paradox of sanctions, has been driven to do this ahead of the West — unintentionally. This is what genuinely frightens me. As YMTC has already demonstrated, U.S. sanctions pushed China to skip the incumbent standard and jump straight to the next-generation one. The result? YMTC carved out a meaningful presence in hybrid bonding — and even Samsung, the king of NAND, ended up licensing YMTC's patents. I believe the West may well find itself licensing this Huawei technology a few years down the road. And I believe cases like these will multiply, spreading China-style standards in their wake.
Gonna try to explain this to tech CEOs again: Young Americans are pissed. They feel betrayed. Half have embraced the far right & want to cut off your access to cheap foreign labor. The other half have embraced the far left & want to cut off your head. One side will win. Choose.
.@PalmerLuckey: American companies don't actually have engineers anymore. "American companies have been hollowed out." "We're not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore." "We're not teaching designers how to actually design things to be manufactured." "We're teaching them how to be high-level design shops that put together a design package, that gets sent to the real engineers in China—and they actually figure out how to do the work." "People are turning into architecture astronauts." "They pick components, and they put them in a nominal layout." "But the real work of—how am I actually going to put this together? How am I going to build a manufacturing line to make this? How am I going to need to figure out how to do the one, two, three, four, five different revisions of this board to pass radio emissions and interference standards? That's all done in China. So they are the real engineers." Via @HooverInst
Gen Z boss in a bread line! Gen Z boss in a bread line!
