Taiwan is de facto an independent state, regardless of whether anyone recognizes it officially or not
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Xiaomi Trademarks Indicate Plan to Build Apple Silicon-Like Family of Custom Chips
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Taiwan is de facto an independent state, regardless of whether anyone recognizes it officially or not
Yes and no.
1. It remains a fact that China doesn't win Nobel Prizes and so doesn't compete at the very highest scientific levels. Unclear quite why this should be, or whether it will persist, but it's simply a fact right now.
2. What about R&D as opposed to pure science? The problem in this case is that Chinese capitalism is ruthless, pretty much exactly the caricature of western capitalism painted by Marx. Marx didn't seem to understand the elements (like patents, branding, and trademarks) that render each Western good an imperfect substitute for that from another company and, again for whatever reason, China likewise doesn't seem to have/get this. The relevance of this is that lacking any sort of market power (because almost everything is a commodity, sold under commodity competition conditions) there's very little profit in Chinese capitalism.
This means two things
- you mostly don't get rich investing in Chinese stocks or companies.
Look at the composite index. Mostly brief periods of mania, followed by the tragic realization that there's no money to be made - pathetic dividends, no price increase, no other way to monetize.
This is one (not the only) reason for the manic diversion of money into apartment blocks (which was pointless in its own, different way...)
Compare the US over the same sort of period:
- The second consequence is that there's not much money around to invest into real R&D.
Obviously there are a few huge companies in China, and plenty of billionaires. But the general consensus (shh...) is that pretty much every such case is blessed by the CCP and/or founded upon a crime. (Which then leads to its own pathologies like all the wealth that's generated being funneled to Los Angeles or Vancouver to be out of the reach of the police, rather than being re-invested).
So yeah, R&D does happen in strategic areas, but not generically. The current XRing is based on Western IP (ARM Cortex CPU, ARM Immortalis-G925 GPU. Xiaomi obviously want to project the idea that this is like Apple's A4 or A5, a starter SoC that begins with outsider CPU and GPU but with self-designed elements like the NoC, memory controller, IO, etc; and that they will in a few years graduate to their own CPU and GPU. Maybe...
But I could also believe that this is mostly a PR scam in the sense that there's not really any innovation in these elements. It wasn't clear at the time, but even with the A4 Apple was in fact seriously rethinking things like the NoC, IO and memory controller. Has Xiaomi done the same rather than just using off-the-shelf? I see no evidence for such rethinking.
Well we'll know in two or three years. But my *guess* is that Xiaomi is in the same position as most Chinese companies, without enough profit generated to allow for serious R&D at the Apple level.
Could this all change? Well sure. If China took economics seriously (ie at the highest political levels, if they actually understood the role of things like patents and branding, rather than simply treating them the way Marx does) they could start to steer the ship in that direction. But will they do so?
We thought permanent sanity was in place given Hu, then he was followed by Xi. It looks like Xi's star has been eclipsed (not officially, but unofficially he appears to be under house arrest, and it seems likely that as of the next party congress in September he'll be thanked for his service and officially kicked out -- very like what happened to Khrushchev, and for much the same reasons.
Oh you didn't know Xi appears to be under house arrest? Did you know he had a stroke last year?)
So OK, Xi gets replaced by someone from the Hu faction and sanity returns, kinda.
But does the new regime have the understanding, the will, or the capability to learn from the West in terms of industrial organization? (ie you need companies to make profits large enough to allow for serious R&D operations) Or are they frozen in their equivalent of the West's internal cold war, hamstrung enough by their equivalent of Woke that all the newly regnant Hu faction can do is hold the line rather than make real changes?
I was literally using that in reference to China coming out with this new chip as in “Taiwan, China”, or “mainland China”. The difference meaning one has access to the machines to make these chips and the other does not. My point was it would be extremely difficult to make these chips without the equipment.
I’m not going to debate politics in a post that’s not about politics.
I’ve never said China was incompetent or can’t do something. I know China is fully competent, but my whole post was about mainland China not having access to one brand of specialized equipment.
I totally agree within say 10 years China will have the same capability as the rest of the world despite not being allowed to access a particular machine. Eventually, they will come up with something that will get the job done. I just don’t think it’s going to be within a few years.
China is the number one manufacturing country in the world when it comes to technology, and probably some other things too.
Having companies the initiative to build their own chips (and innovative in the process) is amazing. It also makes countries less reliant on other countries. And eventually everyone gets some of the knowledge, ideas and discoveries from these developments. This makes tech progress much faster. I wish we had many more companies trying to build their own chips.
Would you really prefer a world where only Apple and a couple other companies try to innovate in this field? To me the more the better.
Formosa is the colonial Portuguese name for the island. The UN-recognition problem you cite stems from the fact that for decades after the Chinese civil war both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) claimed sovereignty over all of China (including Taiwan). For most of that time, neither government was a democracy, the Republic of China was a one-party (the Kuomintang, or KMT) authoritarian state under Chiang and later his son, and the PRC was a one-party (the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP) authoritarian state under the Maoist regime. Before January 1, 1979, the US government recognized the Republic of China (founded in 1912) as sovereign. After that date, the US recognized the PRC as sovereign and the so-called “One China” policy was born.
In truth, however (and I think this is the thing most people don’t understand), there was never a “Two Chinas” policy. The US always recognized one or the other as sovereign.
Remarkable things happened on both sides of the strait after that. Carter recognized Chiang and the KMT’s dictatorship for what it was (I lived there as a teenager in 1981-1982, so I know what I’m talking about)—martial law was lifted in 1987, and the vibrant, multi-party democratic tiger that exists today began to take shape. But even more importantly, on the mainland, Deng Xiaoping was able to move the CCP forward in the 1980s, away from Mao’s dictatorial control of the party, toward something to be proud of, something more meritocratic and thus uniquely Chinese (think Mandate of Heaven).
What has been happening since 2008 under Xi Jinping would take many paragraphs, so I’ll just say that it is ongoing.
In short, TL;DR, in response to your claims: Yes, there has always been one China, but it is not the monolith you think it is. The Chinese people are a highly diverse diaspora, linguistically and culturally. There can be more than one China, indeed there are already many Chinas.
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ASML is the only company making EUV lithography machines TODAY, which are able to write small patterns into chips because of the short wavelength used. There are plenty of other ways to do patterning - the "brute force" method Intel has been using with longer wavelengths for a while, but there are also emerging technologies like nanoimprint lithography, self-assembled block copolymer patterning, and X-ray lithography that could potentially be used as well. The point I'm trying to make is that EUV lithography isn't the only way to get circuits smaller and smaller - there is TONS of other materials, physics, and integration engineering required to make chips work. Lithography feature size is only one part of the puzzle, and is not an insurmountable barrier.
Do these alternatives work with the newer designs? I’m not even an educated novice much less an expert but I know chips are going to smaller processes like 5nm
Well, it is a thread about Xiaomi, so to be expected, I guess. The thread should probably have had the 100-post minimum limit on it. To review, just FYI: The first Trump administration blacklisted Xiaomi in their last days in office in January 2021. There was no evidence to support the claim the company is owned or controlled by the Chinese military. Xiaomi challenged the order in court, and, after a settlement, the Biden administration lifted the investment ban in May 2021.
To get back on topic, everybody copies Apple, Xiaomi isn't alone in that. But, like Apple, they do a high-quality job when they do what everybody else has been trying to do, so they are successful. They are widely known as the "Apple of China," and this move to make their own silicon and throw off the Qualcomm yoke fits into that zeitgeist neatly.
These aren't proprietary though, they're ARM chips just like Apple's. The XRING 1 chip even uses off-the-shelf ARM Cortex core designs, whereas Apple designs their own custom cores that use the ARM ISA. You could theoretically slap one of these into a laptop and run ARM versions of Windows or Linux.
Yeah, Arm is very happy about this:
Xiaomi's New Self-Developed Silicon Powered by Arm Marks a 15-year Alliance Milestone
New XRING O1 silicon, self-developed by Xiaomi, brings next-generation performance and power efficiency to Xiaomi’s flagship mobile devices.
newsroom.arm.com
there is a political reason for that. if it was purely based on the merits of the car, the sales numbers between the two wouldn't be as dramatic, IMHO...
Indeed, if you could buy an su7 in the US you wouldn’t see near as many model3s
Nah Xiaomi’s car is far superior overall.
There is a political reason I can’t buy them in the US
You you you.
You can concern troll me in a private message. No one cares how educated or uneducated an anonymous MR poster is, nor does it affect the China / Taiwan dynamic. Facts are facts, no matter who states them (or is oblivious to them).
If you want to discuss personal matters, feel free to message me, but let's keep the public conversation relevant and interesting, and most importantly ON TOPIC (Apple). Especially on an open one-to-many forum. No one wants to read faux concern trolling or personal suggestions between anonymous chatters. Happy 4th!
Sure (I will edit my post to remove those personal elements), but maybe don’t bring your friend up in the first place then, and don't regale us with two long, multi-paragraph public posts containing your own, personal views on the topic — practice what you preach.
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