This is still an ARM C1-Ultra. Same one used in Mediatek dimensity 9500, which also got more than 4000 points in GB6 lab test. But actual results inside phone with smartphone cooling and wattage requirement became close to 3300.
But perhaps the most important thing, Xiaomi is now able to make chip similar to Mediatek. They are the third largest Smartphone manufacturer by shipment volume. And they are still growing.
I’m now at the iPhone 16.
The performance of those chips with 8GB in non throttled environment (Neo..) can run as a fully performant macOS.
Yet, as a phone I don’t feel upgraded performance since my SE 1st gen days.
Sometimes I get stuttering, basic browsing can get the device pretty warm, sometime camera lags to launch.
My usage profile didn’t change much over the years.
So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. Because, if my device now throttles to what I was happy with years ago assuming the software would behave the same, I’ve expected my usage to give me at least cooler non stuttering performance.
There are so many apps out there which take every shortcut they can to make it easier for developers regardless of the impact on users. On iOS, using things like react native instead of actually native code; on desktop systems, using Electron instead of any other toolkit.
I understand why, mind you; would VS Code or Slack have as much velocity of improvement if they had to individually manage GUI toolkits for each platform? Would VS Code be as extensible if the UI were built in Swift or Qt?o But the results are still there.
There are projects to try to make this /better/, like Tauri - Electron but using your system's built-in browser engine rather than shipping a new one, so that you don't have to have eight separate copies of Chromium loaded into memory - but they still need to reach feature-completeness and projects need to do a non-trivial migration, and then they need to test across multiple browser engines, etc., so it's still not the same.
Regardless, this is the situation we have right now; everyone figured that RAM capacity would continue to increase at the same rate as RAM usage, "it works on my machine" but it's a 32 GB Macbook, Chromium optimized for performance and not memory usage by assuming that each 'page load' would be short lived (browser behavior) rather than having one 'page load' run for hours or days (Slack, VS Code, Spotify).
Looking over the actual killer feature for Electron: running your existing web code with native features layered on top. I mean yeah Tauri does this too, but I think it's relatively rare for someone to decide "I'm going to build a standalone native desktop app in Electron because it's easiest," they're thinking "I already have this PWA that i can repackage with native features without maintaining a whole second UI."
That summarizes my whole computer use. I used to believe it was my tolerance, but then I took out a good old YP-G70CB (Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) from a drawer and everything felt much snappier than my S25.
The only computer that's the exception is my macbook m4. This thing was and still is ridiculously snappy.
It's a few different things. I've gone down a hardcore rabbit hole on this because I also find this exceptionally annoying. I now sometimes experience lag when typing into a terminal, where I am typing faster than characters appear, which is something that didn't even happen in the early 1990s on significantly less capable hardware.
A very big portion of this is just Wirth's Law in motion. Software is getting worse rapidly, and AI is accelerating the decline in software quality, where performance is an aspect of quality.
But the other part of this is the latency vs throughput tradeoff. More and more of our systems are optimized for throughput, or worse are optimized for throughput in ways which causes significant experience degradation if you are unable to meet the throughput demands. There is a natural tension between throughput and latency, and we are seeing this play out across every aspect of both hardware and software system design. As a simple example, nothing you do to USB4 will ever match the latency of PS/2 connection for an input device, but a PS/2 port delivers around 7-12 kiloBITS/second of throughput vs USB4 delivering up to 120Gbps and a /minimum/ of 20 gigabits/second of throughput. PS/2 uses blocking direct hardware interrupts for input devices, vs asynchronous polling on USB. This architectural difference will never allow for USB to match PS/2 latency, regardless how "fast" USB gets.
This tradeoff is leaning more and more towards throughput everywhere you look. Just today, the new M5 Ultra is announced w/ 1.2TBs/ of memory bandwidth. The M5 Max had 14ns of memory latency while high-performance DDR4/DDR5 typically achieves 8-9ns of latency. That's 36% more latency (conservatively), but nearly 10x the throughput. When you stack up small changes like this at every layer of the system, including in our overreliance on micro services and networked data I/O vs local data in applications, and it adds up. There are so many places in modern software where there is some network connection required for something that could have been achieved without that connection, and waiting on that connection consumes a huge amount of wait time relative to the total time for the operation, and we all feel it.
Yeah, it is a really weird one. Especially iOS is optimized to the gills, there is no real desktop running to speak of and app developers care just a little more than on Android, yet somehow an iPhone can't keep a few apps in memory, yet a MacBook Neo with 8GB RAM does just fine with multiple chunky desktop (often Electron) applications in memory, along with macOS itself being more chunky.
I replaced my Pixel 2a with an SE3 when the pixel stopped getting security updates and have been pretty disappointed with the iPhone’s performance. The battery life out of the box was worse than the 5 year old Pixel, and I regularly notice apps getting killed and loosing my place when I tab away.
Maybe if you want to use all of the big mainstream apps the experience might be different, but I tend to have a fairly minimal setup on my phone. On android I would disable animations, use Nova launcher, Firefox with UBO, and a bunch of fdroid apps. This all added up to a very snappy and efficient system that I haven’t been able to replicate on iOS.
Features expand to fill all available hardware. Both the OS and apps got more features, got more flashy, got more complicated. If you were able to run those old original apps, they would likely be VERY fast on your newer device.
There was a noticeable degradation after the introduction of “liquid glass”. Of course I’m still on my 13 mini so I don’t think they really care about how changes impact the performance and battery life of my phone.
However a dev on fast hardware can still run profiles, and the fast hardware decreases the change/build/test cycle by more than enough to make it worthwhile.
The only use of a slow machine is it gives a point where you can say more optimization isn't worth it. Everything else I can do better on a fast machine than a slow machine.
It lacks one inventive. There are many incentives. Many developers love making things faster. Many developers get feedback from users which is itself incentive. Many projects track performance and that provides incentive. Many developers have a boss who cares about such things (this is the least likely of the above).
I am pretty sure that's a feature, not a problem. The idea of these chips is to rush to idle on webpage-like workloads, and then otherwise use as little idle power as possible. Games and heavy work are generally not the intended workload.
While the other comments are correct to point out that majority of mobile workloads are rush to completion, many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones. This is exactly why the newer SoCs are so interesting- that they can deliver more performance for the same power consumption. (Directly increasing run time and decreasing heating)
> many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones
I think most children prefer to play on phones these days. Mobile gaming is huge. To the point where game loops on high-end games are optimized around thermal throttling.
> The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle.
I think this is a trait of all chips. As a general rule of thumb, both desktop chips and graphics cards come with a huge and noisy fan. Demand for aftermarket solutions is so great that it spawned quite a few specialized companies.
How many high-end laptops ship with at least one fan?
Any chip that isn't cooled is going to heat up and throttle or just shut off in seconds. The point is that mobile devices have a peak performance that you don't really get because you can't cool them enough.
Desktops can have plenty of cooling so you actually get the real speed of whatever you are using.
You said it. It was over 100 F here where I live, and I was on my phone outside trying to get work done while watching my kid, and I couldn't even type because of the thermal throttling triggered just by it being so damn hot outside.
A few years ago I decided I was going to get some fresh air by going and working on the (south-facing) deck. Put my phone and drink outside, went back to get my laptop, brought it outside.
Outside was too bright for me to see my laptop screen even at full brightness, but by the time I had it outside and had discovered that my phone had overheated so much it refused to turn on until it cooled down.
Yes and no. Having more competition in the space is excellent news. However I am sad that the world interdependence is eroding as most other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country.
> unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries
The fact that the CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan might suggest that the CCP considers that it can make China and Taiwan one country, at a time of the CCP's choosing.
They would lose all of TSMC if they do any military actions. It's not the fact that the CCP thinks that they can make Taiwan and China a country, it's the the fact that most of China does in fact consider them as one country. Taiwan is ready to defend themselves, but are very happy keeping their relationship with China the way it is.
"Very happy" is a bit of a stretch, since a significant proportion of Taiwan would prefer to jettison the current pretence of being "One China" and become fully independent.
But I agree that pretty much everybody will happily take the status quo over armed invasion.
I have a friend in Taiwan and he told me they're pretty happy because they have independence this way. If they go for more international recognition etc they'll gain nothing they don't already have but they'll upset the balance and give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.
And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.
I've only visited Taiwan once and I only have one friend there so perhaps what I'm hearing is not accurate.
and related to, with all that holds in an Eastern mindset. My adoptive grandmother was born in Shanghai in 1927. To my knowledge she never returned to Mainland China, partially because her relatives wen Telswhere when the communists came in.
> give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.
CCP is not threatening taiwan because it might go for independence. it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific. because of that, it is never about what people in Taiwan believe/say/do.
It is only about the military balance of the west Pacific.
> And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.
sympathetic of what?
20 years ago, you might be able to play the "CCP regime repressing the people in China" joke, you can't do it anymore especially in such topic of Taiwan. quality of life is significantly better in literally every aspect in China. Taipei in 2026 is getting more and more like a tier-3 Chinese city in 2016.
> it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific
I think you are underestimating Chinese nationalism here quite dramatically!
Chinese views of sovereignty are quite independent of other concerns. Take for example their actions against Vietnam in the South China Sea, forcing Vietnam closer to the Philippines and even the US: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
> And the whole concept of bringing everything down to a matter of wealth is so American.
They said "quality of life". Even if they had said wealth that correlates with quality of life so that wouldn't be a very good gotcha by itself, but they didn't say that.
But calling Taipei a "Tier-3" city does refer to economic prowess, that's what I mean.
If you like to say what you think, then trust me, Taipei has much better quality of life. If you see people like Naomi Wu being arrested and gagged just for pointing out a vulnerability in software (which we all agree here is a good thing to do for everyone except the bad guys), that is terrible.
> it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific.
Hardly. It is all about Xi having declared that taking Taiwan by... I think it was 2049, but could be misremembering. Anyway, Xi made that a test of the legitimacy of the CCP, in some very public statements.
So, no, it's not about kicking the US out of the west Pacific. It's about Taiwan, and it's because if they don't, the CCP is illegitimate, by Xi's own word.
By 2023 Xi ordered the Chinese military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.
But that doesn't mean they plan to invade Taiwan by then. One common reading of it is that it was a plan to build up the military to that state with a definite goal date (in the same way the "600 ship navy" plan had a goal date).
The point is that the goal is far enough into the future that the person making it can't be held accountable for failing to meet it.
If Xi had said "the CCP is illegitimate unless it takes Taiwan by 2025", he would be at real risk of being replaced in 2026. Anyone who opposed him (or just wanted power) would have a perfect reason to replace him.
When Xi makes a goal with a "deadline" he won't live to see, he takes no risk of personally failing to meet the goal. If his successor misses the deadline, he can say things changed, Xi failed to consider factors X,Y,Z, etc.
> If his successor misses the deadline, he can say things changed, Xi failed to consider factors X,Y,Z, etc.
That's not how the CCP operates though.
They are not a country where the puppets matter so much, like in most of the western countries. You would very very rarely see a leader being critical of their predecessor even if they are changing policies (which Xi Jinping definitely did). Because they are the same party and thus they are attacking themselves. The party is really more important than whoever happens to be at the top. The party is always right. Even when the party is wrong. Which it is not because it's always right.
No, if this promise disappears it will be silently. Never to be mentioned again, or else. It just never happened.
Not only a few people in and from Taiwan use every chance they get to shit talk the mainland. Be it snark about using simplified characters, or be it trying to prevent their own citizens from taking part in celebrations of victory over fascism. Main theme is being against the mainland, no matter what. They are also very influenced by Japan, whose right wing PM has escalated outrage more than enough recently.
Certainly, somewhat understandable, given the "military exercises" at the doorstep happening every now and then, but also escalatory and idiotically not a good look either. Some of it is just spewed hatred, not taking a high lane when it comes to ethics.
I think the plan is to defend, with allies motivated by the goal of saving TSMC facilities. If you destroy them the moment China declares war, Taiwanese allies might be much less invested
But at the same time everyone understands that the Taiwanese would destroy the facilities before they fall into Chinese hands
its not official public policy, but there have been people in the US government saying that if there is a war then the US will bomb tsmc facilities in taiwan
We are talking about facilities that are extremely complex and expensive to build, to the point that only a very small handful of locations in the world exist today - despite their massive economic value.
TSMC is not something you can rebuild with some brains in front of laptops.
Not everyone is affected by propaganda, either US/Taiwanese or Chinese one.
Some are.
Some people also want to feed their families and not be unemployed.
P.S. A large number of Ukrainians moved to Russia. Including the ones who wanted to reunite with their relatives. Taiwanese have a lot of relatives on the mainland as well.
> *As of mid-June 2023 an estimated 1.2 million Ukrainians were recorded in the Russian Federation under different legal forms of stay (other than refugee or temporary asylum status)
This means people that have Ukrainian citizenship, which includes lots of families that were on both sides of the border. It does not mean people who were residents of Ukraine before the war, and decided to move to Russia. It does include the kidnapped children, and surviving people in occupied cities.
The US cannot offer lots of money to chip fab refugees today, because they are not refugees. Trying to headhunt people at a high quality job is very different.
Part of the reason a Chinese invasion of Taiwan seems more realistic is Trump being a sycophant towards any dictator who will give him the time of day, including Xi Jinping.
It's not impossible, but I feel as though if Trump decides that China is friends and Taiwan is enemies (as he seems to have done with North/South Korea lately) then Taiwanese refugees might not be as eager to move to the US as, say, Canada, Australia, or Europe.
I think you're missing what I'm getting at. Yes, I understand that part. But do you seriously think that if TSMC was destroyed right now, China would change its decision to invade Taiwan? Can you imagine what the actual consequences of executing that plan would be?
> Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang.
I would not want to be maintaining a long-term naval blockade while constantly looking over my shoulder worrying about surprise attacks. Everyone knows where you are, and it would give plenty of time for a counter offensive to be planned. The US has something like 50 attack submarines, and a surprise attack from all of them at once would be a nightmare scenario for any fleet.
In the era of drones and missiles having your navy tied down in a blockade like that makes it all the more vulnerable.
US had all of that and still was unable to do anything meaningful around Hormuz.
US had 10,000 miles of power projection, while China prepared for 100 miles of it for the past 20 years, come on. The answer is EUV alternative that would render TSMC useless.
I understand that majority of people here cannot see the bigger picture, by design.
But nonetheless China is clearly preparing itself to be ready to be able to invade, with aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships, dual purpose roll-on/roll-off carriers. It doesn't mean it will, but that it wants to be able to.
So basically it will depend on a single dictator's whim if they do or don't.
> Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang
Which would be considered an act of war, so it's the same scenario again.
> There is a substantial opposition in Taiwan that want reunification (~20% of population support directly Li-Wun)
20% is more than the % of people in the Donbass that wanted unification with Russia, and we can see how well that went. And it wasn't a dangerous amphibious assault against an island with shit terrain.
Arguable, they had to after the 2008 Buharest NATO summit and Ukraine's militarization going forward, and eradication of Russian language and Russian-speaking population in the east.
> Which would be considered an act of war, so it's the same scenario again.
China considers Taiwan their territory, who is there to protect Taiwan? US?
>20% is more than the % of people in the Donbass that wanted unification with Russia
20% plus part of those white-collar workers who are a backbone of the Taiwan's economy and politics and can be left jobless after China achieves EUV and puts TSMC out of monopoly.
Let's be real. Trump demanded TSMC to invest 100B into US factories and they complied [0].
> Arguable, they had to after the 2008 Buharest NATO summit
How dare the countries threatened by Russia, who had seen how Russia invaded and brutalised multiple countries - Moldova, Checnya, Georgia twice - seek protection from Russia. This totally excuses Russia invading and brutalising again, of course.
> Ukraine's militarization going forward
The country was literally invaded (Crimea and Donbass), what the hell did you or the idiots in the Kremlin expect? That it will just sit and allow Russia to take more of its territory unopposed? That it will become a pliant vassal state again?
> eradication of Russian language and Russian-speaking population in the east
Such eradication that the country elected a Russian speaker to be president, on a platform of reconciliation with Russia. So much so, that his opposition called him a Russian puppet. That guy is Zelenskyy.
I'm sorry, but you're either out of your mind, or have been completely brainwashed. Russia chose to invade multiple of its neighbours, and did unspeakable atrocities every time. The only one to fault for all of this, and everyone around them seeking protection from this, is them. This imperialist nonsense brutality does not belong in the 21st century, and neither does its apologia. And no, I don't care about the whataboutism you're preparing to "defend" these actions with, it's beyond irrelevant. It's what the Russian state has been about since it came into being out of the ruins of the USSR. We should have never treated them as anything else.
> How dare the countries threatened by Russia, who had seen how Russia invaded and brutalised multiple countries - Moldova, Checnya, Georgia twice - seek protection from Russia. This totally excuses Russia invading and brutalising again, of course.
That's literally a copy-paste from propaganda pamphlet.
Can you back it up?
> The country was literally invaded
You seem to forget the amount of killings Ukraine did there and why it started in the first place.
Why should I discuss that with a person who seems to be unaware of facts?
What exactly do you want backed up? That countries across Eastern Europe saw how the russians operate and decided they don't want to be destroyed?
> You seem to forget the amount of killings Ukraine did there and why it started in the first place.
What killings did Ukraine make that resulted in russia invading Crimea? Or russia starting the invasion of the Donbass? MH17 maybe? Oh no, wait, that was the russians too.
All your points consider what China can do but not how others would respond. Blocking Taiwan when the whole AI economy is running on it will invoke lots of countries to go up in arms. There was a quote from US military that it'd cost less to fight than watch Taiwan fall (invasion or not).
> 4. China is close to producing industry-grade EUV
No where near close. At least not production grade at massive scale.
> * Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang.
Doesn't work. If they do that the US, JP and others can also blockade around Shanghai, Hong Kong and the other ports.
> They won't need TSMC soon
Taiwan is not just TSMC. There are thousands to millions of things involving Taiwan you're likely not aware of and they might not even be AI or semi related.
> All your points consider what China can do but not how others would respond.
US backed off last year when there were talks about protecting Taiwan. They pulled Patriot missiles from Taiwan and South Korea too.
China and Japan have a beef. Considering the atrocities Japan did in China, the conversation won't be friendly.
None of these are good for Taiwan, during the times when its political system is failing.
> No where near close. At least not production grade at massive scale.
It looks like you have knowledge of the status of that super-secret government project. Can you share some details then?
> Doesn't work. If they do that the US, JP and others can also blockade around Shanghai, Hong Kong and the other ports.
US cannot blockade Hormuz, as we've seen. JP cannot do that with their current constitution unless they change it (the current government is on the road to it, though).
What we've also seen is that Chinese fishing fleet had a military blockade exercise [0].
> Taiwan is not just TSMC. There are thousands to millions of things involving Taiwan you're likely not aware of and they might not even be AI or semi related.
>US backed off last year when there were talks about protecting Taiwan. They pulled Patriot missiles from Taiwan and South Korea too.
>US cannot blockade Hormuz, as we've seen. JP cannot do that with their current constitution unless they change it (the current government is on the road to it, though).
If China really wants to fuck with Taiwan, they had better do it soon while the most incompetent US administration ever to hold office is still there. Because there is change coming to the US and the next president isn't likely to be such a complete moron.
As an American, what are ways in which you can not defer to an authority - in a way that actually matters? Sure, you can choose to go outside dressed in gaudy colors, or not dressed at all if you are in SF. Or choose to flip the Democrat/Republican bit once every 4 years (usually without any effect on domestic or foreign policy, though not lately). But in a regular person's life, what authority do you want to opt out of? The average person can't do a thing about their HOA board, let alone a government representative.
My bet would be that invasion wouldn't look like quick war, but slow control of political power either through light force like economic blackmail, or through something similar to what US did with Venezuela.
Now that US has already opened the gate to labelling nation head as drug seller, this just eases things for China.
Yes and no. The Iran war is deeply unpopular and won’t even pass congressional approval for money. It’s being fought from pocket change budgets because they know they can’t pass a funding bill for it. Also not the same kind of war.
Any period time? US waged war for 20+ years in Afghanistan. Pretty effectively! To what end? Not an end an army can really achieve so… there you are.
But a war that might actually be popular? To save the world from communist dictators and make sure we have chips for our precious devices? I wouldn’t count out the United States. Or nuclear weapons, which still exist and are a thing.
That was an occupation and a low intensity “pacification” mission. Waging a prolonged war against a military peer on the other side of the continent is a bit more problematic (considering that US is/was on the brink of running out of advanced weaponry in Iran despite having aerial superiority which they won’t over Taiwan, Japan would have to get involved as well cause otherwise US would have to entirely rely on the fragile carrier fleet).
Using tactical nukes (even regardless of the extreme geopolitical downsides that might bring) wouldn’t necessarily give a great tactical advantage either, unless they are willing to do that over Taiwan itself to destroy the landing forces).
And it'd be the kind of war the US is best at. Boots on the ground, against conventional military, with a civilian population that is on the side of the US forces
No guerilla warfare, no insurgents, no need for extended beyond-visual-range warfare that depletes missile stockpiles
Last time used faced a conventional military that could actually challenge it was in Korea.
It won’t have complete areal superiority or entire division surrendering after running into contact with US forces like they in Iraq. “Shock and awe” of course can be very effective just probably not against China. Even now US is running out of materiel against Iran and can’t really sustain a prolonged intense conflict while being able to protect its gulf allies from ballistic missiles and drones.
Iran is not a war funded by congress, so it's really no wonder the US appears inneffective. Trump didn't get the support he thought he would from congress and now he's flailing around trying to save face.
Change the leadership (which will happen soon) and when there is actual support from congress to fund and intervene in a conflict in Taiwan, then you will see a vastly different US military response.
The war over Taiwan wouldn't be done by soldiers on Taiwanese soil. So you wouldn't need many boots on the ground in a literal sense.
But if you mean in a metaphorical sense, how long until the 7th Fleet could get to Taiwan, the answer is 0 days for first response, 3 days for everything located in Japan, and less than a week for the full mobilization of the 7th Fleet (that's 50+ ships and nearly 30K soldiers). The entire Pacific fleet could be there in a week and a half.
(Granted, we're assuming competent US leadership, which is not the current administration.)
just a gut feeling, but if they had to for some reason, I feel like they'd just go in and bomb as much strategic assets and invade, because in their eyes aside from Taiwan, there isn't much left to "unify" and it'd be historic, not something they'd need to do every decade or even century
I feel like Russia thought the same of Ukraine, even though it is way bigger
Any country that competently adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently. And that's for a continental invasion.
Taiwan? All surface ships are sitting ducks. Troop transport ships would get absolutely decimated, and then the landing troops would get swarmed by drones all over again, and then they have to maintain logistics to the small minority that land (good luck with that). And that's without naval drones.
With naval drones? I have no idea how China gets anything across the strait.
And all the above is true for a competently organized Chinese invasion. Which it won't be.
> adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently
The tactical situation in Taiwan is very different though. I think it would come down more to what’s happening in the air since the stalemate in Ukraine is in large because the Russian airforce is almost completely neutralized and can only be used to launch cruise missiles from a safe distance. I doubt China would invade unless they feel they can somehow achieve at least temporary air superiority and achieve their other objectives during that period.
Air defenses are probably much more important than drones overall.
That's why I said it will be slow. I think it will be decades long political control, not a military invasion.
China have more credible threat of bombing economically relevant building like TSMC, or capturing leaders and protestors like they already are doing in Hong Kong.
> CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan
This whole idea of collapsing everything to some single semi-military geo-political concern is naive and not at all how the world works.
Of course there are people in China who would prefer Xiaomi did all their manufacturing inside China, and there are others who prefer to build stronger economic ties between Taiwan and China to make Taiwan economically dependent on China.
There are others who want Xiaomi to dominate world mobile markets by any means necessary. There are others who want Xiaomi to make the most profit possible, and still others who want Chinese firms to race to match US companies technology on every dimension.
These concerns are all interlinked and play out over years in lots of micro decisions.
> The fact that the CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan might suggest that the CCP considers that it can make China and Taiwan one country, at a time of the CCP's choosing.
I'm not so sure. I would say that perhaps it's an indication that the CCP is ok with the status quo.
The PR Chinese might be able to take Taiwan's land, but they can't conceivable take Taiwan's economy, at least not by force.
China isn’t going to invade China until after we get our semiconductors up and running in Arizona for real
(because US won’t have to think about that situation ever again)
removing dependence imperils that island, CCP already has an EUV machine so the inevitable sanctions and export controls on ASML’s in Europe won’t matter either
It technically does not matter today. Sure the SOTA fabs only exist in a few places, but it’s not like a 2010/2015/2020 era chip is unusable trash. All of which are more geographically distributed.
For any critical workload a chip is considered trash after 5-7 years. They still run , of course, but increased incidents on platforms that are supposed to be 99.99 are hard to work with. Now if you mean there’s unused stock of those , that would maybe work, but I am not aware of significant unused stocks.
I agree, a move on Taiwan sets semiconductor industry back like 5 years at this point, down from what I’d say was 10 just last year
yeah equity asset values are going to tank but US will get serious about the supply chain immediately (which is already very much in progress), plus all the older nodes to alleviate some pressure off of the active compute demands
> China and Taiwan are considered one country, even according to US
Your link does not say what you think it does. My guess is you read the first sentence and saw "one-China police" and stopped. But the US's one-China policy is not the same thing as China's one-China principle.
The US's one-China policy is that (continental) China is a single China governed by the PRC. It's silent on Taiwan. But, considering the laws we have on the books declaring our commitment to ensuring the sovereignty of Taiwan, it's a hard row to hoe to get to "the US considers Taiwan to be territory the PRC has a right to control."
The US has an unofficial relationship with Taiwan simply to shut the CCP up. It's like when your partner is complaining about something you did, silence doesn't mean you agree that you messed up. Sometimes it just means you don't want a fight right now.
>The 1979 U.S.-P.R.C. Joint Communique switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. In the Joint Communique, the U.S. recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, acknowledging the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.
>The United States approach to Taiwan has remained consistent across decades and administrations. The United States has a longstanding one China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-China Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; we do not support Taiwan independence
Doesn't sound like silence to me.
>But, considering the laws we have on the books declaring our commitment to ensuring the sovereignty of Taiwan, it's a hard row to hoe to get to "the US considers Taiwan to be territory the PRC has a right to control."
You're moving the goal posts. Sovereignty isn't the same as being a country. States in the US have some sovereignty and their own governance and international relations too, but it wouldn't be correct to say that the US consists of 50 independent countries.
Also, using the word right sounds a bit like muddying the waters. You could argue the United States government doesn't have the right to control their land, as it has been stolen from the indigenous people. But that doesn't mean United States is not an independent country that controls the area within its borders.
I'm unaware of any actual hardware backdoors introduced by primary manufacturers in practice, especially those installed in Xiaomi hardware.
There are accounts of interdiction and post-manufacturing compromises, such as those revealed in the Snowden leaks (2013) and most recently by reporting about the Israeli security services' sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and 2-way radios. These projects didn't expose primary manufacturers to the reputational and legal risk of association.
Until there's evidence of backdoors implanted by these companies, it's better to adopt a "trust but verify" approach and use standard layered security practices to detect intrusion. Conventional network intrusion and insider threat campaigns carry less risk of failure and are simpler and cheaper to execute.
What would you consider as good evidence of a backdoor? Apple got plenty of media coverup for their part in Operation Triangulation, and even hardware experts were defending it as a fuckup rather than a backdoor, providing it with great plausible deniability. Do you count it as evidence? If not, I can easily see any other company leaving these non-backdoors in their hardware with no damage to their reputation.
I'm only aware of some software backdoors in Chinese devices, but times when you could've reverse engineered a chip with microscope are long gone. If there are any it would be really difficult to find them.
There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things - starting with clipper. Pushback is not always successful - but it's far more transparent then China.
Probably, but you are asking the wrong question: Is it legal to produce non-backdoored networked devices or services in China?
The answer to that question in the US is within epsilon of “no” thanks to the cloud act.
Europe and China have passed similar laws. However, China has a reputation for passing laws then selectively enforcing them. Maybe if you get on the right side of the right party member, the answer might still be “Yes” there.
Anyway, the next question to ask is: Who would I rather backdoor my device?
I doubt the Chinese government cares much about me, and unless I vacation there it’s an international incident if they, say, hack my car and murder me by aiming it at a tree at 95mph, like the CIA apparently does now:
Of course, the US government banned cars from China. Presumably this is because they do not have the mandated remote murder network port open, or, if they do, the US doesn’t have the necessary permissions to access it.
Those are both great examples. I think this doesn't obliterate my point, though it weakens it. The manufacturer in CVE-2026-11405 is already out of business, and the one in CVE-2026-66747 is unlikely to continue as a going concern.
Would Xiaomi or the CCP accept the reputational and legal risk of getting caught with a backdoor? Recall the CCP considered the arrest of the Huawei executive in Canada as an offense against itself.
Like a stopped clock, Fox News is right once or twice a day.
For instance election tampering in the US is a well-documented thing: However it almost always favors republicans in districts with electronic voting machines that do not generate paper trails.
As for the person you are replying to, their claims have been documented by most media outlets, places like wikileaks, and their claims are backed by US legal requirements to backdoor stuff (like the US Cloud act).
My opinion about Trump is as bad as the next guy's, but we still have better relation with the USA than with China. And it's not like we have much choice.
Hopefully the same pushback that has so far stopped the worst of chat control would help. But even if not having more western alternatives would be very welcome. If you're in the US it may not resonate with you, but as a Canadian currently reading ongoing rhetoric about being annexed by the US I'd love to have options if things continue to go south with the status quo.
It's good to be skeptical about how we implement the idea of a "root of trust" in these machines, but matter-of-factly characterizing ME and PSP as "backdoor" is misleading and not useful.
TSMC doesn't care what you put in your CPUs. Apple could tell them they want to build a CPU where 90% of the transistor footprint is for a new CIA Engine that takes pictures of your feet every three seconds to trace where you've been from the smell and TSMC's response would be "how many wafers do you want?".
I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
When we buy software from Silicon Valley or a nice Mercedes Benz from Germany we don’t use this same language “outsourcing.”
Colloquially, outsourcing implies low quality or cheap price. No, what’s happening here is that China makes the best products in numerous categories and we are choosing to import them, because the best products are the most desirable.
The west is interested in funneling most of the money to the top no matter what for the last 60 years that has been the drum beat/cry It can’t be done. It can’t be done.
In America, there is one fast food place that does it differently than everyone in the market they don’t franchise and they don’t lease/rent.
They own everything as they expand (the land and the building), which means it’s a little bit slower when you expand, but they don’t care but they are very profitable.
The owner probably gets a call every other week from large equity companies trying to sell them on doing it like everybody else and their pitch they can make you a worldwide company if you just let them in to f you.
Well at this point they are probably the only country in the world that can produce a car end to end starting from the raw iron ore and other elements up to the chips and software that runs on them (I’m sure they will still need to import some small stuff probably like Rhodium or Iridium maybe), who is going to compete with that? Everything done in country, no tariffs at all throughout the entire production cycle.
That said some of these industry especially metallurgical ones will never return to Europe or US as they basically destroy and pollute the environment on a large scale, in China that still seems acceptable but also might change promoting them to outsource to other countries which they already do in some areas I think.
I find it quite strange en people take a development that has happened over the last ~50 years, little more than half a lifetime, and confidently state that now "it will always stay like this". Things always change.
Imagine what those kinds of people would have said in China in the 70s, with western industries being vastly more advanced and efficient. "It's over, we will never catch up." they would probably have said. Wrong then, more wrong now.
China has made a tremendous effort to move to a clean(er) industrial system, using a lot of renewables and clean energy and improving environmental standards. At this point production in China is probably the best for the environment compared to most countries, including the US that is deeply invested in oil production.
China evidently is pushing to move to sodium ion batteries. They didn’t have to. They could’ve stuck with lithium. I’ll let you guess what what would’ve happened in the United States they would’ve said we don’t have to this lithium already works. Why do you want to upset the Apple Cart.
They are also moving close to a point where they will bring Thorium Reactors on line they don’t have to. They could just stick with uranium, but they’re not.
Is this part of the fact that they have engineers running a lot of of the things at the top of their government instead of lawyers?
They seem to be building a lot of infrastructure they are in the process of building several dams on the Brahmaputra River.
But we do have to consider how the speed in which it is dropping. China uses about the same percentage of fossil fuels for energy production as the US right now, but more of it is coal so it is dirtier. However they are aggressively installing and promoting renewables and nuclear power, built themselves, and their pollution standards are rapidly increasing. While in the US renewable and nuclear investment is and has been pretty crappy.
The fact that China is not that far above the US while being the world's factory and having 4x the population is pretty impressive.
And like you said, China is putting a real effort in. I don't see the US trying to reduce domestic short hop flights with electric high speed rail. I don't see the US trying to replace gasoline cars with EVs. I don't see the US curtailing structural incentivization of pickup trucks and SUVs.
The main US policy seems to be "spend trillions on wars for oil" rather than accepting the inevitable decline of oil and planning around it.
This comparison is meaningless because China is the worlds factory (including a major portion of what's consumed in the US ). So that CO2 number is their populations usage plus what's required to manufacture good for the most of the world. A huge part of US CO2 consumption has been outsourced to China.
I've had my thinking in this area shift, too; I now believe China (and a few other places, like Vietnam) have "won" at manufacturing because their combination of government, cultural values, and the masses of their people from which they draw workers, managers, and owners simply are better at manufacturing than my own country is.
Part of what led me to believe this was waking up and realising they're also simply better at offering LLM inference: cheaper; faster; more innovative.
It's a horse of a very different colour from outsourcing where someone is simply chasing the lowest bidder.
> I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
The media to this day portrays China as if it was 80s. Yes, at that time it was an open-air manufacturing plant. You can run rudimentary floor operations with high school educated workers, but you still need trained engineers and managers to run the operations. Exporting engineers quickly became impractical, which led to local engineers getting trained. At some point the training became the bottleneck so local educators were trained. And so on.
Over the years, China has built the entire industrial pipeline: all the way from education and vocational training, to scientific research, to local engineering houses. Remember, the people who built Shenzen are now retired. Or to put it into perspective, China is currently at roughly similar age of industrial boom as post-WWII USA was in... the late 90s - early 00s.
"The West" had a head start with regards to IP and China is indeed fighting an uphill battle there, but they have a huge domestic market to grow the companies out. The proud "Designed in X, made in China" things are being replaced with white-label "made in China", where "designed in China" is implied.
Do you have a robot vacuum? It's probably Roborock / Dreame / Ecovacs, not even some western branding.
Fair point. Outsourcing was not the right word to use, China today makes products over all quality ranges and almost always they are cheaper than any other alternative. “Giving away” would be a better word.
We leave a large part of the question of where things should be manufactured to the market. If the market decides that the place is China it's probably because they think it's individually beneficial to them, not an act of charity.
China didn't get that way by magic. They ran the same playbook that allowed Alexander Hamilton to snatch manufacturing from Great Britain to the US, and the US gave up manufacturing for the same reason the UK gave up manufacturing (suppression of labor interests).
It will be interesting to see what China does. They aren't ideologically committed to exclusively serving the interests of the wealthy, but they still have lots of rich people in the (ahem) Communist Party, so who knows.
It's striking that they recently arrested one of the richest men in the country, the Evergrande founder, for fraud. Seems unthinkable in the US/Europe right now.
Some of Evergrande's financial practices were somewhat ponzi-scheme-ish (new sales funded construction of previous buyers), and the US has imprisoned a few such schemers too.
The people in China that made the decision on that antifreeze in toothpaste, and the 300 pigs in the river or that graffiti tower in Los Angeles across from the Staples Center. I don’t think those people walked.
That is not to say that in time they’ll start to do many of things that happens in the west where those at the 1% or 2% walk away, in time China may drop down to that level, on the other hand, I would like to believe the United States will start to have the same reaction that the country had when Sputnik went around the Earth and change course and I don’t mean sanctions, tariffs, wars, and threatening neighbors to the north and to the south.
The right way to read this isn't that all billionaires can face consquenecs, but that the line that makes sure you don't face consequences is quite a bit different than being a billionaire. You can still have a power center, and impunity, as long as you make sure your misbehavior doesn't embarrass the people with the actual power. Those are smart enough to not do the things they shouldn't in a way that can be made public, and therefore cause said embarrassment.
One can prefer a regime where it's very hard for people who abuse their power to avoid punishment if it's all public to one where the powerful are emboldened enough to be able to be shameless. Even worse when the shamelessness is seen as the purest display of power, and thus people compete in their public misbehavior. But still, understand that the real barrier to punishment in the first case is not to avoid doing bad things, but to make sure that the witnesses either don't exist, or are too scared to say anything.
A judicial system that actually has no sacred cows would be better in all cases, but the sacred cows everywhere do their best to make sure this doesn't happen.
A few years ago I would have comfortably agreed that the US was better at impartial justice and justice for all. That has changed. Now it's a game of making lists of sins and comparing them -- which has enough degrees of freedom that everyone is just going to come to whichever result they were aiming for.
In the west, billionaires are often able to get extremely favorable treatment by the law as an expression of the power money gives. This is not the case in China, in which the party stands at the top.
In practice that's just a difference of incentives that I'm not sure at all is beneficial for anything but an authoritarian regime.
I mean, Deng Xiaoping is/was a huge influence in _our_ lifetimes. It was only the 1970s, just fifty years ago, when he was effectively the head of state. That’s like yesterday. I’m not saying Hamilton doesn’t have the influence you’re describing, but it’s not really an equal comparison given the huge difference in timeframes. Late 1700s is a ways away vs the 70s.
I think it’s a matter of perceptions catching up to reality. 15 years ago China was definitely still ripping off american products down to the english silk screening.
> I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
I feel you're trying too hard to make believe this is somehow unexpected or unnoticed. The fact that subcontracting work to external companies acts as an investment on said companies to develop skills and competences is something that is known since always. The argument that the reigning VC mentality is that this investment is an acceptable tradeoff due to reasons such as these investments being limited to non-critical business concerns.
Maybe new companies can spring up and be competitive with AI assisted design. Im assuming the cost was too high for those old companies to survive right? Small nimble companies could theoretically compete in some segments vs large bloated slobs (even if they have AI as well). This is all just hypothetical thought.
I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy
Gdp grew much faster in the US than in the EU. I believe the EU is the worst performer of the planet. No joke. And not surprising with the self destructive actions.
Sure, GDP in the USA is growing faster than the EU, but the question is who is benefiting from the increased GDP?
The answer is in Dah00n's comment. The rich are getting richer, while the population gets scraps. Meanwhile, people in the EU get guaranteed healthcare, paid time off, maternity leave, better worker's rights, etc.
> Meanwhile, people in the EU get guaranteed healthcare
They had that 20 years ago? Since then the rich asset owners have been accumulating a bigger share of the pie in the EU as well, it’s just marginally less pronounced because there is less wealth to go about in the EU due to the multi-decade long stagnation (outside Eastern Europe and a handful of other countries). On the whole I find it extremely hard to view this as a positive without a huge amount of wishful thinking.
People in the EU need to start thinking about how to improve things rather than exclusively focusing on holding onto what they already have (which is slowly turning into scraps..). To a large extent the old EU countries just froze in time after the GFC.
The GDP growing faster while quality of life doesn’t meaningfully improve is a bad, bad sign. It means we’re burning extra money just to stay afloat and break even. That’s worse than if the GDP didn’t grow.
The EU is doing just fine economically. It's a great place to live which matters much more than money. Also, the US has 40 trillion in debt. Every taxpayer owes $280k.
The EU is not perfect and recently they took a turn for the worse with shit like ChatControl and the ppwr killing small businesses.
But economically it's not a problem. It's not a race to be the richest, though America always makes everything a contest. We just need enough to live comfortably.
Because as everyone knows, GDP is _the_ indicator for well being of its citizens. Nobody in the US is in catastrophic health related debt, because the US's GDP grew so much <3
The median person and especially those in the top 10th percentile are fairly well off and respectively extremely well off in relative terms compared to people in other developed countries. To bottom deciles are of course not in the best situation but for the most part the rest of the population find it fairly easy to ignore that.
Western Europe has been mostly stagnant or declining while real incomes for most workers have actually grown in the same period (and for a significant proportion of the population to a very large degree).
That might be a mirage temporarily made reality by outsourcing defense to the US, manufacturing to China and the work required for GDP growth to refugees.
How is locally producing military equipment versus buying extremely expensive US uberl33t overkill hardware suppose to hurt the EU? It not like the US was just giving Europe free armaments.
Yeah sure they won't be producing any F35s or million dollar per shot missiles, but was that a good idea to start with? Are they worth the money when once again lots of inexpensive arms are shown to be more useful in modern wars than a few handfuls of expensive ones? Both Iran and Ukraine have shown that one side being a few steps ahead in military technology and willing to dump money on equipment still has limited returns. There is no "I win" technology apart from indiscriminately killing most of the entire population, which just makes you an existential enemy to the rest of the planet and erases 95% of the value in taking that territory.
Its really not that obvious to you? Because not having US bases on site and technology sharing and agreements takes money away from entitlements. France tried to cut entitlements by a tiny bit and the yellow vest movement was born. In the long run the Yellow Vests might end up losing everything as a result.
Regardless of the tech stack the work still needs to be done and now the EU has to do it. The Eu does not have infinite money, in fact they have less than the US so there will be cuts elsewhere.
Before outsourcing defense to the US... sorry, but have you ever read a history book? Europe was "exporting defense" around the world before the US got involved in the world wars :-))
Before outsourcing manufacturing to China Europe was making a third of all industrial things on this planet, so Europe will be just fine.
> the work required for GDP growth to refugees
I don't get this one. Do you think the European economy is propped up by refugees? I think there are 5 million of them in total in Europe, most of them Ukrainians and it's likely Ukraine will become a EU member at some point in the future...
>Before outsourcing defense to the US... sorry, but have you ever read a history book? Europe was "exporting defense" around the world before the US got involved in the world wars :-))
And they will continue to do so. Just at a higher cost with no US to maintain bases and do technology cost sharing. That extra money has to come out from somewhere...it will be entitlements. Combine that with terrible demographics and that remaining manufacturing base will be built on a bed of sand. :)
>Before outsourcing manufacturing to China Europe was making a third of all industrial things on this planet, so Europe will be just fine.
Europe can insource everything that China makes. They are not stupid people. You mistake the benefit westerners got from outsourcing. It held back inflation in products because the value came from the living standards difference between chinese and EU people. Remove that disparity by bringing back everything and EU will be living with a lower quality of life because all those products will be significantly more expensive with no alternatives.
>I don't get this one. Do you think the European economy is propped up by refugees? I think there are 5 million of them in total in Europe, most of them Ukrainians and it's likely Ukraine will become a EU member at some point in the future...
Same point I have been making. The consequences of demographic collapse can be hidden away by having young tax paying peoples do the shit jobs that run the economy at low wages. Same thing the US does with illegal migrants. Remove that and the hidden costs are now dumped onto the population. Result: Lower living standards for those who remain.
If they did, they would have done it already. Instead when there was an attempt, some protested wearing yellow vests. There will be more. Whether or not the governments force the issue or they lose to the voters does not matter: Either way quality of life will suffer.
> However I am sad that the world interdependence is eroding (...)
That's quite the odd statement. I don't think that it's in anyone's best interests to have a single country control access to chips. It might be in the US's interests to keep everyone out if the field, but the US is a single country among 195 countries.
And isn't the US's dominant ideology all about competition?
This is what was sold to – and often forced on – countries by the US and their allies via the IMF and World Bank. Global free trade meant that you only produced what you had an advantage in and bought what others could produce at lower cost.
It's not reversing, it's continuing the trend of more and more manufacturing moving to Chinese companies. It already happened to TVs and it's currently happening with RAM.
Xiaomi may manufacture their chips in Taiwan (by tsmc) but Xiaomi is still a Chinese hardware company, similar to how Apple or Qualcomm are US American hardware companies.
No. The problem is that TSMCs new capacity is already hogged by AI peddlers for years to come (in fact, AI BS is the reason why these new non-Taiwanese fabs got the massive US and EU subsidies), and so everyone else not flush with cash from the AI hypetrain has no alternative than to go to China - and deliver all their secrets to the CCP.
And eventually, just like the Western solar, battery, pharma and car companies all have learned, the CCP will use that knowledge to surpass and undercut everyone else.
Do they also deliver all their secrets to US/EU/Taiwan/etc or is it only with China that it goes from ordering some products manufactured to "deliver all their secrets"? Strange how almost everyone points their fingers at the CCP when we know for a fact (hey Snowden etc) that the US does what we say we think China does. I guess China bad > facts.
Countries and institutions should always produce things where they are excellent at producing, in forms of specialization and compete in terms of comparative advantages.
Only if you have the people to do it. China has some of the worst birth rate in the world. In ~20 years that manufacturing capacity either goes to robots or goes away. Then what?
One of the (many) areas in which China is doing great is industrial robotics. Not the fancy dancing dogs, but robots that replace workers in factories.
That why I said it either goes to robots or it goes away. Can the current robots replace something like this? I don't think right now but maybe they figure it out.
That factory looked like it employed a lot of easily replaceable manual work.
You don't have to replace 100% of workforce, replace just the ones whose work is the easiest to do by a robot.
Replacing 50% of workforce buys you enough time that by the time your available worker pool has shrunk 50%, robotics and AI will be much better and you will be able to replace another big chunk.
Production-wise, shrinking demographics are not such a big deal (they still have a lot of youth unemployment).
Shrinking demographics is a problem due to
a) the ratio of workers vs seniors,
b) shrinking overall demand pool -> shrinking economy
c) smaller overall talent pool -> less diversity, less 'geniuses', i.e. the real drivers of innovation, and less capability to mobilize for great projects
You haven't seem to have accounted for costs. Can the speaker still be produced at the same price? It remains to be seen. A lot of products will simply go away due to economics. Thats a reduced quality of life compared to today.
Yeah China bought out Kuka a while back and have done some amazing efforts in automation. Their pragmatic approach to AI and automation may win out in the end. We will have to wait and see.
I didn't watch the entire video, but 90% of the tasks I've seen in that video are easy to automate. The hardest ones are the cable pulling, putting the coil on the insert and soldering directly on the conveyor belt.
It remains to be seen if that bluetooth speaker can be produced with advanced automation at the same price that they are selling it for at this time. If not, parts or the entire category of product (tiny LED bluetooth speaker) might just have to go away as it does not make sense economically anymore. That is the reduced quality of life I am talking about in the other comments here.
Rest of the world does not rely on manufacturing as a large chunk of its economy. Yes it will be painful for all, entire classes of products might just go away if they dont make sense in the new inflationary environment but countries will still likely suffer less than China overall.
While I agree in passing. I think saying you'll export all your work to places with worse labor laws is short-term thinking. Chinese companies are successful yes but they also don't necessarily compete fairly. We still can export large portfolios of goods to China. So to just say they are best because they have a government protected market, plus subsidies so we should abandon local is a bad optimization in the long term
Yes, and no. Yes because you are vulnerable to supply chain disruption by illwilled countries. But illwilled countries that disrupt supply chains greatly incentivise others to diversify supply away from them.
China could have the monopoly of rare earth production and refinery for all of eternity. But because of their reaction towards all the us allies when the us increased tariffs, I don't expect them to be relevant enough to disrupt markets with rare earths sanctions in 10-20 years.
This is so stupid. China itself uses the "dominate and corral" model for their industries, and had severe tariffs to grow their various industrial bases, such as automotive.
Except they've now ground your native industry under their boot and have total monopoly control because you've given up your critical infrastructure. You can no longer stop buying. That isn't an option.
This is geopolitics 101; your fantasy version is decades out of date.
Was it bad when it was the US doing it against the UK? Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad? People said the same thing about the Japanese (they steal designs, they copy, it is bad quality, they are stealing our jobs, and so on).
>Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad?
It's definitely different when the player doesn't even have to play by the market. Comparing US companies and Chinese companies is not apples to apples.
I will agree that dumping is probably just bad overall. But the US, and much of the rest of the world, allows it to happen both within and outside of their countries, sometimes even financially supporting it with government programs. So I really don't see why I should care that someone in China is doing it. We can't hold others to standards significantly higher than we hold for ourselves.
I wouldn't be surprised if Xiaomi intend to use this for their laptops with Windows 11 once the software ecosystem matures. Which both ARM and Qualcomm are working on. But I still believe in terms of PC usage it is all going to be Nvidia.
They do allow to unlock their bootloaders, which is rather rare, which in turn allows to run Linux. Seeing as Chins just migrates their entire administration to Linux, it's not far fetched to assume they'll support Linux on their laptops very soon.
Kafka himself would be proud if their unlocking process[0], but technically sure, they allow it
> Press "Apply for unlocking" at exactly 12:00 AM GMT+8 (pressing it too late will cause the "application quota limit reached" error. Use this website to check the time)
"Account Error" might show up. If that happens, retry after 10 days
I think that Samsung sells rooted devices to companies or organizations engaged in their partner program. There’s at least one company using those commercially in Europe to offer a modified device. I wonder if there is a gray market for Chinese boot loader unlocked devices, or if that’s dealt with on a service per device transaction level with some cellphone shop. If you can buy a device from Samsung with an unlocked boot loader and customized security updates in a sort-of private contract, where they acquire them with who knows what arrangement today that started with their partner program, it seems like a price issue more than a practical issue or policy limitation. I see the software for unlocking devices frequently but I suspect it is a short lived game for those people, either using factory provisioning while they have access to the software or otherwise monetizing the effort to offer these tools and services. Probably malware, definitely device info collection, but it just ends up at the same conclusion. if there is friction, why? Is Goog adversarial to developer devices now? Athe devices without friction in some other way made compliant or unsuitable for general use? Is unlocking the boot loader so much a risk to the firmware delivery and control scheme for the baseband propriety stuff and chipsets or is it just that it’s vertically integrated in western markets through device financing by telecoms? — I do mean to seriously ask what is their holdup. They can’t afford to develop the software and hardware simultaneous tracked and offer that product if it leaves the control of their promised end user as a client?
I'm not experience here, but are there any obstacle to move from "unlocking bootloader" to "running full blow linux on phone" ? I imagine it can't be that simple(mostly driver issue).
Lots of obstacles. The biggest obstacle is having access to the kernel sources. Even if you've got access to the kernel source, driver blobs are a big issue, because if you move to a newer kernel the old drivers may not work.
Take a look at the PostmarketOS Device Wiki[1], you'll see that even phones released 10+ years ago (like Xiaomi Redmi 4) still do not have 100% functionality.
In saying that, in this era of LLMs and reverse-engineering, it may not be long before some of these blockers are reverse-engineered and we might end up with a fully functional Linux distro on older phones like this.
i'm not kernel dev, but i've heard the folk at kernel always try to maintain a stable API so as not to break backward compatible, is this the case here ?
No, that stability is only promised for userland apps, not kernel-level stuff like drivers. In fact, there is no stable API/ABI for device drivers.
Now this mostly isn't a big issue on the desktop/x86 world, because most drivers are open source, except for some exceptions like certain Broadcom drivers and old nVidia drivers. nVidia used to be a massive headache to deal with because the driver would frequently break with kernel updates, but thankfully that's mostly a thing of the past after they released an open driver, relegating most of the proprietary code to their GSP firmware.
Also, PCs and the x86 platform in general are much more open and hacker-friendly, making it relatively easier to reverse-engineer drivers, so as a result we also have a good chunk of drivers maintained by the community.
So the lack of ABI/API stability isn't a big issue generally in the desktop space.
Now in the embedded/ARM space however, things are very different. Unfortunately due to the precedence set by Google, Apple and earlier mobile vendors, chipset vendors generally don't release their sources; even their architecture documentation is closely guarded and hard to obtain, never mind the sources. And the chipset themselves (like the camera/ISP) are tiny black boxes and hard to debug and reverse engineer. So unless this situation changes (ie, official Linux support from the manufacturers themselves), a simple unlocked bootloader means nothing.
This basically answers my question about dark weather in the future for all of this. If Google is standing on an issue of trusting their clients to be in the right bucket of profitable customer to get through agreements and NDAs on what they’re proving unless you’re a multi national juicy enterprise target they’re really not the people I want to deal with. I don’t know what kind of deal Google has but I suspect they finance a substantial amount of “evolutions” for their purposes through the blob device vendors.
This video compares the Mediatek Dimensity to the Xring 03 (at the given timestamp 329s in) and finds significant differences in physical layout and performance: https://youtu.be/BCCJuOopLK8?t=329
Can't wait to see this in actual product and not a development board. It fulfill some of the original promise from ARM. And the world is about to turn upside down if most of that video show are proven to be true.
Missing the most important metric: processing power per watt.
I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs. But putting them in a compact, densely packed, sealed box (aka a phone) would result in a fireball and almost no battery life.
> I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs
In multicore, sure. In most single threaded workloads as well? That'd be interesting enough on its own, regardless of wattage (though that'd make it even more interesting), as my A19 device gives my overclocked 9800X3D a run for its money (and some losses) in single threaded workloads. Considering that's the only thing the 9800X3D is really targeting, it's impressive beyond just whether or not it does so with less power.
Even aside from battery life, high TDP means thermal throttling under sustained load. Which most of these benchmarks don't really test, or if they did, the ambient temperature affects the results.
They do test continuous (1-hour) gaming performance in controlled environment regularly. Thermal throttling can be easily spotted on the frame rate vs time graph.
I won't belittle their hard work, but there's a qualifier here that they're bidding the most for the foundry time, or else nvidia would have the fastest chips.
New CPU is 100% ARM design and nothing by Xiaomi other than "Chinese menu" configuration (i.e. how many blocks of this or that type,..).
Apple CPU is a full custom design that just complies with ARM.
Xiaomi Xring O3 CPU is designed by ARM and Xiaomi (as well as Mediatek) did not do any CPU design, other than custom bus interconnects, physical implementation on TSMC 3nm, an in-house NPU, and adopting next-generation LPDDR6 memory support.
The custom integration is pretty big in and of itself. But the most important thing is that all these ARM C1 Ultra core is accessible to everybody. And it is performing well against Apple's CPU. The old Apple does better SoC advantage is vanished.
We will have A20 vs C2-Ultra this year. Can't wait to see it .
I wonder just how different their processes really are, considering both can be safely described as "full custom design".
I write this especially in the context of apple always being about The Look, so they might also describe their design process in a more optimistical light in advertisement material.
ARM invested significantly lately in CPU design, which can be seen through history of job openings and news, so they caught up to Apple. Xiaomi does only SoC integration and CPU configuration (i.e. choosing how much cache, how many units of what, etc whatever ARM gives as options to choose). So, this is not comparison of Apple CPU vs Xiaomi, but Apple vs ARM ;-) CPU design is very long term and risky. NVIDIA has had it (i.e. Carmel soft CPU) and trimmed it significantly (maybe they reignited it again, since they were not allowed to acquire ARM). However Apple has just launched M6. They all know what competition is going to have next few generations through covert/overt industrial espionage (I remember in Intel their competitive analysis team was sourcing info through chain of sources to "wash it")
> I wonder just how different their processes really are
Night and day.
Apples has in-house silicon dev groups starting (at least) 2008 w/ acquisition of PA semi for their low power CPUs, followed by the acquisition of Anobit in 2012(?). Apple does their own architecture, microarchitecture, etc, full cycle development.
This is nothing. China is about to start doing their own 5nm. When they roll out their own silicon at scale, I don't think there's catching up, nobody can match their manufacturing capabilities. Not even close.
They are already doing 5nm with multi-patterning DUV. But that's not the same as EUV machines. It is not nearly the same scale of production (with yields as low as 20%). They are still a few years away from indigenous EUV. Though I have to admit the shenzhen breakthrough was pretty impressive
For multi-patterning DUV, each patterning/etching step accumulates defect risk. Actually now that I'm reading about it, 20% is the better end of the spectrum. I don't think technology could possibly improve it much beyond that.
I believe the theoretical maximum yield for multi-patterning DUV at 5nm and 7nm is 30-40%
It's not economically sustainable/viable long term. China is only doing it because they've been forced to by the trade war Trump started against them in his first term (Biden didn't really back down either and now Trump 2 tried to ramp it up even higher). China is okay with such low yields because its supposed to be a temporary solution until they achieve domestic EUV tech.
Surely yield is very much a function of the size of the device in question and its tolerance for defects. I don’t think it makes sense for a technology to have a theoretical maximum yield that’s a constant number unless it somehow destroys entire wafers with highish probability.
You can normalise by surface area, which makes defects rate comparable across processes. At least to a first order approximation, keeping all other parameters constant, bigger chips are more likely to have a defect because they have larger surface areas.
If a process has a defect rate of x, the probability of a die having a defect is A*x. The limit is then the defect rate for a die with the surface area of a transistor, you cannot really get any better than this. But that’s not very useful if you want to extrapolate what the defect rate would be on an improved or cheaper process.
On the contrary, it is actually good. For all the hand wringing when someone’s favourite platform loses out on a Geekbench comparison, the benchmarks are quite consistent, even across platforms, and track SPEC results fairly accurately.
Does that matter? I don't care of Apple's thread scheduler is faster or slower than Windows' or if their throttling algorithm behaves differently, I just want to see how it performs in a given task.
I'm also interested in the security features of this new CPU. Where doesn't it sit compared to Apple and ARM (Qualcomm, Titan)?
Modern processor without memory tagging for example is a little..... dated, given how much the new AIs accelerated the vulnerability discovery in all the apps and system components.
I have heard it said that security is the new power when it comes to microarchitecture. I feel like that’s something security enjoyers tell themselves to be happy.
Apple’s devices generally have no or very underpowered thermal solutions; but it also partly regulates battery life.
(Seriously, they rely on air cooling for Neo and MBA — these chips hit 105deg easily and throttle, intentionally)
Adding a thermal pad to a Neo or MacBook Air gives significant boosts peak and sustained performance; whether in benchmarks or real world video renders; but it also reduces your battery life by a little, as there’s less thermal throttling forcing wattage down.
And no, the battery is not connected to the chassis (heatsink), it doesn’t have increased temps.
IMO bot that important practically - SiC batteries, active cooling, bypass charging etc - if one really cares about sustained performance (gaming etc), PRC has phones segments big on mitigating thermal throttling. Exclude benchmark drama, golden samples, retail units still vastly outperform passively cooled phones with "better" silicon on long sessions. Otherwise there aren't many usage case where power consumption matters between that can't be trivially made up by slightly better or larger battery and/or passive cooling.
The benchmark done in a lab is different than one done on a production phone. In a lab you can cool the room or even drop the CPU inside cold oil. Run the benchmark there and it means you have a good freezer.
I'd love to see what it looks like inside a production phone. I really hope for this to be true because we need more competition on the CPU front.
China is hungry in a way others aren't. It is driving them to push far harder and faster because of this. Don't know it will be sustainable long term but it looks good now.
The one thing I have heard form mechanics is that cars from BYD seem to has better than expected manufacturing and engineering. They haven't cut corners were you would expect for the price. Not sure how the electrics will hold a decade into the future but but they have good bones.
There was a lot of hype about the SU7. They killed it with pre-orders. But their target for the year at 550K isn't gonna happen as they're sold about a 180k so far this year.
China is nowhere near “free market”. Their EV sector received more government subsidies in the last 15 years than the entire U.S. automobile market since inception. The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.
250 billion in EV subsidies from China. 10 billion by the U.S.
> The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.
Didn't Tesla essentially stay afloat for years via government subsidies (e.g. government-mandated carbon credits)?
Didn't the US only recently end its direct subsidies for EV buyers?
Don't US taxpayers provide an enormous ongoing subsidy to ICE vehicles by underwriting the security of the oilfields in the Gulf?
Don't US taxpayers in effect subsidize US automakers by ensuring they do not have to compete in the market with the best available vehicles?
More to the point: American free-marketeerism was never about the other side, it was about the US living its own professed values at home. We didn't shackle our press in discussions about the USSR because the USSR chose to shackle its own press. Our lockout of Chinese EVs rankles in part because it's a deviation, at home, from our own professed values.
It's really not. No serious analysis reduces the complexity of markets to a single number in a single sector. In particular, it takes willful blindness to look at subsidies in the EV market and ignore other energy markets.
You're also ignoring the most important point, my last point about values. The comment is still up, feel free to re-read it.
That's the point I guess, it is not binary, but proponents of absolute free markets see it as binary when they are against regulations, and as non-binary, when it is about competition from abroad. They want to have it both ways.
Direct producer subsidies for PRC EV was <100B, less than US injected into US auto, not much more than Euro auto. The latter just poorly, i.e. pork barrel / jobs programs that does not raise baseline competitiveness.
Most of CSIS muh PRC 200b-400b includes rebates/taxes AND subsidies to upstream, i.e. battery industry which used more than cars. AKA they bundled energy sector to skew PRC numbers.
For comparable you'd have to include all historic US/EU auto subsidies, AND ASSOCIATED upstream subsidies like MOST OF fossil industry, related diesel/fuel discounts... etc etc in which case US/EU have been rebating to the tune of trillions.
Strict auto-auto sector equivalence = PRC subsidized less to commoditize their car industry in fraction of time, which is not remotely "overproduction", they still barely exports 20%... they'd have to export 50/75%+ to reach shares of EU/JP/SKR etc and even then those absurd export%s not treated as overproduction. PRC would need to be exporting ~20m more cars then they do now to even qualify.
Auto+energy sector equivalence (the 200-400b figure), PRC not even on the axis in equivalence scenario.
In any case, the point is that the US also subsidizes markets, including the auto markets. China is far from unique in this. As you say, free market capitalism isn't binary, and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.
You seem to understand the meaning of "to some degree" differently than I. To me it implies that subsidies can happen at different amounts, not that they are all the same.
What is an equivalence here is, that the binary flag of "does subsidize" is true, and that equivalence holds.
That's an interesting point actually. Most places in China and even quite rural ones are livable and reachable via public transport including trains. Most of their big cities are very convenient to get around in just by walking and metro or sometimes taking a bus.
If China government kickstarted their EV sector (along many others) and enabled them to be competitive, strong and dominating.
That means the Chinese government is doing a really good job.
I really hate this argument where every government across the globe have to basically be a drag which sucks the life out of an economy and wastes extracted resources (taxes) on bullshit instead of putting them to good use.
This is what winning looks like fellas, and you're just losing. Get used to it as there's only going to be more of this.
That journalist may not want to buy American cars, but thanks to our enlightened government, they must buy American cars, since everything else is taxed significantly or banned altogether. Free market for all! /s
I love this, really, competition on a global scale is good for us, bad for greedy US corporations.
For example, I consider Meta as bigger threat to society, than Xiaomi, DeepSeek, z.ai and other top Chinese companies (haven't used Chinese social media, so can't comment about its content)
When you say "greedy US corporations" do you mean that these US corporations are uniquely greedy, or that all corporations are greedy, and this is bad for the ones in the US? Do you think that corporations in China, which in many cases are subsidized by the government, are also greedy?
all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns or break the law and eventually make sure law is changed to fit your business (e.g. first taxi medallions adjusted the law for themselves, and then Uber)
Same is very difficult to do in China (look what happened to Jack Ma) or in Europe, because you have to follow some regulations
> all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns
How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
> How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
I want to share 3 things here, to think out loud:
1. lets not go too far to the past, because I will say industrial espionage is less harmful than imperialism. Imperialism costed millions of lives across India, Pakistan, African nations, Indonesia and even in China, we are talking about how the West got extremely rich, which allowed it to live in prosperity, when everyone else were struggling (impact of it is still ongoing for some nations). I am fine with lesser of 2 evils, which is an industrial espionage in this case.
2. I didn't say 'benelovent act'
3. this is not baked by a science, just a personal preference, I prefer if country supports companies to advance the country, rather than allowing companies get too rich and bail them out with taxpayer money if they fail because of their dumb actions. (not saying one is better than other, I like how CCP elevated China from 3rd world country to a level, even the US companies are scared, in very short time, without invading and extracting resources from other countries. But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect, but China became superpower in the last 30-40 years, which is an impressive accomplishment.
Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people. Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
Or lets look at China itself, before the opium wars and British colonization, it accounted for ~30% of the world GDP, by 1970s it dropped to 4-5%, now climbing back to 20%.
Indonesia would be another example.
You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage", because you probably live in the West and feel nice about your day to day life and regular things like education feels granted, and not seeing the enormous impact of the West's evil actions to the lives of billions of people around the world in the last 200 years. (US hasn't even stopped yet, see Cuba, Middle Eastern countries)
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
Ridiculous statement. China is doing it today — uighurs are actively erased bit by bit.
> Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
This statement is rooted in “zero sum” logic, and based on the assumption that without colonization India should have stayed with its 25% or more share. Hypotheticals are hypotheticals, and nothing more.
> You keep defending the West,
I’m not defending anyone. I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good” horse and completely oblivious to so many things that China does, which are objectively worse.
> I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good”
Can you read what I have written? if not, let me copy what I wrote earlier here:
> I am fine with lesser of 2 evils
> But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect
I am not saying China is good, I am saying it is lesser of 2 evils with much less negative impact to the lives of human beings around the world, in my opinion.
I am not sure we are arguing here on the merit of the argument itself. You are fine with China’s genocide TODAY because China is the “lesser of two evils”?
I do not understand this. It sounds like a cultist/religious position.
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
But they did. Look at Xinjiang, Tibet, and the history of Manchuria, among others. They did it to themselves as well, like most backwards dictatorship. And "the West” does not really do genocide anymore, either. This is more a consequence of it being a terrible strategy than Chinese benevolence (or anyone’s, really). At some point we realised that direct administration is a burden and that it’s much more cost effective to bribe nominally independent governments without having to deal directly with local populations. China does this a lot, just like evil western imperialist countries. Empires look different in the 21st century than in the 19th, that’s all. And where would you put Russia in a neat west-rest of the world dichotomy?
> You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage"
“The West” is not a monolith. It’s made of several countries, some of them better than others, and each one of them with its good and bad sides. It is not useful to work with generalisations like that. It obscures any information or lesson we could get and leads to wrong conclusions. It’s also counter-productive because for all its evil, there is nothing “the West” did that is unique. Except in scale, but then it’s more a quirk of history than something being intrinsically evil in “western” people.
I would say that saying about anything “whataboutism” is a cheap way out.
China does industrial espionage for the same end goals as American companies work on new things: market domination. So, I find it funny when someone is mad about American companies but not Chinese, while both pursuit the same goals.
Do you still believe this considering those companies live and die by the CCP? Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?
I'm right there with you questioning Meta's value for society, but I do believe it has less opportunity for abuse/manipulation
Considering Meta lives and dies by the White House, where abuse and manipulation have become SOP, I'm not sure the CCP stacks up as the boogeyman anymore.
IMO opinions of this variety often come from being misinformed or under-exposed to exactly how oppressive the CCP is. The US government isn't perfect, but it values various freedoms much more extensively than the CCP
I don't care about internal politics of a state, as long as they are not killing people deliberately on a daily basis or invading other countries and killing their people.
How government is structured is up to Chinese people to decide
> Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?
It's not only about scale and upstart, it's also about how much are they harming society.
Specifically, the M7 is supposedly coming out in the Spring. The M6 band is going to be so small because the M7 will have a lot of AI-focused upgrades and Apple doesn't want to waste manufacturing on M6 Pro/Max/Ultra chips when they can start building the M7 sooner.
That exist, kinda. Android gaming handhelds have mobile SoC and also active cooling. See Ayn and Retroid devices. Their (almost) throttle free is a very nice experience.
Yeah I have an Ayn Thor with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, it's great being able to play fairly demanding Windows games on this tiny device.
It's still PoP with the RAM stacked on top in a plastic casing so you need a pretty big fan to cool it since you have to go through insulating plastic, then the RAM to get to the CPU.
With a HPB packaging you can cool the CPU directly and could theoretically get the same amount of cooling power with a much smaller fan that could be integrated into a thing smartphone (à la RedMagic).
I’m not sure I follow why the performance is “Insane”
This is a M5 level chip that runs slightly within a ballpark of M5 wattage (afaik M5 is between 15W max on an iPad and 30W max CPU+GPU on a cooled Mac)
This is running in a thermally unconstrained bench setup and has potentially worse power consumption with what will be lower than previous gen performance when this and the alleged M6 are truly out.
So tired of people on HN calling you out for being excited about tech.
It gets M5-level numbers at 12-14W.
It gets about 30% better perf than the A19 Pro at equal wattage on the whole 4W - 8W range.
So no it's not worse power consumption than prev gen. This is ARM's stock GPU having finally caught up and being competitive with Apple and Qualcomm's mobile GPUs.
This is insane to me. Stay cynical if you want, I have the right to be excited about it.
I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t be excited by it. But there’s a significant number of caveats to every single number you posted but you glossed over the points I made.
And in being defensive, you jumped straight from the topic you were discussing (GPU perf) to CPU perf numbers to try and make a point.
There’s a difference between being cynical and pragmatic, just as there’s a difference between being hyped and realistic.
You haven’t seen this in a product. You’re seeing development board numbers. Be excited all you want but it’s a public forum, if you want to just post without any responses make a blog.
No? The numbers I quoted were GPU numbers, sourced from this video [1].
Also I explicitly acknowledged in my first comment that real devices won't be able to draw that kind of power. But 4 watts is 4 watts whether it's in a test bench or a phone.
Xiaomi smartphones were extremely well made at least a few years ago. Even the core software was impressive vs Google for example (try echo cancellation on any of your non-Xiaomi devices). Its only real problem is ads.
Yeah it wasn't a dig a Xiaomi specifically. All Android devices have broken Vulkan drivers. We have to rely on alternative open-source drivers (e.g. Turnip for Snapdragon) for real compatibility and performance.
> Xiaomi is the Chinese tech giant. Their phones compete with iPhones.
To the first: I say, "Hmm... maaaaybe. More like they are a large consumer goods company. Many of their goods are very low value." No one doing professional stock analysis on Wall Street would put Xiaomi in the same category as Huawei (which has a frighteningly large and effective R&D division for telco/networking kit).
To the second: I summon my inner Aussie: "Yeah, nah." I think only peak Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy phones are the only two that can possibly challenge iPhones. The rest are poseurs.
Apple is the least interesting company to compare against. They are in their own MacOS/iOS software ecosystem, which you want if you want and you don’t if you don’t. Not to be dismissive of either side of that, there are legit reasons to stay in or out of Apple’s ecosystem. But benchmarking points is not a reason anyone would switch operating systems, right?
What OS will these chips run and what is the competition on that platform? He makes a lot of comparisons to AMD and Intel in the post, why not benchmark against them?
Not at all. I specifically bought a MacBook Air M4, first Mac product in my life, for its fantastic performance in a passively cooled notebook. I have zero loyalty to Apple and usually use Windows. If someone else starts beating them perf wise, I'll happily switch again.
Daniel Lemire specialises in high-performance algorithm implementation. In recent years he has been impressed by specific performance characteristics of Apple's CPUs. For example, their ability to eek out the maximum possible throughput from a given instruction stream's data dependencies. My information may be stale, but when I read Daniel's comments I assume that Apple is being used for compariosn because it is the current leader, and take it as given that AMD and Intel are behind. You can probably find sources where he makes head-to-head comparisons with AMD and Intel. If you're not familiar with his work I can recommend it. The Wookash podcast interview is a gentle introduction, there is open source code and academic papers if that's more your thing.
Here is an excellent video showing silicon die analysis and comprehensive performance-power curves compared against other leading products. Please skim through it and skip the speculating. https://youtu.be/BCCJuOopLK8
> This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers, around 3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-cor, are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.
I was under the impression that there was still a trade export from TSMC to China [1]? Not to mention a near complete ban on ASML devices [2]? Maybe they exfiltrated a few chips into a lab, but can they really source production quantities?
> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
People using the same C1-Ultra core are struggling to get the same performance in applications where heat and power are important. It would be surprising if this is sustainable and not just a temporary boost.
> The Xring O3 will debut in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, the world's first foldable to use it, and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, both launching in China in September 2026. Xiaomi also unveiled the Xring O100 AI chip and the Xring D100 smart-driving chip, the latter built to run models with up to 200 billion parameters locally, with commercial use planned for 2027. Reuters reports TSMC is producing the chips.
I guess we will find out very soon when Chinese customers get their devices. I don't know how they will even source enough LPDDR6 at reasonable prices.
Competition in the ARM space is exactly what the industry needs right now. If Xiaomi can actually sustain that multithreaded performance without thermal throttling, it changes the hardware landscape significantly.
My last three phones has been XIAOMis. I absolutely love them for the their price-performance value, and honestly their Android version MI (build/skin ?) is my favorite android version.
Geekerwan's review is up, with caveat that this is the prototype board, not even packaged into a phone yet, but still shows some amazing results in spec 2026, 3dmark (gpu), perf-per-watt for single core and multi-core https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCJuOopLK8 (you can turn on YouTube auto-dub)
It is the same Xiaomi which announced 300 000 SU7 vehicles sold in a day and 6 months later reported they are struggling to hit their sales targets? Just don’t believe anything a Chinese company say, divide it by at least 2. I have nothing against China, this is a cultural thing which you should be aware reading anything coming from the country.
Xiaomi EVs sales growing ~15% YoY, they just likely to miss their wildly ambitious ~33% YoY target. Or they might get close, they're 80% of target for H1, but PRC sells more cars in H2 (no Q1 new years, Q3+Q4 big sales).
But it's also the same xiaomi and sends gold samples and hacks gaming benchmarks, but IRL an off the shelf model is merely 80% better instead of 100%. It's no different than Samsung, Apple, Nvidia curious powerpoint axis. Whatever advertised, reality is slightly worse, but rarely substantially.
I would find the news much more interesting if they put the new processor in a laptop with 48 GB DDR5 unified memory or more! Right now, M5 with its neural execution engines and unified memory architecture present a unique local AI computing platform.
I think it's great that the Chinese are catching up and can compete directly with the incumbents. The GPU space I find really exciting with several new IPs out there that aren't quite ready for primetime, but still fascinating.
Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.
Impressive silicon progress, but real-world developer experience will hinge on sustained thermal throttling, Linux kernel support, and tooling ecosystem stability.
PRC going to get have surplus of semi talent and equipment in a few years that food delivery companies Meituan probably going to starting making chips like they do LLMs. Only 60% joking.
Xiaomi still need to improve their UX and also match the UI to western culture, in spite of now being a global "tech giant" they still want to convince everyone else to be Chinese?
Huawei is launching a mobile soc built with logic folding. They take a single logic ip, like a cpu, and spread it's components across to dies and use hybrid bonding to combine top to bottom. For example the CPU SRAM on top and logic gates directly below. This reduces critical path, increases fmax, reduces power consumption. They claim this method allow them build faster, more power efficient, more function units with duv process than traditional duv. Will be interesting to benchmark after launch later this year
If Moore's law is truly ending as is generally believed, then it seems logically inevitable that the entire industry will flatten out and equalize. Or, I am oversimplifying something.
In this case it's more that multiple companies (Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek and now Xiaomi) have used the same process (N3P) to produce multiple chips with similar performance. Regardless of Moore's Law death that isn't surprising.
That's just punting the meta which is why are companies converging on similar processes? Plausible explanation being that Moore's law exponential is going away.
Xiaomi has not been sanctioned like Huawei. So it is made by TSMC on N3P.
The Huawei chips, made by SMIC, are so far behind they're not competitive at all with even Xiaomi's first generation chip.
The U.S. is already making moves to completely halt the export of ASML machines to China, including non-EUV ones. Every semiconductor China produces could be used in weapons and that's agains U.S. law.
Last I knew, ASML was a Dutch company with a Veldhoven HQ. With the amount of shit that Trump's been pulling in Europe, The EU might be more willing to side with China and ban exports to the US.
Europe needs to acquire a nuclear arsenal that stands head-to-head with the Russian one quantitatively and independent from the U.S. or any other nation (including the French and British) for nuclear deterrence. This means many more European nations need to acquire a nuclear arsenal.
The frustrating part is that the U.S. doesn't want to give assurances whether it will come to Europe's aid if it were attacked, but at the same time doesn't want European nations to develop an independent nuclear capability. Many European nations (Poland, Finland, Sweden, Germany) are currently contemplating going nuclear. The U.S. is actively discouraging them to do so.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (to which they are all signatories) effectively prevents these countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unless they are willing to face international sanctions and economic ruin, that’s the end of the story.
If you leave the treaty are you still subject to international sanctions if you develop nukes? Me thinks not. That makes the treaty a paper tiger.
The NPT was only useful when the lines were clear and larger nations would come to the aid of smaller ones when they were attacked. That's no longer the case.
I would argue that NATO under Trump is a paper tiger. There is a reason no-one wants to buy US weapons any more, though the intricacies of where they are, having assumed the US would be a reliable ally, mean the current flood of US weaponry to European countries will slow down gradually, not all at once.
Reputation is a fickle thing, so difficult to build, and so easy to lose.
This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers — around *3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-core* — are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.
But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.
> The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
This is where the magic is happening (I believe). They have these ultra cores with additional extensions which they are pinning the benchmarks to.
Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
> Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
I agree that if each core doesn't "support" the full ISA it's a huge pain (the one generation of Intel AVX-512-but-not parts were incredible), but that hasn't been common in years. Usually (and in this case, according to my reading) the small cores get a horrible slow/decoder-emulated implementation of every instruction, so that if you schedule on the "wrong" core you don't trap but just run really slowly instead.
Otherwise, heterogeneous architectures are the present and future of mobile and consumer desktops and have been for years. Desktop OSes are getting better and mobile OSes are just fine at scheduling across different core families (the higher level of abstraction everyone complains about in mobile apps actually helps a lot here).
Only server, as far as I know. Server is now either high-density E core (Sierra Forest) or low-density P core (Granite Rapids), but desktop and laptop are heterogeneous still; laptops are getting even more heterogeneous because they have P-Cores, E-cores, and Low Power Island cores.
Did Intel ever ship any heterogeneous server parts? I'm not aware of any, and it looks like even the Raptor Lake desktop silicon sold under the Xeon brand only had P-cores enabled.
The worst of Intel's processor core asymmetry was with Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, where the two LP-E cores on the IO die had no L3 cache and really bad DRAM latency despite being directly adjacent to the DRAM controller, resulting in those two cores combined offering about as much performance as one of the E-cores on the CPU chiplet. And they used the same IO die across both generations, while updating the microarchitecture of the CPU chiplet, so things diverged even more. And because the performance of the LP-E cores was so bad, Windows wouldn't schedule any threads on them unless it was trying to operate exclusively on those LP-E cores with the CPU chiplet powered down entirely—but those two LP-E cores were still reported to software in the total thread count, so heavy multithreaded applications would launch two more threads than could actually be scheduled at once.
With Panther Lake, Intel still has three tiers of CPU cores, but the performance gap between E cores and LP-E cores is down to only about 10%.
All 10 cores support the same extensions. It’s silly to implement an SoC any other way, and it’s been a decade since someone has last made that mistake.
It's been a long time since anyone tried to actually ship a chip with different instruction set support enabled across its cores, but Intel has spent the past several years shipping consumer parts where they had to disable some features (AVX-512) on their P-cores to bring them down to the level of what their E-cores support, because they didn't plan ahead for doing a heterogeneous chip with those two microarchitectures. Toggling off some instructions in microcode for some cores is quite different from having two microarchitectures that are each designed to implement the same instruction set but with different performance and power characteristics.
It will be interesting to find out the details. From the block diagram, the core only issues 10 instructions per cycle, so not especially wide. Maybe the performance will be worse once in a real phone in real thermal conditions, but if that's true, it could make for a very interesting laptop or desktop chip. Time will tell.
The C1-ultra has a decode of 10 instructions but can issue up to 23 uop per cycle, that’s a good bit wider than any other CPU. In particular, I believe it’s the first CPU to have a 4th load pipeline.
> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can.
From what I recall reading, the impressive performance of Apple mobile CPUs is partly attributable to throwing more silicon area at the problem while not being as cost sensitive (no need to share margin with SoC vendor)
Can we get a powerful arm CPU yet that is geared purely toward performance and just slap an AIO or water cooler on it ? Don't understand why this doesn't exist
It depends on the number of channels. The Xring O3 appears to have 4×24-bit channels, so 113.8 GB/s. The iPhone 17 Pro's memory bandwidth is ~76.8 GB/s. Seems fine?
If I recall correctly, Strix Halo gets about 450G/s. The M series processors get between 400 and 800G/s, and an actual NVIDIA card is like 5.5T/s. 113G/s is pretty slow for inference.
US Government - China is a security risk & they will steal our data. We should ban xiaomi for national security risk. We found the phone collecting telemetry..... just like google and apple.
Is raw perf considered Apple's moat? I think it's their software. I would buy a MacOS laptop even if the performance is ghastly ... in fact, I did: the MacBook Neo.
I don't like Apple as a company or how they act around locking people out of the devices they buy.
I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.
So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.
> I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.
I specifically check the touchpad as well, since right now I am on a MacBook running Asahi and I just can't stand other touchpads. I even tried a Thinkpad for a while and had to return it.
However, while ZenBook's touchpad is not haptic, it's at least a glass one and generally praised for being quite good in comparison. I asked a bunch of people. Notably I prefer to double tap than press on my touchpads, so I don't really care about the haptic feedback, but to each their own. Still, I think it's worth trying it. BestBuy should have them in store if you're in US, I haven't tried it myself yet.
And yes, it's surprisingly quiet. It's a bigger form factor (16") despite very low weight, so that helps with heat dissipation and X2 is very efficient.
Yes it is. I've bought a MacBook air despite despising MacOS (with the hope that Asahi support will come eventually) because the processor currently has no competition.
Why would we compare it to an 8-year-old design? For browsing, the current MBP smokes the MBN, by margins of roughly one-third. It is a significant and noticeable regression. For sustained workloads like software development or even running the MacOS updates, it is a huge and glaring regression. But it's still good kit.
Yes it is. And it has been that way for more than a decade for typical consumer-oriented single-threaded workloads like running JavaScript on a webpage.
It's an ARM-designed CPU core, made in Taiwan. Very little difference from say MediaTek's upcoming Dimensity SoC just announced earlier because it is made on TSMC N3P instead of N2.
we had one chance to elect that technocrat who could have set us on the path that the PRC is on now. instead, we decided it was more important to feel like we could have a beer with the President and so ended up invading Iraq and Afghanistan instead
This thread is the perfect example of useful idiots with astroturfing. This is a CPU core designed by UK company (and owned by Japanese) made in Taiwan on equipment made in EU (with non trivial USA components). Xiaomi here is the easiest to replace in this chain (and the Chinese have very much tried to replace any of the others, failing for now). Yet they are angling for a huge PR win.
ARM is merely an IP portfolio licensing company. They don't really design or build anything. And everyone uses TSMC (who uses ASML). The primary design is still being done by Xiaomi, that's the most unique part of this build.
Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.
Your initial response made it sound as if Xiaomi did nothing wrt chip design and all the hail goes to "ARM engineers" which is simply not true. Had that been true we would have dozens of chip designers which we don't.
Really?! Did you read the announcement? C1 ultra cores are designed by ARM.
>The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
Below is some additional detail about the processor. Like the parent comment notes, ARM licenses IP of an ISA or core designs (see ARM C1-Ultra cores [0]), licensees like Qualcomm then make specific SoC for different use-cases.
Xiaomi has made the XRING 03 boast a larger die size than the XRING 01,
measuring 133mm² compared to its predecessor’s 109mm² dimensions This change
was deemed necessary as the flagship SoC features 16MB of SLC cache, not to
mention a new “6 + 4” CPU cluster that comprises two ARM C1-Ultra cores
running at 4.35GHz, four C1-Premium cores operating at 3.68GHz and lastly,
four C1-Pro cores running at 3.15GHz. [1]
Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.
If "China" decides it doesn't like me, my life really isn't going to change much. If my electric company decides it doesn't like me, I'm in big trouble.
Yeah, I don't want China as an adversary. It appears to me that it is a country full of fun, smart and interesting people. And their manufacturing prowess is incredible.
I'm into funny electric vehicles and China makes some beauties!
You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9], bribe your politicians [10], censor your media [11], universities [12,13,14], advertising and corporations in general [15,16], and even books [17].
While they plan 50 years ahead, we are stuck re-litigating the most basic "united we stand, divided we fall" logic, even while the consequences are all around us. But congratulations on your enlightened individualism.
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
[13] Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, says that [..] American scholars practice self-censorship about China and adopt the official narrative of the Chinese regime when talking about sensitive issues. “We don’t talk about ‘Taiwan independence.’ We talk about ‘the cross-Strait relations.’ We don’t talk about ‘the occupation of Tibet.’ We don’t call the June 4th Massacre ‘massacre.’ - https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-american-academy-misle...
[15] Leica Camera has sought to distance itself from a promotional video depicting photographers covering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown three decades ago, after it landed the German company in hot water in China. - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/lei...
Edit as reply ("posting too fast", thanks HN) to all the "but the US also does bad things" "counterarguments":
> Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
I'm European, and not stupid enough to believe that because the US is acting poorly or even in some cases hostile to Europe (to say nothing of the Middle East or South America), that we should roll over and allow China to subjugate us instead. Neither should the US. This is "you are not pure and innocent enough for self-defense" logic. Please don't drag the rest of us down in some deluded attempt at atonement.
> You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].
All of South America already feels that way about the USA. Add the EU if we include the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard.
Sadly Colombia just elected a US citizen as the new president. The "subordinate receivers of orders" status has been achieved.
>[1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].
As a Canadian, I am going to be honest and say that I thought at first you were describing the United States of 2026.
I mean, we have a much better opinion of China. As does almost the entire world. For extremely good reason.
There is one country bombing endless nations, stealing resources, engaging in sea piracy, undermining democracies, trying to destroy the West, and so on, and it is the United States of America under a juvenile halfwit self-dealing shitbag pedophile, working on behalf of an utterly deranged group of kleptocrats.
Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
> I don't personally consider "China" my adversary
They're not an adversary in the same way that a guy demanding your wallet at knifepoint is, or a company able to cut off your electricity is.
China is an adversary in the sense that they're a totalitarian government, who, by the nature of that system, cannot brook any sort of opposition to their ideology, plans, or desires. All within the state, none without. That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time because doing so will suggest that the powers-that-be in China might not have all of the answers to the human condition. Either you fall in line, or you have to be eliminated.
If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
Instead of railing about ideology, try comparing the actions of the U.S. and China over the past 20 years. The U.S. has been far more interventionist and aggressive; China appears to be maturing and the U.S. is regressing.
Tell that to the fishermen on the shores of the South China Sea, Hong Kong, people in India along the border, and of course, Taiwan.
I'll agree that the US is regressing, but it's becoming more like China. You have an elite that are putting themselves beyond any sort of accountability. You need more and more connection to them in order to get anywhere in society. How long before you see them enshrine themselves in the constitution and create a cadre system?
An "adversary" can also just be a country we're in competition with. Both America and China are in competition for the global leader. Adversary could be akin to friendly competition if we all wanted to operate this way.
> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time
When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.
This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.
> When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.
And how many of those invasions have been of other countries with democratic-republican forms of government in the last 30 years?
> This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.
Then let's take a look at more of that evidence. How's Tibet doing these days? Did the CCP decide that they, too, need to follow international law and withdraw all forces and government infrastructure from the region after invading it in 1950? How about the agreement with Hong Kong? Have they stopped ramming fishing boats in the "disputed" parts of the South China Sea? I quote that because according to international law, there is no dispute; China is just enforcing piracy.
I'd also like to say, they're not an authoritarian technocracy. They're totalitarian. China's political, military, economic, and cultural institutions are all fundamentally guided by the cadre system, which is a version of the party vanguard system suggested by Lenin. A person is paid to be a professional revolutionary of sorts. That person's influence and prospects within the cadre system are not judged solely by merit; they're judged by adherence to a dogma, which is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in this case. This isn't just "ideology vibes", it's a description of the system as it is as a practical matter.
Imagine having a person who is professionally Trumpist at your company constantly making sure that what you do is in line with what the GOP under Trump wants. For a practical example, let's think about tariffs. Does your business suffer because of the tariffs ordered by Trump? Well, no it does not, because that's not what the Trumpist cadre member would say. You wouldn't be filing lawsuits to try and lift those tariffs.
Furthermore, now imagine that the GOP in this case is the only party allowed to have majority control of the government, not just as a de facto matter, but as a de jure matter as well since it'd be a part of the constitution.
There will, sooner or later, be a Chinese Trump. It'll be very difficult to gauge from the outside, because of the restricted flow of information in and out of the country, but it will eventually happen. When that happens, there will be no putting the brakes on anything.
> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time
How in the world is the USA existing with other systems then? By taking it all over with force and subterfuge? It is obvious to those with eyes that China, despite being "totalitarian" has been the better actor (compared to the USA) on the world stage for decades now.
> If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
Yea, because Americans are fucking violent jerks and can only get what they want through threats and intimidation.
If you were able to determine in 5 seconds whether or not a person was a violent jerk, it would take you ~28 years of around-the-clock meetings to assess >= 50% of the current U.S. population, thereby rendering this comment meaningful and true. If you needed a whopping 30 seconds, it would take ~166 years. Better get cracking!
But as a Brit. America, our supposed ally is slapping tarriffs on us, and threatening our actual allies. China not so much. So which are our adversaries?
Countries change trade policy often as is deemed advantageous. For example, the UK decided to leave the customs union of the EU and start treating trade with the continent as it does everywhere else, and did so by no less than a direct popular vote, not a contrived set of executive orders facing court challenge. Does the EU crow on about how the UK is now an enemy? They would certainly have more long-term evidence for it than they would over changes in trade policy with the United States.
> threatening our actual allies
American military leadership was asked to consider plans for an attack on Greenland. American military leadership refused. [0]
I wonder how Chinese military leadership would do if ordered to invade Taiwan.
In recent history, we performed dozens of violent coups and destroyed countries in the name of overthrowing communist regimes.
China has a totalitarian government, but it's existing more in harmony with the world than the US government has for all of my life, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese government will conflict with other countries while in the same breath implying the US government is better.
You're going to find China's history as wanting as the US's in that regard. Plenty of Chinese arms found their way to theaters of war in all corners of the globe during the latter half of the 20th century, and continue to do so in the Donbas today.
Or maybe you can look into what happens to nations in China's immediate neighborhood that resist Beijing's designs.
North Korea, a prison camp masquerading as a country, exists solely because of China. Had Mao not intervened on behalf of the Kim family, UN forces would have asserted control up to the Yalu. To this day, the Chinese have been breaking international law by helping Pyongyang dodge sanctions over the DPRK's nuclear weapons program. Same with Russia, actually, despite them both sitting on the UNSC, which passed the sanctions.
China also illegally occupies Tibet and has for over 75 years.
All of this points to a country very much not existing in harmony with the world.
As far as the US government being better, it's not about any given government being better. It's about whether or not totalitarianism can continue on peacefully. It cannot. This is evident on its face.
> Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.
I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.
Myopically individualistic perspectives, focused on your individual wants and day-to-day experiences, miss a lot of stuff.
> I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.
Nobody in Ukraine who wasn't already explicitly pro-Russian thought that in 2013, did they? Russia-aligned individuals poisoned the third president of Ukraine during his presidential campaign, very likely with direct assistance. You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.
> You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.
You're being too literal. I'm sure Ukrainians weren't actually so stupid as many Americans can be.
My point is you could transplant that logic (elevate individual, myopic interests and gripes; lose sight of the community you're part of), into a situation that we've already seen play out (Ukraine v. Russia).
> China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.
My whole point is that looking at it from the perspective of the "daily life of individual Americans" is the wrong one.
Also, while no two situations are going to be exactly the same, I think it's false to say "China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans." It'd be happy to turn the US into a weak, low-tech country whose only exports are agriculture and natural resources. I can't find it right now, but I've read a quote from some high-level Chinese official to that effect.
If you are an American company US backdoors are annoying but hard to avoid given the government will find ways to compell access anyway. Adding potential avoidable foreign back doors does not improve your security.
I wouldn't tell a Chinese company to buy from Cisco. I wouldn't tell an American one to buy from Huawei.
Exactly. This is not a question of whether you get spied on, it is a question of who gets the monopoly for spying on you. Between extortion groups, cybercrime syndicates, foreign governments and last but not least my own government, there's not much room for real privacy online these days.
>> 1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.
> Can we audit American corporations?
What's your point? Did you even read what I wrote? The five words of your comment seem to be pretty sloppy:
1. If you're taking about their products, which is probably what you meant: if you think they're your adversary, then the answer is no, it's pointless.
2. But your comment as written reads as if you're talking about auditing the corporations themselves, which does in fact happen (for tax and financial reporting purposes).
To make conversation productive, please define "national security" in this case.
For example, if China can't install its hardware in Pentagon, why is it a threat to national security.
On the other hand, if you say, Intel will be in trouble because of these chips, then I would say, so what? Wasn't this a dream of MBAs, educated by the top US schools, to outsource everything in business to cheaper service providers (e.g. manufacturing to China, software development to India and etc,.)
In the 1980s, when Japanese firms were 7 of top-10 in world market cap, the trade magazines were screaming about Japanese fifth gen computers, silicon prowess, etc. and cyberpunk SF mandatorily had Japanese locales thrown in ...
But Meta can share with NSA what kind of porn are you into or that you've said few bad words about US president, whilst CCP doesn't care, so who is a real adversary?! By the way I am an INDIVIDUAL, my personal FREEDOM and FEELINGS are all that matter. China didn't hurt my feelings, domestic companies or politicians did, so, again, who's a real adversary now, huh?!
3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources to show this is not a sudden new development:
Over the next decade, China plans to invest up to RMB 1 trillion (US$161 billion) into its domestic semiconductor industry as it seeks to become a global power in the sector. In recent years, Beijing has repeatedly stated that developing its own integrated circuit (IC) industry is of integral national strategic concern. - https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chips-all-in-investing-i...
> 3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources:
Yeah, I agree. The US and its allies took the wrong lessons from the economic aspect of the cold war. They saw Western capitalism out-perform Soviet central planning, then let capitalist ideologues run amok.
China has the advantage: since it's not run by capitalist ideologues it better able to correct the deficiencies of capitalism AND it can exploit predictable capitalist behavior for strategic advantage.
This isn't to be dismissive of what they ARE delivering - china has the potential to be very big in RAM, and Storage in the comming decades. But I'm not sure that they met their industrial and geopolitical goals with these efforts.
OH, BUT we have fable! We have AI! of course we can answer these questions? can't we? which is true: America's AI is a super powerful defense against our enemies or America's AI is too stupid to defend against such a threat, and only sactions and import controls will suffice.
Just seems like you're inventing things to be scared of.
So it’s an overpriced middle of the road phone to signal ones devotion to Trump and doesn’t actually deliver on several of its core promises (like made in USA).
Just to be accurate, they don't say that it's made in the USA. They only say its assembled in the USA. Perhaps in the past they made some statement that it would have been, but the current box and marketing don't.
Yeah they updated it way late in the game when they couldn’t hide it anymore, well after money had exchanged hands. That certainly qualifies as a broken promise.
Last i read most of the money came from people not reading the fine print on their $100 deposit and only a few thousand have actually been distributed.
Looking now I see maybe tens of thousands of open orders still
I don’t want to get bogged down in a source dispute - this is very easy to search and/but I only spent about 60s on it. I am hardly an expert. Feel free to look it up as well and tell me how I am entirely wrong. This was a combination of AI responses + thumbing through the sources linked to make sure it wasn’t invented whole cloth.
I do not think they are selling well. That seems to be the consensus here.
I don't think they are selling well, either. I was wondering at your source since it would be very atypical for any company to give any numbers at all, let alone a company that's so outwardly sketchy, let alone numbers like "This is the number of orders we have standing open despite being actively in production." This is the exact kind of thing I would not expect to be easy to search, and it'd be ripe for AI hallucination.
The only numbers I can find in a quick search of my own are the leaked numbers stating 30,000 orders placed from 10,000 customers, with nothing said about shipped orders.
It's only confusing if you take a buffoon's attitude at face value, which is rather hard to do in a country where half of the people actively work to thwart what he does.
Which brings me back to my point about totalitarianism.
And everybody forgets the true power of Apple: scale. Can that supposed miracle chip be readily found in million of phones within 6 months? Or will Xiaomi keep selling 90% of their phones with 2 year old chips, reserving these chips to their 2000$ foldables?
This post serves Xiaomi because it implies competitiveness when the reality on the ground will remain unremarkable, and it helps fearmongers because they can latch on to Xiaomi's attempt to appear competitive.
Their power of scale applies to less and less regions. Xiaomi, in particular, delivers that to China where Apple previously slapped and now is becoming a niche player. It's the same as with German car makers. The trend have now reversed, with Chinese manufacturers starting to dominate on foreign markets and it's also something that was unfathomable just a few years back.
They have proven countless of times by now that they are not to be ignored.
Are you really cheerleading right now for massive, monopolistic, post-capitalism corporations? The thing you have decided to focus on is not only irrelevant to the topic at hand, but irrelevant in the minds of most consumers.
Current Apple hardware has a number of selling points for me, but the number of iPhones they've carelessly pumped into the world is not one of them. If anything, contemplating the amount of slave labor which Apple has contributed to leads to the opposite effect.
Additionally, in China, Apple maintains around a quarter market share vs Android's three-quarters share. The argument you are making is not even coherent.
I myself would be on a Xiaomi phone if GrapheneOS were able to support one.
I can install Firefox (and Chrome) extensions with the Orion Browser. It‘s developed by Kagi
https://orionbrowser.com/
I also installed uBlock Origin on Orion, which works quite well on iOS
I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0
What a weird, unhinged take. Android is mostly written in C, Android apps are AOT/JIT compiled when written in Java, and the NDK lets you write/port from whatever native you have, which is how you get Chrome to run on it to begin with.
I think they might be saying that there's still no supported way to build a native-code app on the Android OS. It could be construed as a plea to make that happen in order to unlock greater performance, not necessarily a desire to have a DIY Linux-based OS option.
Ignoring the native vs java runtime interface application difference between Android and iOS, which the top poster was was referencing.
Your Linux phone statement is a fallacy.
Ask FuriLabs how many of their phones they have sold.[0] High confident it is more than 10.
FuriLabs moved their batman, battery monitoring application, from Python to C and it really improved performance. Native applications really do keep resource usage low and is beneficial.
I believe the comparison is with iOS not Linux. Android is Linux after all. It’s just that most programs don’t get to run a that level of abstraction, and instead run on top of a jvm. At least in iOS the code does seem to be able to be more efficient due to to higher usage of natively compiled code, which is what I think the op was complaining about.
There's no JVM in Android. Most important parts of an Android app are compiled ahead of time into CPU machine code, rarely used parts are compiled into machine code in runtime using JIT.
I'm not sure that it matters. You can't put a Qualcomm chip in an iPhone and you can't put Apple Silicon in any other device. So there's no really straightforward way to compare them other than specs on paper, which we all know are theoretical until they get integrated.
I don't see any editorializing, mostly just reports that China is actually competing well.
Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.
That's a profoundly strange take. I've never in my life seen a more anti-China technology forum than HN. Whatever the headline is, say "CO2 levels have been falling for 21 months", if it has "China" in it, it will be ignored. If it has "US", it will make the front page for days. Try Algolia and see for yourself.
This is still an ARM C1-Ultra. Same one used in Mediatek dimensity 9500, which also got more than 4000 points in GB6 lab test. But actual results inside phone with smartphone cooling and wattage requirement became close to 3300.
But perhaps the most important thing, Xiaomi is now able to make chip similar to Mediatek. They are the third largest Smartphone manufacturer by shipment volume. And they are still growing.
This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.
The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle.
If you are just using apps, 15 seconds is more than enough to launch and setup an app, for anything more it will be down graded a little.
Still dang impressive but the form factor becomes the limiting factor.
There’s still one mystery for me.
I’m now at the iPhone 16. The performance of those chips with 8GB in non throttled environment (Neo..) can run as a fully performant macOS.
Yet, as a phone I don’t feel upgraded performance since my SE 1st gen days.
Sometimes I get stuttering, basic browsing can get the device pretty warm, sometime camera lags to launch.
My usage profile didn’t change much over the years.
So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources. Because, if my device now throttles to what I was happy with years ago assuming the software would behave the same, I’ve expected my usage to give me at least cooler non stuttering performance.
But that was never the case.
There are so many apps out there which take every shortcut they can to make it easier for developers regardless of the impact on users. On iOS, using things like react native instead of actually native code; on desktop systems, using Electron instead of any other toolkit.
I understand why, mind you; would VS Code or Slack have as much velocity of improvement if they had to individually manage GUI toolkits for each platform? Would VS Code be as extensible if the UI were built in Swift or Qt?o But the results are still there.
There are projects to try to make this /better/, like Tauri - Electron but using your system's built-in browser engine rather than shipping a new one, so that you don't have to have eight separate copies of Chromium loaded into memory - but they still need to reach feature-completeness and projects need to do a non-trivial migration, and then they need to test across multiple browser engines, etc., so it's still not the same.
Regardless, this is the situation we have right now; everyone figured that RAM capacity would continue to increase at the same rate as RAM usage, "it works on my machine" but it's a 32 GB Macbook, Chromium optimized for performance and not memory usage by assuming that each 'page load' would be short lived (browser behavior) rather than having one 'page load' run for hours or days (Slack, VS Code, Spotify).
Looking over the actual killer feature for Electron: running your existing web code with native features layered on top. I mean yeah Tauri does this too, but I think it's relatively rare for someone to decide "I'm going to build a standalone native desktop app in Electron because it's easiest," they're thinking "I already have this PWA that i can repackage with native features without maintaining a whole second UI."
Or at least, that's how it went where I work.
That summarizes my whole computer use. I used to believe it was my tolerance, but then I took out a good old YP-G70CB (Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) from a drawer and everything felt much snappier than my S25.
The only computer that's the exception is my macbook m4. This thing was and still is ridiculously snappy.
It's a few different things. I've gone down a hardcore rabbit hole on this because I also find this exceptionally annoying. I now sometimes experience lag when typing into a terminal, where I am typing faster than characters appear, which is something that didn't even happen in the early 1990s on significantly less capable hardware.
A very big portion of this is just Wirth's Law in motion. Software is getting worse rapidly, and AI is accelerating the decline in software quality, where performance is an aspect of quality.
But the other part of this is the latency vs throughput tradeoff. More and more of our systems are optimized for throughput, or worse are optimized for throughput in ways which causes significant experience degradation if you are unable to meet the throughput demands. There is a natural tension between throughput and latency, and we are seeing this play out across every aspect of both hardware and software system design. As a simple example, nothing you do to USB4 will ever match the latency of PS/2 connection for an input device, but a PS/2 port delivers around 7-12 kiloBITS/second of throughput vs USB4 delivering up to 120Gbps and a /minimum/ of 20 gigabits/second of throughput. PS/2 uses blocking direct hardware interrupts for input devices, vs asynchronous polling on USB. This architectural difference will never allow for USB to match PS/2 latency, regardless how "fast" USB gets.
This tradeoff is leaning more and more towards throughput everywhere you look. Just today, the new M5 Ultra is announced w/ 1.2TBs/ of memory bandwidth. The M5 Max had 14ns of memory latency while high-performance DDR4/DDR5 typically achieves 8-9ns of latency. That's 36% more latency (conservatively), but nearly 10x the throughput. When you stack up small changes like this at every layer of the system, including in our overreliance on micro services and networked data I/O vs local data in applications, and it adds up. There are so many places in modern software where there is some network connection required for something that could have been achieved without that connection, and waiting on that connection consumes a huge amount of wait time relative to the total time for the operation, and we all feel it.
I think this post deserves a more in-depth discussion around the topic, I'd love to learn more.
Did you try to disable animations? There's an option in the developers settings.
Yeah, it is a really weird one. Especially iOS is optimized to the gills, there is no real desktop running to speak of and app developers care just a little more than on Android, yet somehow an iPhone can't keep a few apps in memory, yet a MacBook Neo with 8GB RAM does just fine with multiple chunky desktop (often Electron) applications in memory, along with macOS itself being more chunky.
So true and SO annoying.
I have been away from Android for a while, is it any better there?
Less optimized, but for the same or less money you get 4-12GB more. Apple can't optimize away that gap.
Androids launched ≥2026 got a serious haircut in either memory or other features though. We'll see in 2028.
I replaced my Pixel 2a with an SE3 when the pixel stopped getting security updates and have been pretty disappointed with the iPhone’s performance. The battery life out of the box was worse than the 5 year old Pixel, and I regularly notice apps getting killed and loosing my place when I tab away.
Maybe if you want to use all of the big mainstream apps the experience might be different, but I tend to have a fairly minimal setup on my phone. On android I would disable animations, use Nova launcher, Firefox with UBO, and a bunch of fdroid apps. This all added up to a very snappy and efficient system that I haven’t been able to replicate on iOS.
I'm really struggling to think of a time I've been disappointed in the performance of my Pixel 8 but I don't ask a ton of it
Features expand to fill all available hardware. Both the OS and apps got more features, got more flashy, got more complicated. If you were able to run those old original apps, they would likely be VERY fast on your newer device.
There was a noticeable degradation after the introduction of “liquid glass”. Of course I’m still on my 13 mini so I don’t think they really care about how changes impact the performance and battery life of my phone.
Devs pay attention to, and optimise, anything that is painfully slow in their test environment. That’s why we need to test stuff on slow hardware.
However a dev on fast hardware can still run profiles, and the fast hardware decreases the change/build/test cycle by more than enough to make it worthwhile.
The only use of a slow machine is it gives a point where you can say more optimization isn't worth it. Everything else I can do better on a fast machine than a slow machine.
The fast machine lacks the most important element: the incentive to do optimizations in the first place.
It lacks one inventive. There are many incentives. Many developers love making things faster. Many developers get feedback from users which is itself incentive. Many projects track performance and that provides incentive. Many developers have a boss who cares about such things (this is the least likely of the above).
Some devs. To think most or even half of all devs do this is a bit overly optomistic.
> So I can only assume codebases became more bloated, websites became more heavy on resources.
If we assume this is true, it at least meant if you didn't upgrade you'd get even worse performance.
decreasing perf makes stomaching OS upgrades hard… I can’t remember a time I didn’t resent having to do a major version bump of my OS.
I am pretty sure that's a feature, not a problem. The idea of these chips is to rush to idle on webpage-like workloads, and then otherwise use as little idle power as possible. Games and heavy work are generally not the intended workload.
While the other comments are correct to point out that majority of mobile workloads are rush to completion, many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones. This is exactly why the newer SoCs are so interesting- that they can deliver more performance for the same power consumption. (Directly increasing run time and decreasing heating)
> many users (especially in China) still do a lot of heavy gaming on their phones
I think most children prefer to play on phones these days. Mobile gaming is huge. To the point where game loops on high-end games are optimized around thermal throttling.
Imagine they make a MacBook Neo Xiaomi version. That would solve the form factor problem.
What OS though?
Aluminium
The browser can sometimes idle a lot until there is a touch/scroll event so it can be good for responsiveness during that kind of bursty stuff too.
Some Linux?
aka how >95% of the users actually use phones (me including), this is enough for most
> The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle.
I think this is a trait of all chips. As a general rule of thumb, both desktop chips and graphics cards come with a huge and noisy fan. Demand for aftermarket solutions is so great that it spawned quite a few specialized companies.
How many high-end laptops ship with at least one fan?
Any chip that isn't cooled is going to heat up and throttle or just shut off in seconds. The point is that mobile devices have a peak performance that you don't really get because you can't cool them enough.
Desktops can have plenty of cooling so you actually get the real speed of whatever you are using.
You said it. It was over 100 F here where I live, and I was on my phone outside trying to get work done while watching my kid, and I couldn't even type because of the thermal throttling triggered just by it being so damn hot outside.
A few years ago I decided I was going to get some fresh air by going and working on the (south-facing) deck. Put my phone and drink outside, went back to get my laptop, brought it outside.
Outside was too bright for me to see my laptop screen even at full brightness, but by the time I had it outside and had discovered that my phone had overheated so much it refused to turn on until it cooled down.
At least my drink was still cold.
Solar radiation.
Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.
> This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.
And good news for everyone else.
Yes and no. Having more competition in the space is excellent news. However I am sad that the world interdependence is eroding as most other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country.
Xiaomi's Xring O3 is manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [1]
MediaTek Dimensity 9500 is also manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [2]
There was no world interdependence change (unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries).
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-launches-XRing-O3-claim...
[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaTek-Dimensity-9500-Proces...
> unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries
The fact that the CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan might suggest that the CCP considers that it can make China and Taiwan one country, at a time of the CCP's choosing.
I've lived in Taiwan for a large part of my life.
They would lose all of TSMC if they do any military actions. It's not the fact that the CCP thinks that they can make Taiwan and China a country, it's the the fact that most of China does in fact consider them as one country. Taiwan is ready to defend themselves, but are very happy keeping their relationship with China the way it is.
"Very happy" is a bit of a stretch, since a significant proportion of Taiwan would prefer to jettison the current pretence of being "One China" and become fully independent.
But I agree that pretty much everybody will happily take the status quo over armed invasion.
I have a friend in Taiwan and he told me they're pretty happy because they have independence this way. If they go for more international recognition etc they'll gain nothing they don't already have but they'll upset the balance and give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.
And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.
I've only visited Taiwan once and I only have one friend there so perhaps what I'm hearing is not accurate.
having lived in Taiwan for a year. that's the sentiment of majority of the population - they want to maintain the status quo.
>sympathetic with the Chinese
and related to, with all that holds in an Eastern mindset. My adoptive grandmother was born in Shanghai in 1927. To my knowledge she never returned to Mainland China, partially because her relatives wen Telswhere when the communists came in.
edit: fixed one errant `t`
> give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.
CCP is not threatening taiwan because it might go for independence. it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific. because of that, it is never about what people in Taiwan believe/say/do.
It is only about the military balance of the west Pacific.
> And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.
sympathetic of what?
20 years ago, you might be able to play the "CCP regime repressing the people in China" joke, you can't do it anymore especially in such topic of Taiwan. quality of life is significantly better in literally every aspect in China. Taipei in 2026 is getting more and more like a tier-3 Chinese city in 2016.
> it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific
I think you are underestimating Chinese nationalism here quite dramatically!
Chinese views of sovereignty are quite independent of other concerns. Take for example their actions against Vietnam in the South China Sea, forcing Vietnam closer to the Philippines and even the US: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
It seems to be about much more than just regional power. To China it's a matter of pride and it's a big factor in the century of humiliation.
Even when a country other than the US does something to benefit Taiwan, Beijing is super offended.
And by sympathetic I mean feeling kinship. And the whole concept of bringing everything down to a matter of wealth is so American.
> And the whole concept of bringing everything down to a matter of wealth is so American.
They said "quality of life". Even if they had said wealth that correlates with quality of life so that wouldn't be a very good gotcha by itself, but they didn't say that.
But calling Taipei a "Tier-3" city does refer to economic prowess, that's what I mean.
If you like to say what you think, then trust me, Taipei has much better quality of life. If you see people like Naomi Wu being arrested and gagged just for pointing out a vulnerability in software (which we all agree here is a good thing to do for everyone except the bad guys), that is terrible.
> it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific.
Hardly. It is all about Xi having declared that taking Taiwan by... I think it was 2049, but could be misremembering. Anyway, Xi made that a test of the legitimacy of the CCP, in some very public statements.
So, no, it's not about kicking the US out of the west Pacific. It's about Taiwan, and it's because if they don't, the CCP is illegitimate, by Xi's own word.
By 2023 Xi ordered the Chinese military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.
But that doesn't mean they plan to invade Taiwan by then. One common reading of it is that it was a plan to build up the military to that state with a definite goal date (in the same way the "600 ship navy" plan had a goal date).
https://www.reuters.com/world/cia-chief-says-chinas-xi-littl...
Xi will not be in power in 2049 because he will be dead. He'd be 96yo.
Countries often set goals beyond the lifetimes of the current leaders.
The point is that the goal is far enough into the future that the person making it can't be held accountable for failing to meet it.
If Xi had said "the CCP is illegitimate unless it takes Taiwan by 2025", he would be at real risk of being replaced in 2026. Anyone who opposed him (or just wanted power) would have a perfect reason to replace him.
When Xi makes a goal with a "deadline" he won't live to see, he takes no risk of personally failing to meet the goal. If his successor misses the deadline, he can say things changed, Xi failed to consider factors X,Y,Z, etc.
> If his successor misses the deadline, he can say things changed, Xi failed to consider factors X,Y,Z, etc.
That's not how the CCP operates though.
They are not a country where the puppets matter so much, like in most of the western countries. You would very very rarely see a leader being critical of their predecessor even if they are changing policies (which Xi Jinping definitely did). Because they are the same party and thus they are attacking themselves. The party is really more important than whoever happens to be at the top. The party is always right. Even when the party is wrong. Which it is not because it's always right.
No, if this promise disappears it will be silently. Never to be mentioned again, or else. It just never happened.
Considering all said so far, and events, it perhaps hardly makes real difference in the diamond era's franchised world.
Not only a few people in and from Taiwan use every chance they get to shit talk the mainland. Be it snark about using simplified characters, or be it trying to prevent their own citizens from taking part in celebrations of victory over fascism. Main theme is being against the mainland, no matter what. They are also very influenced by Japan, whose right wing PM has escalated outrage more than enough recently.
Certainly, somewhat understandable, given the "military exercises" at the doorstep happening every now and then, but also escalatory and idiotically not a good look either. Some of it is just spewed hatred, not taking a high lane when it comes to ethics.
Isn't there some kind of "if you invade us we bomb our strategic factories" strategy? Like "if we can't have them, nobody can"?
I think the plan is to defend, with allies motivated by the goal of saving TSMC facilities. If you destroy them the moment China declares war, Taiwanese allies might be much less invested
But at the same time everyone understands that the Taiwanese would destroy the facilities before they fall into Chinese hands
If both those are true, then shouldn't we expect China to destroy them as part of first offensive?
Ideally every side would prefer a complete victory... who wouldn't? Reality rarely offers such clear outcomes.
Effectively the semantics are like a game of chicken and hostage combined. Might as well be a Prisoner's Dilemma.
its not official public policy, but there have been people in the US government saying that if there is a war then the US will bomb tsmc facilities in taiwan
Why would China care if Taiwan blows up its fabs?
The talent is still there, so they could rebuild, or recruit the talent to work for Chinese mainland fabs instead?
We are talking about facilities that are extremely complex and expensive to build, to the point that only a very small handful of locations in the world exist today - despite their massive economic value.
TSMC is not something you can rebuild with some brains in front of laptops.
> The talent is still there, so they could rebuild, or recruit the talent to work for Chinese mainland fabs instead?
Would you voluntarily work in a country that invaded and taken over yours?
Would you ask the same about Russia recruiting Ukrainians?
Not everyone is affected by propaganda, either US/Taiwanese or Chinese one.
Some are.
Some people also want to feed their families and not be unemployed.
P.S. A large number of Ukrainians moved to Russia. Including the ones who wanted to reunite with their relatives. Taiwanese have a lot of relatives on the mainland as well.
> A large number of Ukrainians moved to Russia
Citation very much needed.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_refugee_crisis
2. https://data.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/117204 - 1.2 million.
> *As of mid-June 2023 an estimated 1.2 million Ukrainians were recorded in the Russian Federation under different legal forms of stay (other than refugee or temporary asylum status)
This means people that have Ukrainian citizenship, which includes lots of families that were on both sides of the border. It does not mean people who were residents of Ukraine before the war, and decided to move to Russia. It does include the kidnapped children, and surviving people in occupied cities.
wouldn't it be more likely that they'd flee to e.g. the US which would poach them and shower them with money?
maybe easier said than done but still
Can't flee if your island is encircled and shooting down airplanes. China's military drills are executing exactly this.
The US could do this TODAY. Just saying.
The US cannot offer lots of money to chip fab refugees today, because they are not refugees. Trying to headhunt people at a high quality job is very different.
The pay might not be as good but they could also go to Europe. Might depend where they've got family / contacts.
Part of the reason a Chinese invasion of Taiwan seems more realistic is Trump being a sycophant towards any dictator who will give him the time of day, including Xi Jinping.
It's not impossible, but I feel as though if Trump decides that China is friends and Taiwan is enemies (as he seems to have done with North/South Korea lately) then Taiwanese refugees might not be as eager to move to the US as, say, Canada, Australia, or Europe.
Let's say they execute that plan. What then? Would it win them anything?
The whole point of the plan is to remove some of the incentive for an invasion, thus making it less likely.
I think you're missing what I'm getting at. Yes, I understand that part. But do you seriously think that if TSMC was destroyed right now, China would change its decision to invade Taiwan? Can you imagine what the actual consequences of executing that plan would be?
> I've lived in Taiwan for a large part of my life.
Sounds like you've been fed the US anti-China propaganda for the large part of your life as well.
_China doesn't need to invade Taiwan_
1. 50%+ of Taiwan's workforce are white-collar workers [0].
2. There are 3-4 major underwater internet communication hubs in Taiwan [1].
3. There is a substantial opposition in Taiwan that want reunification (~20% of population support directly Li-Wun) [2].
4. China is close to producing industry-grade EUV [3].
China just can:
* Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang.
* Cut underwater internet cables in those 3 locations.
* Achieve EUV.
They won't need TSMC soon, and with the blockade they can show the world that TSMC is not a reliable supplier.
Within months the political structure of Taiwan is going to crumble, as white-collar workers lose their jobs.
[0] https://www.cbc.gov.tw/dl-215893-af39cb14b0044d1cb05a60864ec...
[1] https://cablegraph.com/
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3350271/xi-...
[3] https://asiatimes.com/2025/12/made-in-china-euv-machine-targ...
> Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang.
I would not want to be maintaining a long-term naval blockade while constantly looking over my shoulder worrying about surprise attacks. Everyone knows where you are, and it would give plenty of time for a counter offensive to be planned. The US has something like 50 attack submarines, and a surprise attack from all of them at once would be a nightmare scenario for any fleet.
In the era of drones and missiles having your navy tied down in a blockade like that makes it all the more vulnerable.
US had all of that and still was unable to do anything meaningful around Hormuz.
US had 10,000 miles of power projection, while China prepared for 100 miles of it for the past 20 years, come on. The answer is EUV alternative that would render TSMC useless.
I understand that majority of people here cannot see the bigger picture, by design.
> _China doesn't need to invade Taiwan_
Russia didn't need to invade Ukraine either.
But nonetheless China is clearly preparing itself to be ready to be able to invade, with aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships, dual purpose roll-on/roll-off carriers. It doesn't mean it will, but that it wants to be able to.
So basically it will depend on a single dictator's whim if they do or don't.
> Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang
Which would be considered an act of war, so it's the same scenario again.
> There is a substantial opposition in Taiwan that want reunification (~20% of population support directly Li-Wun)
20% is more than the % of people in the Donbass that wanted unification with Russia, and we can see how well that went. And it wasn't a dangerous amphibious assault against an island with shit terrain.
> Russia didn't need to invade Ukraine either.
Arguable, they had to after the 2008 Buharest NATO summit and Ukraine's militarization going forward, and eradication of Russian language and Russian-speaking population in the east.
> Which would be considered an act of war, so it's the same scenario again.
China considers Taiwan their territory, who is there to protect Taiwan? US?
>20% is more than the % of people in the Donbass that wanted unification with Russia
20% plus part of those white-collar workers who are a backbone of the Taiwan's economy and politics and can be left jobless after China achieves EUV and puts TSMC out of monopoly.
Let's be real. Trump demanded TSMC to invest 100B into US factories and they complied [0].
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/03/tsmc-to-announce-100-billion...
> Arguable, they had to after the 2008 Buharest NATO summit
How dare the countries threatened by Russia, who had seen how Russia invaded and brutalised multiple countries - Moldova, Checnya, Georgia twice - seek protection from Russia. This totally excuses Russia invading and brutalising again, of course.
> Ukraine's militarization going forward
The country was literally invaded (Crimea and Donbass), what the hell did you or the idiots in the Kremlin expect? That it will just sit and allow Russia to take more of its territory unopposed? That it will become a pliant vassal state again?
> eradication of Russian language and Russian-speaking population in the east
Such eradication that the country elected a Russian speaker to be president, on a platform of reconciliation with Russia. So much so, that his opposition called him a Russian puppet. That guy is Zelenskyy.
I'm sorry, but you're either out of your mind, or have been completely brainwashed. Russia chose to invade multiple of its neighbours, and did unspeakable atrocities every time. The only one to fault for all of this, and everyone around them seeking protection from this, is them. This imperialist nonsense brutality does not belong in the 21st century, and neither does its apologia. And no, I don't care about the whataboutism you're preparing to "defend" these actions with, it's beyond irrelevant. It's what the Russian state has been about since it came into being out of the ruins of the USSR. We should have never treated them as anything else.
> How dare the countries threatened by Russia, who had seen how Russia invaded and brutalised multiple countries - Moldova, Checnya, Georgia twice - seek protection from Russia. This totally excuses Russia invading and brutalising again, of course.
That's literally a copy-paste from propaganda pamphlet. Can you back it up?
> The country was literally invaded
You seem to forget the amount of killings Ukraine did there and why it started in the first place.
Why should I discuss that with a person who seems to be unaware of facts?
> That's literally a copy-paste from propaganda pamphlet. Can you back it up?
Back what up? That Russia invaded and destroyed Chechnya? Or Georgia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Chechen_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Chechen_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1999%E2%80%9...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War
What exactly do you want backed up? That countries across Eastern Europe saw how the russians operate and decided they don't want to be destroyed?
> You seem to forget the amount of killings Ukraine did there and why it started in the first place.
What killings did Ukraine make that resulted in russia invading Crimea? Or russia starting the invasion of the Donbass? MH17 maybe? Oh no, wait, that was the russians too.
> _China doesn't need to invade Taiwan._
All your points consider what China can do but not how others would respond. Blocking Taiwan when the whole AI economy is running on it will invoke lots of countries to go up in arms. There was a quote from US military that it'd cost less to fight than watch Taiwan fall (invasion or not).
> 4. China is close to producing industry-grade EUV
No where near close. At least not production grade at massive scale.
> * Establish a total naval and air blockade of Taiwan using their fleets stationed in Ningbo and Zhanjiang.
Doesn't work. If they do that the US, JP and others can also blockade around Shanghai, Hong Kong and the other ports.
> They won't need TSMC soon
Taiwan is not just TSMC. There are thousands to millions of things involving Taiwan you're likely not aware of and they might not even be AI or semi related.
> All your points consider what China can do but not how others would respond.
US backed off last year when there were talks about protecting Taiwan. They pulled Patriot missiles from Taiwan and South Korea too.
China and Japan have a beef. Considering the atrocities Japan did in China, the conversation won't be friendly.
None of these are good for Taiwan, during the times when its political system is failing.
> No where near close. At least not production grade at massive scale.
It looks like you have knowledge of the status of that super-secret government project. Can you share some details then?
> Doesn't work. If they do that the US, JP and others can also blockade around Shanghai, Hong Kong and the other ports.
US cannot blockade Hormuz, as we've seen. JP cannot do that with their current constitution unless they change it (the current government is on the road to it, though).
What we've also seen is that Chinese fishing fleet had a military blockade exercise [0].
> Taiwan is not just TSMC. There are thousands to millions of things involving Taiwan you're likely not aware of and they might not even be AI or semi related.
All is around semiconductors.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/16/world/asia/ch...
>US backed off last year when there were talks about protecting Taiwan. They pulled Patriot missiles from Taiwan and South Korea too.
>US cannot blockade Hormuz, as we've seen. JP cannot do that with their current constitution unless they change it (the current government is on the road to it, though).
If China really wants to fuck with Taiwan, they had better do it soon while the most incompetent US administration ever to hold office is still there. Because there is change coming to the US and the next president isn't likely to be such a complete moron.
> Because there is change coming to the US and the next president isn't likely to be such a complete moron.
All past elections prove you otherwise.
If you honestly think that, then you are not paying attention, or you're just a typical troll.
Everybody always forgets George Bush for some reason
Maybe you are? Because so far, I backed up my opinion about China vs Taiwan with facts. And you backed up yours with wishes.
>All past elections prove you otherwise.
This is not a fact. This is bullshit trolling.
This pointless internet interaction is over.
As a resident of Taiwan, would you say the average person there is comfortable obeying a strong central government, whoever that currently is?
As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.
As an American, what are ways in which you can not defer to an authority - in a way that actually matters? Sure, you can choose to go outside dressed in gaudy colors, or not dressed at all if you are in SF. Or choose to flip the Democrat/Republican bit once every 4 years (usually without any effect on domestic or foreign policy, though not lately). But in a regular person's life, what authority do you want to opt out of? The average person can't do a thing about their HOA board, let alone a government representative.
> As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.
Are schoolchildren in the US still required to recite the pledge of allegiance...?
No, children can not be forced to stand and recite the pledge.
The Supreme Court ruled, in 1943, that it is unconstitutional to compel students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/319/624.h...
Required, no.
Strongly pressured, yes.
Really? Surely it can't be unfamiliar at least. So many GOPs anxiously mentioning Dear Leader every chance they get.
> They would lose all of TSMC if they do any military actions.
How is that?
Is there an action movie style self destruct sequence?
Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40441650 "TSMC EUV machines equipped with remote self-destruct in case of invasion"
Seems like a risky move - they found just fein invasion, let them nerf their entire economy and then just go home.
A few employees with sledge hammers would be enough. These are rather delicate machines.
To render inoperable sure, but invaders would surely be able to suss out some of their secrets from the remains.
I would suggest industrial espionage and luring away employees instead of invasion, if you are after secrets.
> To render inoperable sure, but invaders would surely be able to suss out some of their secrets from the remains.
Yes, but I have a suspicion the Taiwanese plans are a bit more involved than my sledge hammer idea.
What are you gonna do the day they don't need tsmc anymore
My bet would be that invasion wouldn't look like quick war, but slow control of political power either through light force like economic blackmail, or through something similar to what US did with Venezuela.
Now that US has already opened the gate to labelling nation head as drug seller, this just eases things for China.
Also the US has very publicly shown they don’t have the ability to effectively wage war over any period of time.
Yes and no. The Iran war is deeply unpopular and won’t even pass congressional approval for money. It’s being fought from pocket change budgets because they know they can’t pass a funding bill for it. Also not the same kind of war.
Any period time? US waged war for 20+ years in Afghanistan. Pretty effectively! To what end? Not an end an army can really achieve so… there you are.
But a war that might actually be popular? To save the world from communist dictators and make sure we have chips for our precious devices? I wouldn’t count out the United States. Or nuclear weapons, which still exist and are a thing.
> US waged war for 20+ years in Afghanistan
That was an occupation and a low intensity “pacification” mission. Waging a prolonged war against a military peer on the other side of the continent is a bit more problematic (considering that US is/was on the brink of running out of advanced weaponry in Iran despite having aerial superiority which they won’t over Taiwan, Japan would have to get involved as well cause otherwise US would have to entirely rely on the fragile carrier fleet).
Using tactical nukes (even regardless of the extreme geopolitical downsides that might bring) wouldn’t necessarily give a great tactical advantage either, unless they are willing to do that over Taiwan itself to destroy the landing forces).
Ah yeah that $1T a year for the last forever is just pocket change
And it'd be the kind of war the US is best at. Boots on the ground, against conventional military, with a civilian population that is on the side of the US forces
No guerilla warfare, no insurgents, no need for extended beyond-visual-range warfare that depletes missile stockpiles
> no need for extended beyond-visual-range warfare that depletes missile stockpiles
Was with you until that last one. If you haven't noticed missiles, drones, and interceptors have played a central role in ukraine.
> against conventional military,
Last time used faced a conventional military that could actually challenge it was in Korea.
It won’t have complete areal superiority or entire division surrendering after running into contact with US forces like they in Iraq. “Shock and awe” of course can be very effective just probably not against China. Even now US is running out of materiel against Iran and can’t really sustain a prolonged intense conflict while being able to protect its gulf allies from ballistic missiles and drones.
Iran is not a war funded by congress, so it's really no wonder the US appears inneffective. Trump didn't get the support he thought he would from congress and now he's flailing around trying to save face.
Change the leadership (which will happen soon) and when there is actual support from congress to fund and intervene in a conflict in Taiwan, then you will see a vastly different US military response.
How many boots on the ground could you get and how quickly/safely? The supposed opposition here is MUCH closer to the island.
The war over Taiwan wouldn't be done by soldiers on Taiwanese soil. So you wouldn't need many boots on the ground in a literal sense.
But if you mean in a metaphorical sense, how long until the 7th Fleet could get to Taiwan, the answer is 0 days for first response, 3 days for everything located in Japan, and less than a week for the full mobilization of the 7th Fleet (that's 50+ ships and nearly 30K soldiers). The entire Pacific fleet could be there in a week and a half.
(Granted, we're assuming competent US leadership, which is not the current administration.)
just a gut feeling, but if they had to for some reason, I feel like they'd just go in and bomb as much strategic assets and invade, because in their eyes aside from Taiwan, there isn't much left to "unify" and it'd be historic, not something they'd need to do every decade or even century
I feel like Russia thought the same of Ukraine, even though it is way bigger
Any country that competently adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently. And that's for a continental invasion.
Taiwan? All surface ships are sitting ducks. Troop transport ships would get absolutely decimated, and then the landing troops would get swarmed by drones all over again, and then they have to maintain logistics to the small minority that land (good luck with that). And that's without naval drones.
With naval drones? I have no idea how China gets anything across the strait.
And all the above is true for a competently organized Chinese invasion. Which it won't be.
> adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently
The tactical situation in Taiwan is very different though. I think it would come down more to what’s happening in the air since the stalemate in Ukraine is in large because the Russian airforce is almost completely neutralized and can only be used to launch cruise missiles from a safe distance. I doubt China would invade unless they feel they can somehow achieve at least temporary air superiority and achieve their other objectives during that period.
Air defenses are probably much more important than drones overall.
That's why I said it will be slow. I think it will be decades long political control, not a military invasion.
China have more credible threat of bombing economically relevant building like TSMC, or capturing leaders and protestors like they already are doing in Hong Kong.
> CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan
This whole idea of collapsing everything to some single semi-military geo-political concern is naive and not at all how the world works.
Of course there are people in China who would prefer Xiaomi did all their manufacturing inside China, and there are others who prefer to build stronger economic ties between Taiwan and China to make Taiwan economically dependent on China.
There are others who want Xiaomi to dominate world mobile markets by any means necessary. There are others who want Xiaomi to make the most profit possible, and still others who want Chinese firms to race to match US companies technology on every dimension.
These concerns are all interlinked and play out over years in lots of micro decisions.
> The fact that the CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan might suggest that the CCP considers that it can make China and Taiwan one country, at a time of the CCP's choosing.
I'm not so sure. I would say that perhaps it's an indication that the CCP is ok with the status quo.
The PR Chinese might be able to take Taiwan's land, but they can't conceivable take Taiwan's economy, at least not by force.
That act could throw us all back into the dark ages, though.
They already consider it as one country. The CCP sees Taiwan as a province of China.
Or mainland China is occupied west Taiwan.
And the US is occupied west Britain?
“West Taiwan”? Why not just say ROC instead of inventing nonsense names..
They're intentional about economic integration because it will in theory make unification easier without a war.
Its the opposite
China isn’t going to invade China until after we get our semiconductors up and running in Arizona for real
(because US won’t have to think about that situation ever again)
removing dependence imperils that island, CCP already has an EUV machine so the inevitable sanctions and export controls on ASML’s in Europe won’t matter either
It technically does not matter today. Sure the SOTA fabs only exist in a few places, but it’s not like a 2010/2015/2020 era chip is unusable trash. All of which are more geographically distributed.
For any critical workload a chip is considered trash after 5-7 years. They still run , of course, but increased incidents on platforms that are supposed to be 99.99 are hard to work with. Now if you mean there’s unused stock of those , that would maybe work, but I am not aware of significant unused stocks.
I am talking about making new chips on older nodes. If China can only build 7nm, but TSMC is at 3nm, that’s unfortunate, but they will survive.
I agree, a move on Taiwan sets semiconductor industry back like 5 years at this point, down from what I’d say was 10 just last year
yeah equity asset values are going to tank but US will get serious about the supply chain immediately (which is already very much in progress), plus all the older nodes to alleviate some pressure off of the active compute demands
China and Taiwan are considered one country, even according to US https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12503
How do you make one country into one country? It's already one country and is treated as such by even countries that consider China an adversary
> China and Taiwan are considered one country, even according to US
Your link does not say what you think it does. My guess is you read the first sentence and saw "one-China police" and stopped. But the US's one-China policy is not the same thing as China's one-China principle.
The US's one-China policy is that (continental) China is a single China governed by the PRC. It's silent on Taiwan. But, considering the laws we have on the books declaring our commitment to ensuring the sovereignty of Taiwan, it's a hard row to hoe to get to "the US considers Taiwan to be territory the PRC has a right to control."
The US has an unofficial relationship with Taiwan simply to shut the CCP up. It's like when your partner is complaining about something you did, silence doesn't mean you agree that you messed up. Sometimes it just means you don't want a fight right now.
> The US's one-China policy is that (continental) China is a single China governed by the PRC. It's silent on Taiwan
Oh really?
https://2021-2025.state.gov/countries-areas/taiwan/
>The 1979 U.S.-P.R.C. Joint Communique switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. In the Joint Communique, the U.S. recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, acknowledging the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.
https://2021-2025.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/
>The United States approach to Taiwan has remained consistent across decades and administrations. The United States has a longstanding one China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three U.S.-China Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; we do not support Taiwan independence
Doesn't sound like silence to me.
>But, considering the laws we have on the books declaring our commitment to ensuring the sovereignty of Taiwan, it's a hard row to hoe to get to "the US considers Taiwan to be territory the PRC has a right to control."
You're moving the goal posts. Sovereignty isn't the same as being a country. States in the US have some sovereignty and their own governance and international relations too, but it wouldn't be correct to say that the US consists of 50 independent countries.
Also, using the word right sounds a bit like muddying the waters. You could argue the United States government doesn't have the right to control their land, as it has been stolen from the indigenous people. But that doesn't mean United States is not an independent country that controls the area within its borders.
MediaTek is a Taiwanese company. Xiaomi could put any backdoor that the government tell them to install and TSMC won't be able to catch that.
I'm unaware of any actual hardware backdoors introduced by primary manufacturers in practice, especially those installed in Xiaomi hardware.
There are accounts of interdiction and post-manufacturing compromises, such as those revealed in the Snowden leaks (2013) and most recently by reporting about the Israeli security services' sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and 2-way radios. These projects didn't expose primary manufacturers to the reputational and legal risk of association.
Until there's evidence of backdoors implanted by these companies, it's better to adopt a "trust but verify" approach and use standard layered security practices to detect intrusion. Conventional network intrusion and insider threat campaigns carry less risk of failure and are simpler and cheaper to execute.
Intel management engine
“It’s not a vulnerability, it’s a feature!”
What would you consider as good evidence of a backdoor? Apple got plenty of media coverup for their part in Operation Triangulation, and even hardware experts were defending it as a fuckup rather than a backdoor, providing it with great plausible deniability. Do you count it as evidence? If not, I can easily see any other company leaving these non-backdoors in their hardware with no damage to their reputation.
I'm only aware of some software backdoors in Chinese devices, but times when you could've reverse engineered a chip with microscope are long gone. If there are any it would be really difficult to find them.
Everyone relax. This guy on the Internet is unaware of any.
And are you aware of any? If nobody can find evidence then it's probably not a widespread risk.
Are you certain I'm a guy? I could be a particularly well-trained dog.
Do you say the same about Intel, Amd, etc. or is it only big bad China?
There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things - starting with clipper. Pushback is not always successful - but it's far more transparent then China.
Are there any documented cases of backdoors being present in Chinese hardware at time of manufacturing?
Probably, but you are asking the wrong question: Is it legal to produce non-backdoored networked devices or services in China?
The answer to that question in the US is within epsilon of “no” thanks to the cloud act.
Europe and China have passed similar laws. However, China has a reputation for passing laws then selectively enforcing them. Maybe if you get on the right side of the right party member, the answer might still be “Yes” there.
Anyway, the next question to ask is: Who would I rather backdoor my device?
I doubt the Chinese government cares much about me, and unless I vacation there it’s an international incident if they, say, hack my car and murder me by aiming it at a tree at 95mph, like the CIA apparently does now:
https://www.motor1.com/news/138679/wikileaks-claim-cia-hack-...
Of course, the US government banned cars from China. Presumably this is because they do not have the mandated remote murder network port open, or, if they do, the US doesn’t have the necessary permissions to access it.
Two just this year, CVE-2026-66747 and CVE-2026-11405.
Those are both great examples. I think this doesn't obliterate my point, though it weakens it. The manufacturer in CVE-2026-11405 is already out of business, and the one in CVE-2026-66747 is unlikely to continue as a going concern.
Would Xiaomi or the CCP accept the reputational and legal risk of getting caught with a backdoor? Recall the CCP considered the arrest of the Huawei executive in Canada as an offense against itself.
>There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things
A bit of selective memory necessary for that take given good old Crypto AG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
Too many propoganda leads to expressions like yours. Sorry your story has zero foundation and is fox news quality.
Like a stopped clock, Fox News is right once or twice a day.
For instance election tampering in the US is a well-documented thing: However it almost always favors republicans in districts with electronic voting machines that do not generate paper trails.
As for the person you are replying to, their claims have been documented by most media outlets, places like wikileaks, and their claims are backed by US legal requirements to backdoor stuff (like the US Cloud act).
My opinion about Trump is as bad as the next guy's, but we still have better relation with the USA than with China. And it's not like we have much choice.
There are already American backdoors on intel and AMD chips everywhere, we call them ME and PSP. Switching to chinese tech won't make it worse.
Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.
> Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.
Why would they not do the same? They are very pro-surveillance for a start.
Hopefully the same pushback that has so far stopped the worst of chat control would help. But even if not having more western alternatives would be very welcome. If you're in the US it may not resonate with you, but as a Canadian currently reading ongoing rhetoric about being annexed by the US I'd love to have options if things continue to go south with the status quo.
It's good to be skeptical about how we implement the idea of a "root of trust" in these machines, but matter-of-factly characterizing ME and PSP as "backdoor" is misleading and not useful.
After xkeyscore and prism, it would be naive to say otherwise.
They are backdoors, with not even very good plausible deniability.
It's so on the nose it's comical.
TSMC doesn't care what you put in your CPUs. Apple could tell them they want to build a CPU where 90% of the transistor footprint is for a new CIA Engine that takes pictures of your feet every three seconds to trace where you've been from the smell and TSMC's response would be "how many wafers do you want?".
I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
When we buy software from Silicon Valley or a nice Mercedes Benz from Germany we don’t use this same language “outsourcing.”
Colloquially, outsourcing implies low quality or cheap price. No, what’s happening here is that China makes the best products in numerous categories and we are choosing to import them, because the best products are the most desirable.
The west is interested in funneling most of the money to the top no matter what for the last 60 years that has been the drum beat/cry It can’t be done. It can’t be done.
In America, there is one fast food place that does it differently than everyone in the market they don’t franchise and they don’t lease/rent.
They own everything as they expand (the land and the building), which means it’s a little bit slower when you expand, but they don’t care but they are very profitable.
The owner probably gets a call every other week from large equity companies trying to sell them on doing it like everybody else and their pitch they can make you a worldwide company if you just let them in to f you.
The tension is killing me… who is the fast food joint?
I'm guessing Chick-Fil-A?
CFA franchises, but their program is very strict and requires an unusually high amount of upfront capital
Can't be them because they franchise. My guess is In-N-Out
Who is the fast food place?
Well at this point they are probably the only country in the world that can produce a car end to end starting from the raw iron ore and other elements up to the chips and software that runs on them (I’m sure they will still need to import some small stuff probably like Rhodium or Iridium maybe), who is going to compete with that? Everything done in country, no tariffs at all throughout the entire production cycle.
That said some of these industry especially metallurgical ones will never return to Europe or US as they basically destroy and pollute the environment on a large scale, in China that still seems acceptable but also might change promoting them to outsource to other countries which they already do in some areas I think.
I find it quite strange en people take a development that has happened over the last ~50 years, little more than half a lifetime, and confidently state that now "it will always stay like this". Things always change.
Imagine what those kinds of people would have said in China in the 70s, with western industries being vastly more advanced and efficient. "It's over, we will never catch up." they would probably have said. Wrong then, more wrong now.
What are en People?
Thanks, should've been "when"
> China that still seems acceptable
China has made a tremendous effort to move to a clean(er) industrial system, using a lot of renewables and clean energy and improving environmental standards. At this point production in China is probably the best for the environment compared to most countries, including the US that is deeply invested in oil production.
China evidently is pushing to move to sodium ion batteries. They didn’t have to. They could’ve stuck with lithium. I’ll let you guess what what would’ve happened in the United States they would’ve said we don’t have to this lithium already works. Why do you want to upset the Apple Cart.
They are also moving close to a point where they will bring Thorium Reactors on line they don’t have to. They could just stick with uranium, but they’re not.
Is this part of the fact that they have engineers running a lot of of the things at the top of their government instead of lawyers?
They seem to be building a lot of infrastructure they are in the process of building several dams on the Brahmaputra River.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station
It does seem that China is run by engineers who like to build cool stuff.
United States: 384 gCO2/kWh
China: 525 gCO2/kWh
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
But we do have to consider how the speed in which it is dropping. China uses about the same percentage of fossil fuels for energy production as the US right now, but more of it is coal so it is dirtier. However they are aggressively installing and promoting renewables and nuclear power, built themselves, and their pollution standards are rapidly increasing. While in the US renewable and nuclear investment is and has been pretty crappy.
The fact that China is not that far above the US while being the world's factory and having 4x the population is pretty impressive.
And like you said, China is putting a real effort in. I don't see the US trying to reduce domestic short hop flights with electric high speed rail. I don't see the US trying to replace gasoline cars with EVs. I don't see the US curtailing structural incentivization of pickup trucks and SUVs.
The main US policy seems to be "spend trillions on wars for oil" rather than accepting the inevitable decline of oil and planning around it.
This comparison is meaningless because China is the worlds factory (including a major portion of what's consumed in the US ). So that CO2 number is their populations usage plus what's required to manufacture good for the most of the world. A huge part of US CO2 consumption has been outsourced to China.
I've had my thinking in this area shift, too; I now believe China (and a few other places, like Vietnam) have "won" at manufacturing because their combination of government, cultural values, and the masses of their people from which they draw workers, managers, and owners simply are better at manufacturing than my own country is.
Part of what led me to believe this was waking up and realising they're also simply better at offering LLM inference: cheaper; faster; more innovative.
It's a horse of a very different colour from outsourcing where someone is simply chasing the lowest bidder.
> I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
The media to this day portrays China as if it was 80s. Yes, at that time it was an open-air manufacturing plant. You can run rudimentary floor operations with high school educated workers, but you still need trained engineers and managers to run the operations. Exporting engineers quickly became impractical, which led to local engineers getting trained. At some point the training became the bottleneck so local educators were trained. And so on.
Over the years, China has built the entire industrial pipeline: all the way from education and vocational training, to scientific research, to local engineering houses. Remember, the people who built Shenzen are now retired. Or to put it into perspective, China is currently at roughly similar age of industrial boom as post-WWII USA was in... the late 90s - early 00s.
"The West" had a head start with regards to IP and China is indeed fighting an uphill battle there, but they have a huge domestic market to grow the companies out. The proud "Designed in X, made in China" things are being replaced with white-label "made in China", where "designed in China" is implied.
Do you have a robot vacuum? It's probably Roborock / Dreame / Ecovacs, not even some western branding.
Fair point. Outsourcing was not the right word to use, China today makes products over all quality ranges and almost always they are cheaper than any other alternative. “Giving away” would be a better word.
We leave a large part of the question of where things should be manufactured to the market. If the market decides that the place is China it's probably because they think it's individually beneficial to them, not an act of charity.
“The market” is historically short-sighted and policy makers also can’t see beyond the next election date.
China didn't get that way by magic. They ran the same playbook that allowed Alexander Hamilton to snatch manufacturing from Great Britain to the US, and the US gave up manufacturing for the same reason the UK gave up manufacturing (suppression of labor interests).
It will be interesting to see what China does. They aren't ideologically committed to exclusively serving the interests of the wealthy, but they still have lots of rich people in the (ahem) Communist Party, so who knows.
China and Vietnam are the only countries worldwide which have executed bankers for corruption in recent decades. No ahem necessary.
It's striking that they recently arrested one of the richest men in the country, the Evergrande founder, for fraud. Seems unthinkable in the US/Europe right now.
Some of Evergrande's financial practices were somewhat ponzi-scheme-ish (new sales funded construction of previous buyers), and the US has imprisoned a few such schemers too.
Communists have been executing bankers since day one so not just recent decades, if anyone finds that impressive.
Were they guilty?
The people in China that made the decision on that antifreeze in toothpaste, and the 300 pigs in the river or that graffiti tower in Los Angeles across from the Staples Center. I don’t think those people walked.
That is not to say that in time they’ll start to do many of things that happens in the west where those at the 1% or 2% walk away, in time China may drop down to that level, on the other hand, I would like to believe the United States will start to have the same reaction that the country had when Sputnik went around the Earth and change course and I don’t mean sanctions, tariffs, wars, and threatening neighbors to the north and to the south.
Do you find that far-fetched?
I can't imagine it going any other way than what we've seen from every other country in your set of examples, honestly.
China actually penalizes, imprisons, and even executes its billionaires, so that’s different.
The right way to read this isn't that all billionaires can face consquenecs, but that the line that makes sure you don't face consequences is quite a bit different than being a billionaire. You can still have a power center, and impunity, as long as you make sure your misbehavior doesn't embarrass the people with the actual power. Those are smart enough to not do the things they shouldn't in a way that can be made public, and therefore cause said embarrassment.
One can prefer a regime where it's very hard for people who abuse their power to avoid punishment if it's all public to one where the powerful are emboldened enough to be able to be shameless. Even worse when the shamelessness is seen as the purest display of power, and thus people compete in their public misbehavior. But still, understand that the real barrier to punishment in the first case is not to avoid doing bad things, but to make sure that the witnesses either don't exist, or are too scared to say anything.
A judicial system that actually has no sacred cows would be better in all cases, but the sacred cows everywhere do their best to make sure this doesn't happen.
A few years ago I would have comfortably agreed that the US was better at impartial justice and justice for all. That has changed. Now it's a game of making lists of sins and comparing them -- which has enough degrees of freedom that everyone is just going to come to whichever result they were aiming for.
Not very...?
In the west, billionaires are often able to get extremely favorable treatment by the law as an expression of the power money gives. This is not the case in China, in which the party stands at the top.
In practice that's just a difference of incentives that I'm not sure at all is beneficial for anything but an authoritarian regime.
The industrialization of USA comes after the civil war, thus long after e.g. Charles Dickens, to say nothing of Hamilton.
Hamilton set the strategic agenda. Do you want to argue that US industrialization didn't follow the broad strokes of this plan?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Manufactures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)
Parallel: the industrialization of China for the most part happened after Deng Xiaoping, but are people wrong to credit him for setting the course?
I mean, Deng Xiaoping is/was a huge influence in _our_ lifetimes. It was only the 1970s, just fifty years ago, when he was effectively the head of state. That’s like yesterday. I’m not saying Hamilton doesn’t have the influence you’re describing, but it’s not really an equal comparison given the huge difference in timeframes. Late 1700s is a ways away vs the 70s.
You're pivoting. Alexander Hamilton had the influence on America's foreign policy that I said he had.
I think it’s a matter of perceptions catching up to reality. 15 years ago China was definitely still ripping off american products down to the english silk screening.
It's manufactured in Taiwan.
> I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.
I feel you're trying too hard to make believe this is somehow unexpected or unnoticed. The fact that subcontracting work to external companies acts as an investment on said companies to develop skills and competences is something that is known since always. The argument that the reigning VC mentality is that this investment is an acceptable tradeoff due to reasons such as these investments being limited to non-critical business concerns.
I don't think it's by choice just ask all those extinct manufacturers
It was a choice, western oligarchs handed China the means of production on a silver platter in the pursuit of short term profits.
And even that wasn't anything new. They did the same with Japan and then Taiwan. Remember when made in Japan was a joke, then made in Taiwan?
Now Japan is known for quality electronics and options and Taiwan for state of the art semiconductors.
Maybe new companies can spring up and be competitive with AI assisted design. Im assuming the cost was too high for those old companies to survive right? Small nimble companies could theoretically compete in some segments vs large bloated slobs (even if they have AI as well). This is all just hypothetical thought.
This would be interdependence expanding. Manufacturing isn't the only kind of economic activity
I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0
As if our EU leaders aren't a complete joke as well. Pushing ChatControl, fascism and gambling everywhere. We're just as much of a joke.
It's not disingenuous. It was obvious this was happening 15 years ago and the US and EU could have done something about it back then.
The tendency to protect corporate profit margins is the western Achilles heel and China knew they could exploit that.
yet somehow the outcome for the US has been much better. EU wins on paper though, yay!
Sure if you are Bezos or Musk. Otherwise, no.
Gdp grew much faster in the US than in the EU. I believe the EU is the worst performer of the planet. No joke. And not surprising with the self destructive actions.
This doesn't really refute what Dah00n said.
Sure, GDP in the USA is growing faster than the EU, but the question is who is benefiting from the increased GDP?
The answer is in Dah00n's comment. The rich are getting richer, while the population gets scraps. Meanwhile, people in the EU get guaranteed healthcare, paid time off, maternity leave, better worker's rights, etc.
> Meanwhile, people in the EU get guaranteed healthcare
They had that 20 years ago? Since then the rich asset owners have been accumulating a bigger share of the pie in the EU as well, it’s just marginally less pronounced because there is less wealth to go about in the EU due to the multi-decade long stagnation (outside Eastern Europe and a handful of other countries). On the whole I find it extremely hard to view this as a positive without a huge amount of wishful thinking.
People in the EU need to start thinking about how to improve things rather than exclusively focusing on holding onto what they already have (which is slowly turning into scraps..). To a large extent the old EU countries just froze in time after the GFC.
The GDP growing faster while quality of life doesn’t meaningfully improve is a bad, bad sign. It means we’re burning extra money just to stay afloat and break even. That’s worse than if the GDP didn’t grow.
The EU is doing just fine economically. It's a great place to live which matters much more than money. Also, the US has 40 trillion in debt. Every taxpayer owes $280k.
The EU is not perfect and recently they took a turn for the worse with shit like ChatControl and the ppwr killing small businesses.
But economically it's not a problem. It's not a race to be the richest, though America always makes everything a contest. We just need enough to live comfortably.
Because as everyone knows, GDP is _the_ indicator for well being of its citizens. Nobody in the US is in catastrophic health related debt, because the US's GDP grew so much <3
The median person and especially those in the top 10th percentile are fairly well off and respectively extremely well off in relative terms compared to people in other developed countries. To bottom deciles are of course not in the best situation but for the most part the rest of the population find it fairly easy to ignore that.
GDP should be retired. It has become a very polluted metric. The average american is not making $100k of wealth per year, not even close.
> outcome for the US has been much better
Is this better outcome for the US in the room with us?
Compare any measurable economic and investment stat in EU vs US
What happens when you compare quality of life? Or workers rights? Pretty sure that your average person cares more about those two data points…
Western Europe has been mostly stagnant or declining while real incomes for most workers have actually grown in the same period (and for a significant proportion of the population to a very large degree).
That might be a mirage temporarily made reality by outsourcing defense to the US, manufacturing to China and the work required for GDP growth to refugees.
All three will be going away sooner or later.
How is locally producing military equipment versus buying extremely expensive US uberl33t overkill hardware suppose to hurt the EU? It not like the US was just giving Europe free armaments.
Yeah sure they won't be producing any F35s or million dollar per shot missiles, but was that a good idea to start with? Are they worth the money when once again lots of inexpensive arms are shown to be more useful in modern wars than a few handfuls of expensive ones? Both Iran and Ukraine have shown that one side being a few steps ahead in military technology and willing to dump money on equipment still has limited returns. There is no "I win" technology apart from indiscriminately killing most of the entire population, which just makes you an existential enemy to the rest of the planet and erases 95% of the value in taking that territory.
Its really not that obvious to you? Because not having US bases on site and technology sharing and agreements takes money away from entitlements. France tried to cut entitlements by a tiny bit and the yellow vest movement was born. In the long run the Yellow Vests might end up losing everything as a result.
Regardless of the tech stack the work still needs to be done and now the EU has to do it. The Eu does not have infinite money, in fact they have less than the US so there will be cuts elsewhere.
Before outsourcing defense to the US... sorry, but have you ever read a history book? Europe was "exporting defense" around the world before the US got involved in the world wars :-))
Before outsourcing manufacturing to China Europe was making a third of all industrial things on this planet, so Europe will be just fine.
> the work required for GDP growth to refugees
I don't get this one. Do you think the European economy is propped up by refugees? I think there are 5 million of them in total in Europe, most of them Ukrainians and it's likely Ukraine will become a EU member at some point in the future...
>Before outsourcing defense to the US... sorry, but have you ever read a history book? Europe was "exporting defense" around the world before the US got involved in the world wars :-))
And they will continue to do so. Just at a higher cost with no US to maintain bases and do technology cost sharing. That extra money has to come out from somewhere...it will be entitlements. Combine that with terrible demographics and that remaining manufacturing base will be built on a bed of sand. :)
>Before outsourcing manufacturing to China Europe was making a third of all industrial things on this planet, so Europe will be just fine.
Europe can insource everything that China makes. They are not stupid people. You mistake the benefit westerners got from outsourcing. It held back inflation in products because the value came from the living standards difference between chinese and EU people. Remove that disparity by bringing back everything and EU will be living with a lower quality of life because all those products will be significantly more expensive with no alternatives.
>I don't get this one. Do you think the European economy is propped up by refugees? I think there are 5 million of them in total in Europe, most of them Ukrainians and it's likely Ukraine will become a EU member at some point in the future...
Same point I have been making. The consequences of demographic collapse can be hidden away by having young tax paying peoples do the shit jobs that run the economy at low wages. Same thing the US does with illegal migrants. Remove that and the hidden costs are now dumped onto the population. Result: Lower living standards for those who remain.
Pretty sure almost every European would celebrate any of these things
If they did, they would have done it already. Instead when there was an attempt, some protested wearing yellow vests. There will be more. Whether or not the governments force the issue or they lose to the voters does not matter: Either way quality of life will suffer.
> However I am sad that the world interdependence is eroding (...)
That's quite the odd statement. I don't think that it's in anyone's best interests to have a single country control access to chips. It might be in the US's interests to keep everyone out if the field, but the US is a single country among 195 countries.
And isn't the US's dominant ideology all about competition?
This is what was sold to – and often forced on – countries by the US and their allies via the IMF and World Bank. Global free trade meant that you only produced what you had an advantage in and bought what others could produce at lower cost.
So same as before?
Except this trend is actually reversing now, with fabs being built outside of Taiwan?
It's not reversing, it's continuing the trend of more and more manufacturing moving to Chinese companies. It already happened to TVs and it's currently happening with RAM.
By Chinese company, do you mean Taiwan is Chinese in the same way China is Chinese?
Xiaomi may manufacture their chips in Taiwan (by tsmc) but Xiaomi is still a Chinese hardware company, similar to how Apple or Qualcomm are US American hardware companies.
No. The problem is that TSMCs new capacity is already hogged by AI peddlers for years to come (in fact, AI BS is the reason why these new non-Taiwanese fabs got the massive US and EU subsidies), and so everyone else not flush with cash from the AI hypetrain has no alternative than to go to China - and deliver all their secrets to the CCP.
And eventually, just like the Western solar, battery, pharma and car companies all have learned, the CCP will use that knowledge to surpass and undercut everyone else.
Do they also deliver all their secrets to US/EU/Taiwan/etc or is it only with China that it goes from ordering some products manufactured to "deliver all their secrets"? Strange how almost everyone points their fingers at the CCP when we know for a fact (hey Snowden etc) that the US does what we say we think China does. I guess China bad > facts.
Goddamn turbocapitalist commies! How dare they!
Countries and institutions should always produce things where they are excellent at producing, in forms of specialization and compete in terms of comparative advantages.
We surely cant be this naive after the recent history of:
- China weaponizing the world's dependence on rare earth
- The US weaponizing the world's dependence on SWIFT
- Russia weaponizing Europe's dependence on natural gas
- Iran weaponizing the the world's dependence of oil supply through strait of Hormuz
Russian are more than happy to sell you NatGas, why do you think they’re weaponising? Watch too much propaganda?
They specifically cut access to said gas pipelines at the beginning of the Ukrainian war.
This is true until you add a layer of geopolitics to your analysis.
Supply chain advantages make the country that produces most of the stuff progressively better at doing everything.
Only if you have the people to do it. China has some of the worst birth rate in the world. In ~20 years that manufacturing capacity either goes to robots or goes away. Then what?
One of the (many) areas in which China is doing great is industrial robotics. Not the fancy dancing dogs, but robots that replace workers in factories.
That why I said it either goes to robots or it goes away. Can the current robots replace something like this? I don't think right now but maybe they figure it out.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
That factory looked like it employed a lot of easily replaceable manual work.
You don't have to replace 100% of workforce, replace just the ones whose work is the easiest to do by a robot.
Replacing 50% of workforce buys you enough time that by the time your available worker pool has shrunk 50%, robotics and AI will be much better and you will be able to replace another big chunk.
Production-wise, shrinking demographics are not such a big deal (they still have a lot of youth unemployment).
Shrinking demographics is a problem due to a) the ratio of workers vs seniors, b) shrinking overall demand pool -> shrinking economy c) smaller overall talent pool -> less diversity, less 'geniuses', i.e. the real drivers of innovation, and less capability to mobilize for great projects
You haven't seem to have accounted for costs. Can the speaker still be produced at the same price? It remains to be seen. A lot of products will simply go away due to economics. Thats a reduced quality of life compared to today.
Timely contribution from BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62m4zn1q6mo :-)
Yeah China bought out Kuka a while back and have done some amazing efforts in automation. Their pragmatic approach to AI and automation may win out in the end. We will have to wait and see.
I didn't watch the entire video, but 90% of the tasks I've seen in that video are easy to automate. The hardest ones are the cable pulling, putting the coil on the insert and soldering directly on the conveyor belt.
It remains to be seen if that bluetooth speaker can be produced with advanced automation at the same price that they are selling it for at this time. If not, parts or the entire category of product (tiny LED bluetooth speaker) might just have to go away as it does not make sense economically anymore. That is the reduced quality of life I am talking about in the other comments here.
how is that different from the rest of the world?
Rest of the world does not rely on manufacturing as a large chunk of its economy. Yes it will be painful for all, entire classes of products might just go away if they dont make sense in the new inflationary environment but countries will still likely suffer less than China overall.
That depends on if everybody gets along and is willing to trade
Those thing are not static! Changing them can be a political decision. It was a political decision in China to become excellent at manufacturing.
While I agree in passing. I think saying you'll export all your work to places with worse labor laws is short-term thinking. Chinese companies are successful yes but they also don't necessarily compete fairly. We still can export large portfolios of goods to China. So to just say they are best because they have a government protected market, plus subsidies so we should abandon local is a bad optimization in the long term
This attitude, if followed without qualifications, is dangerously naive and shortsighted, as the last few years of geopolitical events have shown.
Yes, and no. Yes because you are vulnerable to supply chain disruption by illwilled countries. But illwilled countries that disrupt supply chains greatly incentivise others to diversify supply away from them.
China could have the monopoly of rare earth production and refinery for all of eternity. But because of their reaction towards all the us allies when the us increased tariffs, I don't expect them to be relevant enough to disrupt markets with rare earths sanctions in 10-20 years.
> But illwilled countries that disrupt supply chains greatly incentivise others to diversify supply away from them.
... Except when they can't in any meaningful span of time.
Families should always eat at the restaurants that produce the most excellent cuisine. /s
If the Linux drivers aren't up upstreamed and the chips aren't sold to anyone else, meh.
Lol, no.
This is so stupid. China itself uses the "dominate and corral" model for their industries, and had severe tariffs to grow their various industrial bases, such as automotive.
Same is true of US, Germany, Britain, etc
The US had open markets and low tariffs for a long time; China's automotive tariffs were amongst the strongest in the entire world.
And in the 19th century when US industry was developing?
From the outside, it is still competition.
If they go too far to impose their system, we stop buying :)
Except they've now ground your native industry under their boot and have total monopoly control because you've given up your critical infrastructure. You can no longer stop buying. That isn't an option.
This is geopolitics 101; your fantasy version is decades out of date.
No. Chinese dumpers undercutting everyone else and destroying the competition is never good.
Was it bad when it was the US doing it against the UK? Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad? People said the same thing about the Japanese (they steal designs, they copy, it is bad quality, they are stealing our jobs, and so on).
>Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad?
It's definitely different when the player doesn't even have to play by the market. Comparing US companies and Chinese companies is not apples to apples.
> Was it bad when it was the US doing it against the UK? Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad?
dumping is always bad.
I will agree that dumping is probably just bad overall. But the US, and much of the rest of the world, allows it to happen both within and outside of their countries, sometimes even financially supporting it with government programs. So I really don't see why I should care that someone in China is doing it. We can't hold others to standards significantly higher than we hold for ourselves.
Now imagine if they actually provided a good support for Windows and Linux for those chips and started selling it to OEMs for Desktop/Laptop use.
I wouldn't be surprised if Xiaomi intend to use this for their laptops with Windows 11 once the software ecosystem matures. Which both ARM and Qualcomm are working on. But I still believe in terms of PC usage it is all going to be Nvidia.
Or allowed you to run Linux on their phone. We can only dream.
They do allow to unlock their bootloaders, which is rather rare, which in turn allows to run Linux. Seeing as Chins just migrates their entire administration to Linux, it's not far fetched to assume they'll support Linux on their laptops very soon.
> They do allow to unlock their bootloaders
Kafka himself would be proud if their unlocking process[0], but technically sure, they allow it
> Press "Apply for unlocking" at exactly 12:00 AM GMT+8 (pressing it too late will cause the "application quota limit reached" error. Use this website to check the time) "Account Error" might show up. If that happens, retry after 10 days
[0] https://github.com/realdtn2/xiaomi-unlocking-rooting-guide
This is even funnier than how some people defended Apple, that they allow changing OSs on Apple silicon MacBooks.
Is it? When I unlocked my bootloader it was straightforward. And my point on China migrating to Linux still stands.
Caveat on the unlocking of bootloader.
It is very much harder to do now. There is a lot of friction introduced now to it.
I think that Samsung sells rooted devices to companies or organizations engaged in their partner program. There’s at least one company using those commercially in Europe to offer a modified device. I wonder if there is a gray market for Chinese boot loader unlocked devices, or if that’s dealt with on a service per device transaction level with some cellphone shop. If you can buy a device from Samsung with an unlocked boot loader and customized security updates in a sort-of private contract, where they acquire them with who knows what arrangement today that started with their partner program, it seems like a price issue more than a practical issue or policy limitation. I see the software for unlocking devices frequently but I suspect it is a short lived game for those people, either using factory provisioning while they have access to the software or otherwise monetizing the effort to offer these tools and services. Probably malware, definitely device info collection, but it just ends up at the same conclusion. if there is friction, why? Is Goog adversarial to developer devices now? Athe devices without friction in some other way made compliant or unsuitable for general use? Is unlocking the boot loader so much a risk to the firmware delivery and control scheme for the baseband propriety stuff and chipsets or is it just that it’s vertically integrated in western markets through device financing by telecoms? — I do mean to seriously ask what is their holdup. They can’t afford to develop the software and hardware simultaneous tracked and offer that product if it leaves the control of their promised end user as a client?
I'm not experience here, but are there any obstacle to move from "unlocking bootloader" to "running full blow linux on phone" ? I imagine it can't be that simple(mostly driver issue).
Lots of obstacles. The biggest obstacle is having access to the kernel sources. Even if you've got access to the kernel source, driver blobs are a big issue, because if you move to a newer kernel the old drivers may not work.
Take a look at the PostmarketOS Device Wiki[1], you'll see that even phones released 10+ years ago (like Xiaomi Redmi 4) still do not have 100% functionality.
In saying that, in this era of LLMs and reverse-engineering, it may not be long before some of these blockers are reverse-engineered and we might end up with a fully functional Linux distro on older phones like this.
i'm not kernel dev, but i've heard the folk at kernel always try to maintain a stable API so as not to break backward compatible, is this the case here ?
No, that stability is only promised for userland apps, not kernel-level stuff like drivers. In fact, there is no stable API/ABI for device drivers.
Now this mostly isn't a big issue on the desktop/x86 world, because most drivers are open source, except for some exceptions like certain Broadcom drivers and old nVidia drivers. nVidia used to be a massive headache to deal with because the driver would frequently break with kernel updates, but thankfully that's mostly a thing of the past after they released an open driver, relegating most of the proprietary code to their GSP firmware.
Also, PCs and the x86 platform in general are much more open and hacker-friendly, making it relatively easier to reverse-engineer drivers, so as a result we also have a good chunk of drivers maintained by the community.
So the lack of ABI/API stability isn't a big issue generally in the desktop space.
Now in the embedded/ARM space however, things are very different. Unfortunately due to the precedence set by Google, Apple and earlier mobile vendors, chipset vendors generally don't release their sources; even their architecture documentation is closely guarded and hard to obtain, never mind the sources. And the chipset themselves (like the camera/ISP) are tiny black boxes and hard to debug and reverse engineer. So unless this situation changes (ie, official Linux support from the manufacturers themselves), a simple unlocked bootloader means nothing.
This basically answers my question about dark weather in the future for all of this. If Google is standing on an issue of trusting their clients to be in the right bucket of profitable customer to get through agreements and NDAs on what they’re proving unless you’re a multi national juicy enterprise target they’re really not the people I want to deal with. I don’t know what kind of deal Google has but I suspect they finance a substantial amount of “evolutions” for their purposes through the blob device vendors.
This is probably the plan for xiaomi along with servers and gpus down the road.
This video compares the Mediatek Dimensity to the Xring 03 (at the given timestamp 329s in) and finds significant differences in physical layout and performance: https://youtu.be/BCCJuOopLK8?t=329
Can't wait to see this in actual product and not a development board. It fulfill some of the original promise from ARM. And the world is about to turn upside down if most of that video show are proven to be true.
Is it really this fast or just this fast on benchmarks?
I sense a US blacklisting coming
Missing the most important metric: processing power per watt.
I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs. But putting them in a compact, densely packed, sealed box (aka a phone) would result in a fireball and almost no battery life.
> I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs
In multicore, sure. In most single threaded workloads as well? That'd be interesting enough on its own, regardless of wattage (though that'd make it even more interesting), as my A19 device gives my overclocked 9800X3D a run for its money (and some losses) in single threaded workloads. Considering that's the only thing the 9800X3D is really targeting, it's impressive beyond just whether or not it does so with less power.
No I don’t think you can find a single CPU that can beat Apple CPUs in a single-threaded workload.
Unless you're benchmarking single-threaded SIMD: https://lemire.me/blog/2020/12/13/arm-macbook-vs-intel-macbo...
it's 6 Year old blog, apple has improved a lot with ST, i argue that it's even more than Intel and AMD in the same timeframe.
Be that as it may, Apple has not added any real AVX-equivalent SIMD block. AMD and Intel's chips will generally lap them in SIMD benchmarks.
O3 is supposed to draw 25% less than O1, which according to reviews of their tablets did not throttle.
Their next Fold phone (TBA September) will use O3. I guess we will find out very soon.
some chinese youtubers have posted their test results, seems pretty good, but the devices have been provided to them in advance fwiw
Did their test results include power draw?
I'm sure it benchmarks well, but does it actually have good battery life?
Even aside from battery life, high TDP means thermal throttling under sustained load. Which most of these benchmarks don't really test, or if they did, the ambient temperature affects the results.
They do test continuous (1-hour) gaming performance in controlled environment regularly. Thermal throttling can be easily spotted on the frame rate vs time graph.
"matches" could've also been written as "this year's product falls short of the competitor's last year one".
And multithreaded is 10 cores vs 6 cores.
I appreciate Apple being kept on their feet, but they're not dethroned yet.
Crazy how long Apple has been able to keep their lead, there is so much money trying to catch up
I won't belittle their hard work, but there's a qualifier here that they're bidding the most for the foundry time, or else nvidia would have the fastest chips.
that's precisely what the post says under the title.
New CPU is 100% ARM design and nothing by Xiaomi other than "Chinese menu" configuration (i.e. how many blocks of this or that type,..). Apple CPU is a full custom design that just complies with ARM. Xiaomi Xring O3 CPU is designed by ARM and Xiaomi (as well as Mediatek) did not do any CPU design, other than custom bus interconnects, physical implementation on TSMC 3nm, an in-house NPU, and adopting next-generation LPDDR6 memory support.
Everyone has to start somewhere, they achieve better performance than Tensor CPU on Pixel, to me that's an achievement.
There’s a big gap between spec’ing an SoC by configuration code, and designing one from the ground up.
That difference amounts to who, if anyone, gets the credit for being competitive with Apple.
The custom integration is pretty big in and of itself. But the most important thing is that all these ARM C1 Ultra core is accessible to everybody. And it is performing well against Apple's CPU. The old Apple does better SoC advantage is vanished.
We will have A20 vs C2-Ultra this year. Can't wait to see it .
I wonder just how different their processes really are, considering both can be safely described as "full custom design".
I write this especially in the context of apple always being about The Look, so they might also describe their design process in a more optimistical light in advertisement material.
An insider take would be helpful.
ARM invested significantly lately in CPU design, which can be seen through history of job openings and news, so they caught up to Apple. Xiaomi does only SoC integration and CPU configuration (i.e. choosing how much cache, how many units of what, etc whatever ARM gives as options to choose). So, this is not comparison of Apple CPU vs Xiaomi, but Apple vs ARM ;-) CPU design is very long term and risky. NVIDIA has had it (i.e. Carmel soft CPU) and trimmed it significantly (maybe they reignited it again, since they were not allowed to acquire ARM). However Apple has just launched M6. They all know what competition is going to have next few generations through covert/overt industrial espionage (I remember in Intel their competitive analysis team was sourcing info through chain of sources to "wash it")
> I wonder just how different their processes really are
Night and day.
Apples has in-house silicon dev groups starting (at least) 2008 w/ acquisition of PA semi for their low power CPUs, followed by the acquisition of Anobit in 2012(?). Apple does their own architecture, microarchitecture, etc, full cycle development.
Apple licenses ISA, not designs.
And by “licenses” you mean they were a founding company of the ARM consortium way back in the 1990s.
No, I mean licenses to use the ISA. The act of paying for the license has nothing to with Apple being or not being one of the founders.
yeap, it's xiaomi's thing. it dont have the ability.
This is nothing. China is about to start doing their own 5nm. When they roll out their own silicon at scale, I don't think there's catching up, nobody can match their manufacturing capabilities. Not even close.
They are already doing 5nm with multi-patterning DUV. But that's not the same as EUV machines. It is not nearly the same scale of production (with yields as low as 20%). They are still a few years away from indigenous EUV. Though I have to admit the shenzhen breakthrough was pretty impressive
Is DUV inherently 5nm a 20% yield class or it's matter of process improvement that China is struggling compared to taiwan or Intel ?
For multi-patterning DUV, each patterning/etching step accumulates defect risk. Actually now that I'm reading about it, 20% is the better end of the spectrum. I don't think technology could possibly improve it much beyond that.
I believe the theoretical maximum yield for multi-patterning DUV at 5nm and 7nm is 30-40%
It's not economically sustainable/viable long term. China is only doing it because they've been forced to by the trade war Trump started against them in his first term (Biden didn't really back down either and now Trump 2 tried to ramp it up even higher). China is okay with such low yields because its supposed to be a temporary solution until they achieve domestic EUV tech.
Surely yield is very much a function of the size of the device in question and its tolerance for defects. I don’t think it makes sense for a technology to have a theoretical maximum yield that’s a constant number unless it somehow destroys entire wafers with highish probability.
You can normalise by surface area, which makes defects rate comparable across processes. At least to a first order approximation, keeping all other parameters constant, bigger chips are more likely to have a defect because they have larger surface areas.
If a process has a defect rate of x, the probability of a die having a defect is A*x. The limit is then the defect rate for a die with the surface area of a transistor, you cannot really get any better than this. But that’s not very useful if you want to extrapolate what the defect rate would be on an improved or cheaper process.
If so they're going to be massively tariffed in the US. Chips are a national security sector.
Yea I dont think they show ant signs of slowing down. With how massively slow the West are, they are gonna get swallowed up.
M5 (iPad) AnTuTu: 3.5 million
XRing O3 AnTuTu: 5.5 million
---
M5 iPad Geekbench Single-Core: 3,556
M5 Max Geekbench Single-Core: 4,300
XRing O3 Geekbench Single-Core: 3,945
---
M5 iPad Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,285
M5 Max Geekbench Multi-Core: 29,200
XRing O3 Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,221
And less than a day later Apple announced the M6. The timing has to be a coincidence, but it is quite amusing.
I dont think Geekbench is a good cross-platform benchmark, given what it measures
I don’t either, but these are the only benchmarks Xiaomi provided!
Geekerwan has an excellent video [1] where they run the new Spec 2026 benchmark on the development board they received.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCJuOopLK8
On the contrary, it is actually good. For all the hand wringing when someone’s favourite platform loses out on a Geekbench comparison, the benchmarks are quite consistent, even across platforms, and track SPEC results fairly accurately.
Of course it’s not perfect, but then, nothing is.
Geekbench is the only consumer usable cross-platform benchmark. It matches SPEC differences between platforms
Does it test hardware, or hardware plus software that can be different on different platforms?
Does that matter? I don't care of Apple's thread scheduler is faster or slower than Windows' or if their throttling algorithm behaves differently, I just want to see how it performs in a given task.
What degree of OS-indepedence do you think is reasonable to expect from a consumer-facing benchmark suite like Geekbench?
AFAIK it's mostly self-contained outside of basics like malloc. If you have any evidence to the contrary, post it.
Suspiciously ignored is power consumption. That’s the biggest and most useful metric often ignored because it’s less flashy than speed.
I'm also interested in the security features of this new CPU. Where doesn't it sit compared to Apple and ARM (Qualcomm, Titan)?
Modern processor without memory tagging for example is a little..... dated, given how much the new AIs accelerated the vulnerability discovery in all the apps and system components.
I have heard it said that security is the new power when it comes to microarchitecture. I feel like that’s something security enjoyers tell themselves to be happy.
I don't understand your comment - did you want to say that hardware security is overrated or that security and microarchitecture don't mix?
Or maybe that security doesn't have a practical application?
Or maybe just a joke, that most of the world does not care so much about security, unlike security minded people would like to?
Good question.
I’m sure Apple’s chips could do better in single core if they were willing to push the power envelope way higher too.
Multi-core is easy to beat, just add more cores until you win. There were already chips that beat the M series just by having way more threads/cores.
Apple’s devices generally have no or very underpowered thermal solutions; but it also partly regulates battery life.
(Seriously, they rely on air cooling for Neo and MBA — these chips hit 105deg easily and throttle, intentionally)
Adding a thermal pad to a Neo or MacBook Air gives significant boosts peak and sustained performance; whether in benchmarks or real world video renders; but it also reduces your battery life by a little, as there’s less thermal throttling forcing wattage down.
And no, the battery is not connected to the chassis (heatsink), it doesn’t have increased temps.
IMO bot that important practically - SiC batteries, active cooling, bypass charging etc - if one really cares about sustained performance (gaming etc), PRC has phones segments big on mitigating thermal throttling. Exclude benchmark drama, golden samples, retail units still vastly outperform passively cooled phones with "better" silicon on long sessions. Otherwise there aren't many usage case where power consumption matters between that can't be trivially made up by slightly better or larger battery and/or passive cooling.
And arguably the most important when it comes to mobile and small form factor usecases.
Apple doesn't optimize for raw performance but rather perf/watt. So comparing only performance is not really useful.
The benchmark done in a lab is different than one done on a production phone. In a lab you can cool the room or even drop the CPU inside cold oil. Run the benchmark there and it means you have a good freezer.
I'd love to see what it looks like inside a production phone. I really hope for this to be true because we need more competition on the CPU front.
Xiaomi also make amazing cars.
"WSJ
I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don't Want to Buy American Cars Anymore.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/chinese-ev-test-drive...
"
My last car and my current one, both are from china (BYD, Xiaomi). these chinese brands really went very far compared to the rest of the world
China is hungry in a way others aren't. It is driving them to push far harder and faster because of this. Don't know it will be sustainable long term but it looks good now.
Tech/feature wise it's not even close between Chinese cars and the rest of the world.
No idea about reliability or anything else but just as pure tech demos they seem incredible.
The one thing I have heard form mechanics is that cars from BYD seem to has better than expected manufacturing and engineering. They haven't cut corners were you would expect for the price. Not sure how the electrics will hold a decade into the future but but they have good bones.
There was a lot of hype about the SU7. They killed it with pre-orders. But their target for the year at 550K isn't gonna happen as they're sold about a 180k so far this year.
Due to lack of demand or lack of production capacity?
The CEO of Ford directly said if Chinese EVs are allowed into the US it will be the end of US auto manufacturing.
They know they are inferior, and choose not to compete, just lobby for more regulations to keep competitors out. Free market, haha.
China is nowhere near “free market”. Their EV sector received more government subsidies in the last 15 years than the entire U.S. automobile market since inception. The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.
250 billion in EV subsidies from China. 10 billion by the U.S.
> The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.
Didn't Tesla essentially stay afloat for years via government subsidies (e.g. government-mandated carbon credits)?
Didn't the US only recently end its direct subsidies for EV buyers?
Don't US taxpayers provide an enormous ongoing subsidy to ICE vehicles by underwriting the security of the oilfields in the Gulf?
Don't US taxpayers in effect subsidize US automakers by ensuring they do not have to compete in the market with the best available vehicles?
More to the point: American free-marketeerism was never about the other side, it was about the US living its own professed values at home. We didn't shackle our press in discussions about the USSR because the USSR chose to shackle its own press. Our lockout of Chinese EVs rankles in part because it's a deviation, at home, from our own professed values.
Carbon credits where open to any companies, so it wasn't a unfair subsidy.
EV incentives where also not limited to us companies.
Every country distorts its markets in different ways. It's still silly to pretend the US is free of these kinds of distortions.
That's just whataboutism that ignores the order of magnitude scale differences of the subsidies that were provided in China in the original comment.
It's really not. No serious analysis reduces the complexity of markets to a single number in a single sector. In particular, it takes willful blindness to look at subsidies in the EV market and ignore other energy markets.
You're also ignoring the most important point, my last point about values. The comment is still up, feel free to re-read it.
This is a false equivalence.
Adding carbon credits the U.S. is close to 20 billion in EV subsidies.
The ENTIRE EU spent 125 billion.
China supplied 250 billion to a 400 billion dollar industry and is facing overproduction. It’s dishonest to say it’s the same.
Free market capitalism isn’t binary. If that’s what you think, you’re gravely misinformed.
Just to be clear, that 250 billion is for 15 years and 400 billion is the current per-year number.
The subsidies were around 25% of sales in 2018 and have dropped down to about 10%.
And of that 250 billion, half is a sales tax exemption and a quarter is purchase rebates. That bulk of the money doesn't lead to unfair competition.
https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil...
That's the point I guess, it is not binary, but proponents of absolute free markets see it as binary when they are against regulations, and as non-binary, when it is about competition from abroad. They want to have it both ways.
This is false equivalence.
Direct producer subsidies for PRC EV was <100B, less than US injected into US auto, not much more than Euro auto. The latter just poorly, i.e. pork barrel / jobs programs that does not raise baseline competitiveness.
Most of CSIS muh PRC 200b-400b includes rebates/taxes AND subsidies to upstream, i.e. battery industry which used more than cars. AKA they bundled energy sector to skew PRC numbers.
For comparable you'd have to include all historic US/EU auto subsidies, AND ASSOCIATED upstream subsidies like MOST OF fossil industry, related diesel/fuel discounts... etc etc in which case US/EU have been rebating to the tune of trillions.
Strict auto-auto sector equivalence = PRC subsidized less to commoditize their car industry in fraction of time, which is not remotely "overproduction", they still barely exports 20%... they'd have to export 50/75%+ to reach shares of EU/JP/SKR etc and even then those absurd export%s not treated as overproduction. PRC would need to be exporting ~20m more cars then they do now to even qualify.
Auto+energy sector equivalence (the 200-400b figure), PRC not even on the axis in equivalence scenario.
E:cleaner language
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49424924
> dishonest to say it’s the same.
I literally didn't say that it was?
In any case, the point is that the US also subsidizes markets, including the auto markets. China is far from unique in this. As you say, free market capitalism isn't binary, and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.
> I literally didn’t say that it was?
> and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.
Textbook false equivalence.
You seem to understand the meaning of "to some degree" differently than I. To me it implies that subsidies can happen at different amounts, not that they are all the same.
What is an equivalence here is, that the binary flag of "does subsidize" is true, and that equivalence holds.
Isn’t this just good strategy? Shouldn’t government subsidize the things it wants more of?
The US auto industry is also subsidized by all aspects of American life requiring a car outside of NYC and a few big cities.
That's an interesting point actually. Most places in China and even quite rural ones are livable and reachable via public transport including trains. Most of their big cities are very convenient to get around in just by walking and metro or sometimes taking a bus.
Also just directly by the USG, see "Cash for Clunkers".
No, it's actually 200 000 trillion for both countries.
Source: same as yours
Yep, it's pretty much just illegal dumping.
The vast majority of that money went to car purchasing assistance. It helps build the industry up but it doesn't change the actual price.
The only serious EV maker in the US has received more US subsidizing than any single Chinese maker.
You’re forgetting the 9.3$ billion given to us automakers to bail them out that was never recovered.
If China government kickstarted their EV sector (along many others) and enabled them to be competitive, strong and dominating.
That means the Chinese government is doing a really good job.
I really hate this argument where every government across the globe have to basically be a drag which sucks the life out of an economy and wastes extracted resources (taxes) on bullshit instead of putting them to good use.
This is what winning looks like fellas, and you're just losing. Get used to it as there's only going to be more of this.
Even without the subsidies, at this point, they’re arguably making better cars.
Well, what do you expect him to say? Consider the audience.
It would be great if he said “we have to up our game and build better vehicles that are less expensive.”
But it’s so much easier to just lobby the competition away so there is none. It’s the American way!
I don't want buy American cars either. European, Korean or Japanese are the way to go.
Odd to list things in reverse order.
They have 5 min full EV charging while I have to twiddle my thumbs for 30 minutes at every charge stop. What a shit administration we currently have.
That journalist may not want to buy American cars, but thanks to our enlightened government, they must buy American cars, since everything else is taxed significantly or banned altogether. Free market for all! /s
I love this, really, competition on a global scale is good for us, bad for greedy US corporations.
For example, I consider Meta as bigger threat to society, than Xiaomi, DeepSeek, z.ai and other top Chinese companies (haven't used Chinese social media, so can't comment about its content)
When you say "greedy US corporations" do you mean that these US corporations are uniquely greedy, or that all corporations are greedy, and this is bad for the ones in the US? Do you think that corporations in China, which in many cases are subsidized by the government, are also greedy?
all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns or break the law and eventually make sure law is changed to fit your business (e.g. first taxi medallions adjusted the law for themselves, and then Uber)
Same is very difficult to do in China (look what happened to Jack Ma) or in Europe, because you have to follow some regulations
> all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns
How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
> How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
I want to share 3 things here, to think out loud:
1. lets not go too far to the past, because I will say industrial espionage is less harmful than imperialism. Imperialism costed millions of lives across India, Pakistan, African nations, Indonesia and even in China, we are talking about how the West got extremely rich, which allowed it to live in prosperity, when everyone else were struggling (impact of it is still ongoing for some nations). I am fine with lesser of 2 evils, which is an industrial espionage in this case.
2. I didn't say 'benelovent act'
3. this is not baked by a science, just a personal preference, I prefer if country supports companies to advance the country, rather than allowing companies get too rich and bail them out with taxpayer money if they fail because of their dumb actions. (not saying one is better than other, I like how CCP elevated China from 3rd world country to a level, even the US companies are scared, in very short time, without invading and extracting resources from other countries. But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect, but China became superpower in the last 30-40 years, which is an impressive accomplishment.
China is imperialist as any other country. They extract resources from others like the British 100 years ago.
This is hilarious that this whole “west is bad” makes people blind.
> Imperialism costed millions of lives
Chinese policies resulted in 10s of millions of their own people dead, and many millions in labor camps today.
Sure, “west is bad” but China “has its problems”.
> China is imperialist as any other country.
Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people. Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
Or lets look at China itself, before the opium wars and British colonization, it accounted for ~30% of the world GDP, by 1970s it dropped to 4-5%, now climbing back to 20%.
Indonesia would be another example.
You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage", because you probably live in the West and feel nice about your day to day life and regular things like education feels granted, and not seeing the enormous impact of the West's evil actions to the lives of billions of people around the world in the last 200 years. (US hasn't even stopped yet, see Cuba, Middle Eastern countries)
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
Ridiculous statement. China is doing it today — uighurs are actively erased bit by bit.
> Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
This statement is rooted in “zero sum” logic, and based on the assumption that without colonization India should have stayed with its 25% or more share. Hypotheticals are hypotheticals, and nothing more.
> You keep defending the West,
I’m not defending anyone. I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good” horse and completely oblivious to so many things that China does, which are objectively worse.
> I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good”
Can you read what I have written? if not, let me copy what I wrote earlier here:
> I am fine with lesser of 2 evils
> But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect
I am not saying China is good, I am saying it is lesser of 2 evils with much less negative impact to the lives of human beings around the world, in my opinion.
I am not sure we are arguing here on the merit of the argument itself. You are fine with China’s genocide TODAY because China is the “lesser of two evils”?
I do not understand this. It sounds like a cultist/religious position.
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
But they did. Look at Xinjiang, Tibet, and the history of Manchuria, among others. They did it to themselves as well, like most backwards dictatorship. And "the West” does not really do genocide anymore, either. This is more a consequence of it being a terrible strategy than Chinese benevolence (or anyone’s, really). At some point we realised that direct administration is a burden and that it’s much more cost effective to bribe nominally independent governments without having to deal directly with local populations. China does this a lot, just like evil western imperialist countries. Empires look different in the 21st century than in the 19th, that’s all. And where would you put Russia in a neat west-rest of the world dichotomy?
> You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage"
“The West” is not a monolith. It’s made of several countries, some of them better than others, and each one of them with its good and bad sides. It is not useful to work with generalisations like that. It obscures any information or lesson we could get and leads to wrong conclusions. It’s also counter-productive because for all its evil, there is nothing “the West” did that is unique. Except in scale, but then it’s more a quirk of history than something being intrinsically evil in “western” people.
> And "the West” does not really do genocide anymore, either
Don't want to get into the definition of genocide, but sure, you can think of whatever you want, but facts are different (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides):
Not classified as genocide but almost similar or even larger impact: > “The West” is not a monolith. It’s made of several countriessome wars on the list were joint operations between US, Britain and NATO, for others you can read this 20 page wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
> How would you call decades of ...
I'd call it a whataboutism
> I'd call it a whataboutism
I would say that saying about anything “whataboutism” is a cheap way out.
China does industrial espionage for the same end goals as American companies work on new things: market domination. So, I find it funny when someone is mad about American companies but not Chinese, while both pursuit the same goals.
Thinking there's no corruption in China because Jack Ma got sent to a dungeon for being too mouthy is actually comical
there's less corruption than in the US nowadays.
How would you know?
Presumably based on the number of news headlines where China publicly executes for corruption.
> Same is very difficult
> Thinking there's no corruption
You see what you did here?
> is actually comical
Indeed.
He means monopolistic.
Speaking of "us" it seems that Samsung/Mediatek/Xiaomi/Huawei SoCs are not available in the US.
I hate China’s form of government for everything except rapid development. I don’t trust as single one of their companies.
Do you still believe this considering those companies live and die by the CCP? Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?
I'm right there with you questioning Meta's value for society, but I do believe it has less opportunity for abuse/manipulation
Considering Meta lives and dies by the White House, where abuse and manipulation have become SOP, I'm not sure the CCP stacks up as the boogeyman anymore.
IMO opinions of this variety often come from being misinformed or under-exposed to exactly how oppressive the CCP is. The US government isn't perfect, but it values various freedoms much more extensively than the CCP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs#Human_rights_abuses_ag...
> those companies live and die by the CCP
I don't care about internal politics of a state, as long as they are not killing people deliberately on a daily basis or invading other countries and killing their people.
How government is structured is up to Chinese people to decide
> Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?
It's not only about scale and upstart, it's also about how much are they harming society.
> I don't care about internal politics of a state, as long as they are not killing people deliberately
What about forced cultural assimilation and re-education camps? Or, as long as it’s confined to the borders of a country doing so, it is fine?
> How government is structured is up to Chinese people to decide
Funny take given the events of 1989
It would be quite a demonstration of supremacy for any Chinese firm to to equal or exceed the damage done (and ongoing) to western society by meta.
I'm curious as to the performance per watt. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
no free lunch for a given process node I guess. It's using TSMC’s 3nm N3P.
“…of course, Apple may soon announce their next processor”
I’m pretty sure they will, as they have, like clockwork, in the same month, for over a decade.
And reportedly early next year they have another coming out of band.
Specifically, the M7 is supposedly coming out in the Spring. The M6 band is going to be so small because the M7 will have a lot of AI-focused upgrades and Apple doesn't want to waste manufacturing on M6 Pro/Max/Ultra chips when they can start building the M7 sooner.
The GPU performance is insane too, approaches M5 results at ~20W.
Of course it will be in Android phones so it will be throttle hard past 4W and will have terrible drivers.
I wish phones moved to HPB packaging and active cooling so we could have sustained 10W and use them as light workstations.
That exist, kinda. Android gaming handhelds have mobile SoC and also active cooling. See Ayn and Retroid devices. Their (almost) throttle free is a very nice experience.
Yeah I have an Ayn Thor with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, it's great being able to play fairly demanding Windows games on this tiny device.
It's still PoP with the RAM stacked on top in a plastic casing so you need a pretty big fan to cool it since you have to go through insulating plastic, then the RAM to get to the CPU.
With a HPB packaging you can cool the CPU directly and could theoretically get the same amount of cooling power with a much smaller fan that could be integrated into a thing smartphone (à la RedMagic).
I’m not sure I follow why the performance is “Insane”
This is a M5 level chip that runs slightly within a ballpark of M5 wattage (afaik M5 is between 15W max on an iPad and 30W max CPU+GPU on a cooled Mac)
This is running in a thermally unconstrained bench setup and has potentially worse power consumption with what will be lower than previous gen performance when this and the alleged M6 are truly out.
So tired of people on HN calling you out for being excited about tech.
It gets M5-level numbers at 12-14W.
It gets about 30% better perf than the A19 Pro at equal wattage on the whole 4W - 8W range.
So no it's not worse power consumption than prev gen. This is ARM's stock GPU having finally caught up and being competitive with Apple and Qualcomm's mobile GPUs.
This is insane to me. Stay cynical if you want, I have the right to be excited about it.
I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t be excited by it. But there’s a significant number of caveats to every single number you posted but you glossed over the points I made.
And in being defensive, you jumped straight from the topic you were discussing (GPU perf) to CPU perf numbers to try and make a point.
There’s a difference between being cynical and pragmatic, just as there’s a difference between being hyped and realistic.
You haven’t seen this in a product. You’re seeing development board numbers. Be excited all you want but it’s a public forum, if you want to just post without any responses make a blog.
No? The numbers I quoted were GPU numbers, sourced from this video [1].
Also I explicitly acknowledged in my first comment that real devices won't be able to draw that kind of power. But 4 watts is 4 watts whether it's in a test bench or a phone.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCJuOopLK8
Xiaomi smartphones were extremely well made at least a few years ago. Even the core software was impressive vs Google for example (try echo cancellation on any of your non-Xiaomi devices). Its only real problem is ads.
Yeah it wasn't a dig a Xiaomi specifically. All Android devices have broken Vulkan drivers. We have to rely on alternative open-source drivers (e.g. Turnip for Snapdragon) for real compatibility and performance.
Just get a laptop?
The opening paragraph:
To the first: I say, "Hmm... maaaaybe. More like they are a large consumer goods company. Many of their goods are very low value." No one doing professional stock analysis on Wall Street would put Xiaomi in the same category as Huawei (which has a frighteningly large and effective R&D division for telco/networking kit).To the second: I summon my inner Aussie: "Yeah, nah." I think only peak Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy phones are the only two that can possibly challenge iPhones. The rest are poseurs.
Xiaomi and other Chinese manufacturers are ahead of Samsung, Apple etc. They have superior cameras, battery technology and the best, latest SOC's.
How is this news worthy? The cores are off the shelf C1-Ultra. Even Google got them in the new pixel.
It's crazy how quickly this thread became a political discussion. No one is talking about tech details.
44mb of cache really highlights the bottleneck of how raw compute is cheap, but the real limit is memory latency.
Apple is the least interesting company to compare against. They are in their own MacOS/iOS software ecosystem, which you want if you want and you don’t if you don’t. Not to be dismissive of either side of that, there are legit reasons to stay in or out of Apple’s ecosystem. But benchmarking points is not a reason anyone would switch operating systems, right?
What OS will these chips run and what is the competition on that platform? He makes a lot of comparisons to AMD and Intel in the post, why not benchmark against them?
Not at all. I specifically bought a MacBook Air M4, first Mac product in my life, for its fantastic performance in a passively cooled notebook. I have zero loyalty to Apple and usually use Windows. If someone else starts beating them perf wise, I'll happily switch again.
The air m4 is really the best sub-thousand-dollar laptop.
I was surprised when I bought my 'cheap, crappy' 2024 M3 Air ($1.3K) and it ran circles around my top-of-line last Intel MBP ($4.6K).
Daniel Lemire specialises in high-performance algorithm implementation. In recent years he has been impressed by specific performance characteristics of Apple's CPUs. For example, their ability to eek out the maximum possible throughput from a given instruction stream's data dependencies. My information may be stale, but when I read Daniel's comments I assume that Apple is being used for compariosn because it is the current leader, and take it as given that AMD and Intel are behind. You can probably find sources where he makes head-to-head comparisons with AMD and Intel. If you're not familiar with his work I can recommend it. The Wookash podcast interview is a gentle introduction, there is open source code and academic papers if that's more your thing.
They are the kind of single core right now, so they’re the most interesting comparison.
Do you want to compare to Intel/AMD? If these are destined for phones that’s not a useful comparison by your metric.
Linus specifically always buys Apple laptops to run Linux on because they're just that good. Even despite all the paper cuts.
Linus Torvalds has in past used laptops from Apple, Lenovo and Dell and probably many more.
His current laptop is an Intel laptop.
Yay free markets China makes a fast chip Yay national security
Here is an excellent video showing silicon die analysis and comprehensive performance-power curves compared against other leading products. Please skim through it and skip the speculating. https://youtu.be/BCCJuOopLK8
Edit: There are also memory latency charts
> This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers, around 3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-cor, are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.
I was under the impression that there was still a trade export from TSMC to China [1]? Not to mention a near complete ban on ASML devices [2]? Maybe they exfiltrated a few chips into a lab, but can they really source production quantities?
> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
People using the same C1-Ultra core are struggling to get the same performance in applications where heat and power are important. It would be surprising if this is sustainable and not just a temporary boost.
> The Xring O3 will debut in the Xiaomi 18 Fold, the world's first foldable to use it, and the Xiaomi Pad 9 Pro Max, both launching in China in September 2026. Xiaomi also unveiled the Xring O100 AI chip and the Xring D100 smart-driving chip, the latter built to run models with up to 200 billion parameters locally, with commercial use planned for 2027. Reuters reports TSMC is producing the chips.
I guess we will find out very soon when Chinese customers get their devices. I don't know how they will even source enough LPDDR6 at reasonable prices.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/creve4x8drgo
[2] https://www.trendforce.com/news/2026/08/25/news-u-s-may-push...
Competition in the ARM space is exactly what the industry needs right now. If Xiaomi can actually sustain that multithreaded performance without thermal throttling, it changes the hardware landscape significantly.
Anyone can make a fast CPU, but is it also a safe and secure CPU? Or does it have architectural defects as a consequence of the race to be fast?
See eg LoongLeak and the Loongson processor: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26/presentat...
Xiaomi are implementing ARM cores on an ARM ISA so any architectural defects would also affect other ARM processors.
There are side channels available, they have licenced IP blocks, not a whole CPU. All that logic for the cache and interconnect.
My last three phones has been XIAOMis. I absolutely love them for the their price-performance value, and honestly their Android version MI (build/skin ?) is my favorite android version.
Geekerwan's review is up, with caveat that this is the prototype board, not even packaged into a phone yet, but still shows some amazing results in spec 2026, 3dmark (gpu), perf-per-watt for single core and multi-core https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCJuOopLK8 (you can turn on YouTube auto-dub)
You will be vibecoding using MiMo on your Xiaomi android phone with the Xiaomi Token Plan and everything. I guarantee you.
It is the same Xiaomi which announced 300 000 SU7 vehicles sold in a day and 6 months later reported they are struggling to hit their sales targets? Just don’t believe anything a Chinese company say, divide it by at least 2. I have nothing against China, this is a cultural thing which you should be aware reading anything coming from the country.
Xiaomi EVs sales growing ~15% YoY, they just likely to miss their wildly ambitious ~33% YoY target. Or they might get close, they're 80% of target for H1, but PRC sells more cars in H2 (no Q1 new years, Q3+Q4 big sales).
But it's also the same xiaomi and sends gold samples and hacks gaming benchmarks, but IRL an off the shelf model is merely 80% better instead of 100%. It's no different than Samsung, Apple, Nvidia curious powerpoint axis. Whatever advertised, reality is slightly worse, but rarely substantially.
Yeah, well, I'm still waiting for 1 Apple Car ...
Why are you waiting for something that was never announced?
You never heard of project Titan? It even has a wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project
"around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018."
Was it announced?
What difference does that make. It's the end result that counts.
This is a discussion of whether company announcements are true or not in various circumstances. It makes all the difference.
It is pretty amazing the creativity with compute architecture which is afforded by a zillion transistors.
I would find the news much more interesting if they put the new processor in a laptop with 48 GB DDR5 unified memory or more! Right now, M5 with its neural execution engines and unified memory architecture present a unique local AI computing platform.
Xiaomi did a great job. This area need new player which is good to consumers
I think it's great that the Chinese are catching up and can compete directly with the incumbents. The GPU space I find really exciting with several new IPs out there that aren't quite ready for primetime, but still fascinating.
Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.
Execution units are cheap if you can't keep them fed, so the huge cache seems like the other half of the story
Impressive silicon progress, but real-world developer experience will hinge on sustained thermal throttling, Linux kernel support, and tooling ecosystem stability.
PRC going to get have surplus of semi talent and equipment in a few years that food delivery companies Meituan probably going to starting making chips like they do LLMs. Only 60% joking.
Xiaomi still need to improve their UX and also match the UI to western culture, in spite of now being a global "tech giant" they still want to convince everyone else to be Chinese?
From the benchmarks, the single core performance is close but lower.
RIP Mediatek, RIP Qualcomm
Would be nice to see some independent numbers and benchmarks. Apparently, Xiaomi announced this SoC today, so there's no 3rd party data about it.
"Let's isolate China's semiconductor industry," they said.
"This will all turn out well," they said.
There is a nuance: Xiaomi is not Huawei. They were not sanctioned. This chip is made in Taiwan like all the non-Samsung competition.
Argh -- perfectly read. I was thinking of Huawei.
Huawei is launching a mobile soc built with logic folding. They take a single logic ip, like a cpu, and spread it's components across to dies and use hybrid bonding to combine top to bottom. For example the CPU SRAM on top and logic gates directly below. This reduces critical path, increases fmax, reduces power consumption. They claim this method allow them build faster, more power efficient, more function units with duv process than traditional duv. Will be interesting to benchmark after launch later this year
If Moore's law is truly ending as is generally believed, then it seems logically inevitable that the entire industry will flatten out and equalize. Or, I am oversimplifying something.
In this case it's more that multiple companies (Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek and now Xiaomi) have used the same process (N3P) to produce multiple chips with similar performance. Regardless of Moore's Law death that isn't surprising.
That's just punting the meta which is why are companies converging on similar processes? Plausible explanation being that Moore's law exponential is going away.
It's already flattening out. The rate of progress is much faster in 90-00s then now.
Where is this being fabbed TSMC? How advanced a process node CPU maker has access to is usually all you need to predict relative performance.
(as long as you take similar assumptions in die size, advanced packaging and power envelope).
This is the only advantage Apple had on its rivals.
You forgot the /s
Yeah but they can't use TSMC to make it so they'll have to make due with older or more expensive lithography processes.
That probably explains why there's so few of these CPUs around: the yields of the domestic Chinese lithography processes (non-EUV) are awful.
Xiaomi has not been sanctioned like Huawei. So it is made by TSMC on N3P. The Huawei chips, made by SMIC, are so far behind they're not competitive at all with even Xiaomi's first generation chip.
After this news they might suddenly be.
The U.S. is already making moves to completely halt the export of ASML machines to China, including non-EUV ones. Every semiconductor China produces could be used in weapons and that's agains U.S. law.
Last I knew, ASML was a Dutch company with a Veldhoven HQ. With the amount of shit that Trump's been pulling in Europe, The EU might be more willing to side with China and ban exports to the US.
Not as long as there's a NATO.
Europe needs to acquire a nuclear arsenal that stands head-to-head with the Russian one quantitatively and independent from the U.S. or any other nation (including the French and British) for nuclear deterrence. This means many more European nations need to acquire a nuclear arsenal.
The frustrating part is that the U.S. doesn't want to give assurances whether it will come to Europe's aid if it were attacked, but at the same time doesn't want European nations to develop an independent nuclear capability. Many European nations (Poland, Finland, Sweden, Germany) are currently contemplating going nuclear. The U.S. is actively discouraging them to do so.
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (to which they are all signatories) effectively prevents these countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Unless they are willing to face international sanctions and economic ruin, that’s the end of the story.
If you leave the treaty are you still subject to international sanctions if you develop nukes? Me thinks not. That makes the treaty a paper tiger.
The NPT was only useful when the lines were clear and larger nations would come to the aid of smaller ones when they were attacked. That's no longer the case.
I would argue that NATO under Trump is a paper tiger. There is a reason no-one wants to buy US weapons any more, though the intricacies of where they are, having assumed the US would be a reliable ally, mean the current flood of US weaponry to European countries will slow down gradually, not all at once.
Reputation is a fickle thing, so difficult to build, and so easy to lose.
Xiaomi can and does use TSMC.
Nice. Let's see if they perform well in the real world.
Interesting how quickly they seem to have caught up.
This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers — around *3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-core* — are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.
But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?
This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.
Doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Look at the top comment thread: just politics and no discussion of the tech.
Were I to guess
> The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
This is where the magic is happening (I believe). They have these ultra cores with additional extensions which they are pinning the benchmarks to.
Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
> Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.
I agree that if each core doesn't "support" the full ISA it's a huge pain (the one generation of Intel AVX-512-but-not parts were incredible), but that hasn't been common in years. Usually (and in this case, according to my reading) the small cores get a horrible slow/decoder-emulated implementation of every instruction, so that if you schedule on the "wrong" core you don't trap but just run really slowly instead.
Otherwise, heterogeneous architectures are the present and future of mobile and consumer desktops and have been for years. Desktop OSes are getting better and mobile OSes are just fine at scheduling across different core families (the higher level of abstraction everyone complains about in mobile apps actually helps a lot here).
didn't intel discontinue heterogeneous (laptop?) chips recently
Only server, as far as I know. Server is now either high-density E core (Sierra Forest) or low-density P core (Granite Rapids), but desktop and laptop are heterogeneous still; laptops are getting even more heterogeneous because they have P-Cores, E-cores, and Low Power Island cores.
Did Intel ever ship any heterogeneous server parts? I'm not aware of any, and it looks like even the Raptor Lake desktop silicon sold under the Xeon brand only had P-cores enabled.
The worst of Intel's processor core asymmetry was with Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, where the two LP-E cores on the IO die had no L3 cache and really bad DRAM latency despite being directly adjacent to the DRAM controller, resulting in those two cores combined offering about as much performance as one of the E-cores on the CPU chiplet. And they used the same IO die across both generations, while updating the microarchitecture of the CPU chiplet, so things diverged even more. And because the performance of the LP-E cores was so bad, Windows wouldn't schedule any threads on them unless it was trying to operate exclusively on those LP-E cores with the CPU chiplet powered down entirely—but those two LP-E cores were still reported to software in the total thread count, so heavy multithreaded applications would launch two more threads than could actually be scheduled at once.
With Panther Lake, Intel still has three tiers of CPU cores, but the performance gap between E cores and LP-E cores is down to only about 10%.
All 10 cores support the same extensions. It’s silly to implement an SoC any other way, and it’s been a decade since someone has last made that mistake.
It's been a long time since anyone tried to actually ship a chip with different instruction set support enabled across its cores, but Intel has spent the past several years shipping consumer parts where they had to disable some features (AVX-512) on their P-cores to bring them down to the level of what their E-cores support, because they didn't plan ahead for doing a heterogeneous chip with those two microarchitectures. Toggling off some instructions in microcode for some cores is quite different from having two microarchitectures that are each designed to implement the same instruction set but with different performance and power characteristics.
It is just the same as MediaTek Dimensity 9500. They managed 4000+ point in lab, but real world it was much closer to 3300.
It is still not a bad results though. And we are about to see MediaTek Dimensity 9600 based on ARM C2-Ultra.
It will be interesting to find out the details. From the block diagram, the core only issues 10 instructions per cycle, so not especially wide. Maybe the performance will be worse once in a real phone in real thermal conditions, but if that's true, it could make for a very interesting laptop or desktop chip. Time will tell.
The C1-ultra has a decode of 10 instructions but can issue up to 23 uop per cycle, that’s a good bit wider than any other CPU. In particular, I believe it’s the first CPU to have a 4th load pipeline.
> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can.
From what I recall reading, the impressive performance of Apple mobile CPUs is partly attributable to throwing more silicon area at the problem while not being as cost sensitive (no need to share margin with SoC vendor)
ok but power consumption??
Good. Competition is great for consumers.
If China has technological superiority to the US in every facet of science and engineering, is that really good for us though?
Not good for us if it gets banned domestically because the US can't compete in a free market.
Free market was a tool, yet for you it is a venerated idol.
That's fine, US can export movies and alfalfa.
Who is "us"?
I guess US and European societies.
US consumer
Yeah I am not from US so this does not concern me.
> If China has technological superiority to the US in every facet of science and engineering, is that really good for us though?
I'm too stupid or too mad a Trump to care.
Can we get a powerful arm CPU yet that is geared purely toward performance and just slap an AIO or water cooler on it ? Don't understand why this doesn't exist
LPDDR6... that's not enough for speedy inference
Oh thank heavens, computing hardware that the AI companies will not buy all of the supply of.
It depends on the number of channels. The Xring O3 appears to have 4×24-bit channels, so 113.8 GB/s. The iPhone 17 Pro's memory bandwidth is ~76.8 GB/s. Seems fine?
If I recall correctly, Strix Halo gets about 450G/s. The M series processors get between 400 and 800G/s, and an actual NVIDIA card is like 5.5T/s. 113G/s is pretty slow for inference.
The CPU is for mobile phones. An Nvidia H200 has 4.8TB/s. An RTX 5090 has 1.8TB/s. Both use ~700W - not comparable with a phone.
Strix Halo is 256 GB/s.
Thank you! Got my wires crossed: Strix Halo at 256G/s, M1 at 450G/s. Apologies, and thanks for the correction!
According to Mark Gurman, the base M6 is bumped up to 200 GB/s of memory bandwidth with a single core performance bump of 15%.
Not every computing platform is expected to do fast inference.
Maybe,but memory bandwidth is much better than on the DGX Spark at least.
No. its has a 96 bit bus.
I hate this RAMpocalypse so much
On the other hand, this year's RAMpocalypse could be 2028's RAMbundance ;P
RAMvana was right there!!
"Arm-designed CPU core matches Apple-designed CPU core from a year ago"
No mention I can see of power consumption multiple compared to apple's chips at matching perf. My guess is 2x-5x
US Government - China is a security risk & they will steal our data. We should ban xiaomi for national security risk. We found the phone collecting telemetry..... just like google and apple.
Is raw perf considered Apple's moat? I think it's their software. I would buy a MacOS laptop even if the performance is ghastly ... in fact, I did: the MacBook Neo.
I don't like Apple as a company or how they act around locking people out of the devices they buy.
I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.
So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.
> I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.
This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.
>> good touchpad, be silent
> This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.
Including those two items I emphasised? This is usually where Apple's competition fail, mostly because they don't even consider it.
I specifically check the touchpad as well, since right now I am on a MacBook running Asahi and I just can't stand other touchpads. I even tried a Thinkpad for a while and had to return it.
However, while ZenBook's touchpad is not haptic, it's at least a glass one and generally praised for being quite good in comparison. I asked a bunch of people. Notably I prefer to double tap than press on my touchpads, so I don't really care about the haptic feedback, but to each their own. Still, I think it's worth trying it. BestBuy should have them in store if you're in US, I haven't tried it myself yet.
And yes, it's surprisingly quiet. It's a bigger form factor (16") despite very low weight, so that helps with heat dissipation and X2 is very efficient.
Any thoughts on the "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"?
Doesn't meet the same silent or single core perf requirements. probably the closest out there though.
Yes it is. I've bought a MacBook air despite despising MacOS (with the hope that Asahi support will come eventually) because the processor currently has no competition.
That's sort of weird though because unless the operating system supports your applications, the performance of the processor cannot be appreciated.
My applications are generally open-source and volunteers have already compiled them to any and all operating systems whose tool chain is available.
The general workload performance (browsing, text editing) is comparable for neo and m* MacBooks afaict.
Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.
Why would we compare it to an 8-year-old design? For browsing, the current MBP smokes the MBN, by margins of roughly one-third. It is a significant and noticeable regression. For sustained workloads like software development or even running the MacOS updates, it is a huge and glaring regression. But it's still good kit.
Yes it is. And it has been that way for more than a decade for typical consumer-oriented single-threaded workloads like running JavaScript on a webpage.
the MacBook neo has faster single core perf than any x86 laptop (for the first 0.5 sec which is what matters for ui responsiveness).
Insane if true. Does Xiaomi sell laptops?
Yeah, but they're just normal Intel stuff.
I have Mi Notebook Pro. Not that bad actually.
But they have stopped making premium laptop since then.
can't wait to see Xiaomi enter the GPUs market and beats Nvidia
this is an arm mali gpu?
good. competition is good. we, the consumers, win.
the a20pro and what not will match or beat it and the cycle will continue.
if this chip turns into a decent desktop chip then arm linux laptops might be very nice.
Great, now they can put much more Ads in my notes app...
Good, get this qualcomm garbage out of here
2020's US geopolitical doctrine:
1) Pick a historically extremely innovative and disciplined culture which also happens to have massive human capital
2) Please arbitrary artificial ill-thought-out economic constraints on them
3) wait a while
4) get a bunch of magnificent spanking in return (AI, chips, etc...)
This worked just as well in the 1980s when they wanted to protect their auto industry...
I can feel the scores of messages being sent to the federal government from lobbyists saying what a threat Chinese hardware is to national security.
It's an ARM-designed CPU core, made in Taiwan. Very little difference from say MediaTek's upcoming Dimensity SoC just announced earlier because it is made on TSMC N3P instead of N2.
I don't think they have any angle with that.
you say that like American lobbyists and Congress people are at-all technically minded and not just hyperbolic princes seeking influence at any cost
To be fair, describing the internet as a series of tubes is rather technical to some extent.
If they said "pipes" network admins probably would have given it a pass.
we had one chance to elect that technocrat who could have set us on the path that the PRC is on now. instead, we decided it was more important to feel like we could have a beer with the President and so ended up invading Iraq and Afghanistan instead
This thread is the perfect example of useful idiots with astroturfing. This is a CPU core designed by UK company (and owned by Japanese) made in Taiwan on equipment made in EU (with non trivial USA components). Xiaomi here is the easiest to replace in this chain (and the Chinese have very much tried to replace any of the others, failing for now). Yet they are angling for a huge PR win.
ARM is merely an IP portfolio licensing company. They don't really design or build anything. And everyone uses TSMC (who uses ASML). The primary design is still being done by Xiaomi, that's the most unique part of this build.
Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.
They license the IP that they design. They design complete chips you can buy and go right to tape out with no changes if you want.
And how did that IP portfolio come into existence? Did it suddenly materialize out of thin air or… did ARM engineers design it?
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt: in your mothertongue, the meaning of “design” is not as broad as in English?
How about Apple M series ARM chip designs? From what I have seen only resemblance with ARM is the ISA.
What about it? Apple has an architectural license which allows them to design their own CPUs with ARM ISA. Most companies that use ARM CPUs don’t.
Your initial response made it sound as if Xiaomi did nothing wrt chip design and all the hail goes to "ARM engineers" which is simply not true. Had that been true we would have dozens of chip designers which we don't.
Really?! Did you read the announcement? C1 ultra cores are designed by ARM.
>The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).
>https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra
ARM does the design. What are u talking about?
Below is some additional detail about the processor. Like the parent comment notes, ARM licenses IP of an ISA or core designs (see ARM C1-Ultra cores [0]), licensees like Qualcomm then make specific SoC for different use-cases.
0. https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra1. https://wccftech.com/xiaomi-xring-03-official-tsmc-3nm-n3p-l...
You are misunderstanding, and, they are not downplaying.
A revision or other reply would benefit from explaining how their value chain x location correspondence is wrong - perhaps missing a step?
Though, in anticipation of a revision, I wonder if its simple as you thought the cores were custom-designed by Xiaomi instead of standard ARM.
Did they license an actual chip design from ARM or just the ISA?
They licensed several ARM IP blocks.
I'm not one to cry "foreign bots!" but this thread seems astroturfed after realizing this.
> I can feel the scores of messages being sent to the federal government from lobbyists saying what a threat Chinese hardware is to national security.
The motivation for such messages may be greedy, but it doesn't mean the facts aren't wrong:
1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.
2. Free market incentives work counter to national security all the time, in many ways (e.g. causing domestic capabilities to wither and die).
Can we audit American corporations?
Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.
If "China" decides it doesn't like me, my life really isn't going to change much. If my electric company decides it doesn't like me, I'm in big trouble.
Yeah, I don't want China as an adversary. It appears to me that it is a country full of fun, smart and interesting people. And their manufacturing prowess is incredible.
I'm into funny electric vehicles and China makes some beauties!
What about Russia and Ukraine?
The answer varies depending on the day.
"Two bald men fighting for a comb", both in demographic collapse and set afire for the usual reasons.
You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9], bribe your politicians [10], censor your media [11], universities [12,13,14], advertising and corporations in general [15,16], and even books [17].
While they plan 50 years ahead, we are stuck re-litigating the most basic "united we stand, divided we fall" logic, even while the consequences are all around us. But congratulations on your enlightened individualism.
[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673
[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...
[4] https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overpro...
[5] EU: Anti-dumping probe into China solar panels - https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2...
[6] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...
[8] FIPA agreement with China: What's really in it for Canada? - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...
[9] Posters depicting Hong Kong protests removed by Massey University within 12 hours - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...
[10] Businesses with Chinese connections gave Australia's major parties more than $5.5 million between 2013 and 2015, making them easily the largest source of foreign-linked donations. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-21/australian-groups-str...
[11] Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/apple-ch...
[12] Chinese students in Australia fear reprisals at home if they speak out, inquiry hears - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/12/chine...
[13] Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, says that [..] American scholars practice self-censorship about China and adopt the official narrative of the Chinese regime when talking about sensitive issues. “We don’t talk about ‘Taiwan independence.’ We talk about ‘the cross-Strait relations.’ We don’t talk about ‘the occupation of Tibet.’ We don’t call the June 4th Massacre ‘massacre.’ - https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-american-academy-misle...
[14] China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/chinese-officials-co...
[15] Leica Camera has sought to distance itself from a promotional video depicting photographers covering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown three decades ago, after it landed the German company in hot water in China. - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/lei...
[16] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...
[17] China gets German children's book about COVID withdrawn - https://www.dw.com/en/china-gets-german-childrens-book-about...
Edit as reply ("posting too fast", thanks HN) to all the "but the US also does bad things" "counterarguments":
> Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
I'm European, and not stupid enough to believe that because the US is acting poorly or even in some cases hostile to Europe (to say nothing of the Middle East or South America), that we should roll over and allow China to subjugate us instead. Neither should the US. This is "you are not pure and innocent enough for self-defense" logic. Please don't drag the rest of us down in some deluded attempt at atonement.
> You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].
All of South America already feels that way about the USA. Add the EU if we include the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard.
Sadly Colombia just elected a US citizen as the new president. The "subordinate receivers of orders" status has been achieved.
This is what will happen when a hegemon realizes their power and elects someone scrupulous. That's why it's important to be the hegemon.
Meanwhile look at the southchina sea shenanigans and the behavior of Chinese fishing fleets all over the world.
>[1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].
As a Canadian, I am going to be honest and say that I thought at first you were describing the United States of 2026.
I mean, we have a much better opinion of China. As does almost the entire world. For extremely good reason.
There is one country bombing endless nations, stealing resources, engaging in sea piracy, undermining democracies, trying to destroy the West, and so on, and it is the United States of America under a juvenile halfwit self-dealing shitbag pedophile, working on behalf of an utterly deranged group of kleptocrats.
Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.
> I don't personally consider "China" my adversary
They're not an adversary in the same way that a guy demanding your wallet at knifepoint is, or a company able to cut off your electricity is.
China is an adversary in the sense that they're a totalitarian government, who, by the nature of that system, cannot brook any sort of opposition to their ideology, plans, or desires. All within the state, none without. That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time because doing so will suggest that the powers-that-be in China might not have all of the answers to the human condition. Either you fall in line, or you have to be eliminated.
If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
Instead of railing about ideology, try comparing the actions of the U.S. and China over the past 20 years. The U.S. has been far more interventionist and aggressive; China appears to be maturing and the U.S. is regressing.
Tell that to the fishermen on the shores of the South China Sea, Hong Kong, people in India along the border, and of course, Taiwan.
I'll agree that the US is regressing, but it's becoming more like China. You have an elite that are putting themselves beyond any sort of accountability. You need more and more connection to them in order to get anywhere in society. How long before you see them enshrine themselves in the constitution and create a cadre system?
An "adversary" can also just be a country we're in competition with. Both America and China are in competition for the global leader. Adversary could be akin to friendly competition if we all wanted to operate this way.
> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time
When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.
This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.
> When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.
And how many of those invasions have been of other countries with democratic-republican forms of government in the last 30 years?
> This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.
Then let's take a look at more of that evidence. How's Tibet doing these days? Did the CCP decide that they, too, need to follow international law and withdraw all forces and government infrastructure from the region after invading it in 1950? How about the agreement with Hong Kong? Have they stopped ramming fishing boats in the "disputed" parts of the South China Sea? I quote that because according to international law, there is no dispute; China is just enforcing piracy.
I'd also like to say, they're not an authoritarian technocracy. They're totalitarian. China's political, military, economic, and cultural institutions are all fundamentally guided by the cadre system, which is a version of the party vanguard system suggested by Lenin. A person is paid to be a professional revolutionary of sorts. That person's influence and prospects within the cadre system are not judged solely by merit; they're judged by adherence to a dogma, which is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in this case. This isn't just "ideology vibes", it's a description of the system as it is as a practical matter.
Imagine having a person who is professionally Trumpist at your company constantly making sure that what you do is in line with what the GOP under Trump wants. For a practical example, let's think about tariffs. Does your business suffer because of the tariffs ordered by Trump? Well, no it does not, because that's not what the Trumpist cadre member would say. You wouldn't be filing lawsuits to try and lift those tariffs.
Furthermore, now imagine that the GOP in this case is the only party allowed to have majority control of the government, not just as a de facto matter, but as a de jure matter as well since it'd be a part of the constitution.
There will, sooner or later, be a Chinese Trump. It'll be very difficult to gauge from the outside, because of the restricted flow of information in and out of the country, but it will eventually happen. When that happens, there will be no putting the brakes on anything.
> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time
How in the world is the USA existing with other systems then? By taking it all over with force and subterfuge? It is obvious to those with eyes that China, despite being "totalitarian" has been the better actor (compared to the USA) on the world stage for decades now.
> If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.
Yea, because Americans are fucking violent jerks and can only get what they want through threats and intimidation.
If you were able to determine in 5 seconds whether or not a person was a violent jerk, it would take you ~28 years of around-the-clock meetings to assess >= 50% of the current U.S. population, thereby rendering this comment meaningful and true. If you needed a whopping 30 seconds, it would take ~166 years. Better get cracking!
If I lacked the wit to understand sampling, that would be true.
But as a Brit. America, our supposed ally is slapping tarriffs on us, and threatening our actual allies. China not so much. So which are our adversaries?
> slapping tariffs
Countries change trade policy often as is deemed advantageous. For example, the UK decided to leave the customs union of the EU and start treating trade with the continent as it does everywhere else, and did so by no less than a direct popular vote, not a contrived set of executive orders facing court challenge. Does the EU crow on about how the UK is now an enemy? They would certainly have more long-term evidence for it than they would over changes in trade policy with the United States.
> threatening our actual allies
American military leadership was asked to consider plans for an attack on Greenland. American military leadership refused. [0]
I wonder how Chinese military leadership would do if ordered to invade Taiwan.
[0] https://www.firstpost.com/world/trump-asked-us-special-force...
I mean, China's seems to be doing an okay job at coexisting with other countries.
Especially when you compare it to the US, where our democracy and capitalism have led us to numerous wars and war-crimes.
Like, just this year, we've committed far more breaches of international law than china https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_the_2026_Iran_war#...
In recent history, we performed dozens of violent coups and destroyed countries in the name of overthrowing communist regimes.
China has a totalitarian government, but it's existing more in harmony with the world than the US government has for all of my life, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese government will conflict with other countries while in the same breath implying the US government is better.
You're going to find China's history as wanting as the US's in that regard. Plenty of Chinese arms found their way to theaters of war in all corners of the globe during the latter half of the 20th century, and continue to do so in the Donbas today.
Or maybe you can look into what happens to nations in China's immediate neighborhood that resist Beijing's designs.
North Korea, a prison camp masquerading as a country, exists solely because of China. Had Mao not intervened on behalf of the Kim family, UN forces would have asserted control up to the Yalu. To this day, the Chinese have been breaking international law by helping Pyongyang dodge sanctions over the DPRK's nuclear weapons program. Same with Russia, actually, despite them both sitting on the UNSC, which passed the sanctions.
China also illegally occupies Tibet and has for over 75 years.
All of this points to a country very much not existing in harmony with the world.
As far as the US government being better, it's not about any given government being better. It's about whether or not totalitarianism can continue on peacefully. It cannot. This is evident on its face.
Kind of an okay job, but they could do better. I might feel differently if I lived in Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjian, Myanmar, etc.
> Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.
I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.
Myopically individualistic perspectives, focused on your individual wants and day-to-day experiences, miss a lot of stuff.
> I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.
Nobody in Ukraine who wasn't already explicitly pro-Russian thought that in 2013, did they? Russia-aligned individuals poisoned the third president of Ukraine during his presidential campaign, very likely with direct assistance. You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.
> You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.
You're being too literal. I'm sure Ukrainians weren't actually so stupid as many Americans can be.
My point is you could transplant that logic (elevate individual, myopic interests and gripes; lose sight of the community you're part of), into a situation that we've already seen play out (Ukraine v. Russia).
I am observing that it is a bad analogy.
China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.
China isn't even a threat to the the daily life of individual Americans in the way that Russia was (and arguably is)
> China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.
My whole point is that looking at it from the perspective of the "daily life of individual Americans" is the wrong one.
Also, while no two situations are going to be exactly the same, I think it's false to say "China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans." It'd be happy to turn the US into a weak, low-tech country whose only exports are agriculture and natural resources. I can't find it right now, but I've read a quote from some high-level Chinese official to that effect.
If you are an American company US backdoors are annoying but hard to avoid given the government will find ways to compell access anyway. Adding potential avoidable foreign back doors does not improve your security.
I wouldn't tell a Chinese company to buy from Cisco. I wouldn't tell an American one to buy from Huawei.
Exactly. This is not a question of whether you get spied on, it is a question of who gets the monopoly for spying on you. Between extortion groups, cybercrime syndicates, foreign governments and last but not least my own government, there's not much room for real privacy online these days.
>> 1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.
> Can we audit American corporations?
What's your point? Did you even read what I wrote? The five words of your comment seem to be pretty sloppy:
1. If you're taking about their products, which is probably what you meant: if you think they're your adversary, then the answer is no, it's pointless.
2. But your comment as written reads as if you're talking about auditing the corporations themselves, which does in fact happen (for tax and financial reporting purposes).
This is essentially asking every country in the world to be subservient to US tech in perpetuity. They didn't sign up for that.
To make conversation productive, please define "national security" in this case.
For example, if China can't install its hardware in Pentagon, why is it a threat to national security.
On the other hand, if you say, Intel will be in trouble because of these chips, then I would say, so what? Wasn't this a dream of MBAs, educated by the top US schools, to outsource everything in business to cheaper service providers (e.g. manufacturing to China, software development to India and etc,.)
Where is the threat and what is the threat?
"To make conversation productive, please explain how outsourcing your strategic industry and know-how to geopolitical rivals and enemies is a threat."
You have a funny definition of "productive".
In the 1980s, when Japanese firms were 7 of top-10 in world market cap, the trade magazines were screaming about Japanese fifth gen computers, silicon prowess, etc. and cyberpunk SF mandatorily had Japanese locales thrown in ...
But Meta can share with NSA what kind of porn are you into or that you've said few bad words about US president, whilst CCP doesn't care, so who is a real adversary?! By the way I am an INDIVIDUAL, my personal FREEDOM and FEELINGS are all that matter. China didn't hurt my feelings, domestic companies or politicians did, so, again, who's a real adversary now, huh?!
3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources to show this is not a sudden new development:
Back in 2014, the central government set up the China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. - https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2145422/how-ch...
Over the next decade, China plans to invest up to RMB 1 trillion (US$161 billion) into its domestic semiconductor industry as it seeks to become a global power in the sector. In recent years, Beijing has repeatedly stated that developing its own integrated circuit (IC) industry is of integral national strategic concern. - https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chips-all-in-investing-i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Indus...
> 3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources:
Yeah, I agree. The US and its allies took the wrong lessons from the economic aspect of the cold war. They saw Western capitalism out-perform Soviet central planning, then let capitalist ideologues run amok.
China has the advantage: since it's not run by capitalist ideologues it better able to correct the deficiencies of capitalism AND it can exploit predictable capitalist behavior for strategic advantage.
> Over the next decade
That was a 2016 article.
We're at the other end of that investment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSvDYDfd78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhQrz9EJ40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KrdcTsScKk
It did not quite turn out like china wanted.
This isn't to be dismissive of what they ARE delivering - china has the potential to be very big in RAM, and Storage in the comming decades. But I'm not sure that they met their industrial and geopolitical goals with these efforts.
OH, BUT we have fable! We have AI! of course we can answer these questions? can't we? which is true: America's AI is a super powerful defense against our enemies or America's AI is too stupid to defend against such a threat, and only sactions and import controls will suffice.
Just seems like you're inventing things to be scared of.
it's a hardware problem, you run into engineering, materials, and physics issues. we're not talking about reverse engineering software
Xiaomi doesn't do business in the US anyway.
The angle is to pressure other countries to ban them as well.
same playbook than Huawei
I wonder if the Trump T2 phone will get this chip.
Man I forgot about that nonsense. I can’t imagine any self respecting person picking one up.
It's a U24 Pro - somebody compared them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1ytw85Npt8
So it’s an overpriced middle of the road phone to signal ones devotion to Trump and doesn’t actually deliver on several of its core promises (like made in USA).
Just to be accurate, they don't say that it's made in the USA. They only say its assembled in the USA. Perhaps in the past they made some statement that it would have been, but the current box and marketing don't.
Yeah they updated it way late in the game when they couldn’t hide it anymore, well after money had exchanged hands. That certainly qualifies as a broken promise.
Still a massive market looks like.
Last i read most of the money came from people not reading the fine print on their $100 deposit and only a few thousand have actually been distributed.
Looking now I see maybe tens of thousands of open orders still
"Looking now"? Is this something they publicize for some unknowable reason?
I don’t want to get bogged down in a source dispute - this is very easy to search and/but I only spent about 60s on it. I am hardly an expert. Feel free to look it up as well and tell me how I am entirely wrong. This was a combination of AI responses + thumbing through the sources linked to make sure it wasn’t invented whole cloth.
I do not think they are selling well. That seems to be the consensus here.
I don't think they are selling well, either. I was wondering at your source since it would be very atypical for any company to give any numbers at all, let alone a company that's so outwardly sketchy, let alone numbers like "This is the number of orders we have standing open despite being actively in production." This is the exact kind of thing I would not expect to be easy to search, and it'd be ripe for AI hallucination.
The only numbers I can find in a quick search of my own are the leaked numbers stating 30,000 orders placed from 10,000 customers, with nothing said about shipped orders.
I mean, yeah?
It's generally a bad idea to use information-handling hardware from your main geopolitical rival.
It can be confusing to follow who the rivals are. Russia and North Korea are friends and Canada is the enemy. China seems more liked than Canada.
It's only confusing if you take a buffoon's attitude at face value, which is rather hard to do in a country where half of the people actively work to thwart what he does.
Which brings me back to my point about totalitarianism.
And everybody forgets the true power of Apple: scale. Can that supposed miracle chip be readily found in million of phones within 6 months? Or will Xiaomi keep selling 90% of their phones with 2 year old chips, reserving these chips to their 2000$ foldables?
This post serves Xiaomi because it implies competitiveness when the reality on the ground will remain unremarkable, and it helps fearmongers because they can latch on to Xiaomi's attempt to appear competitive.
Their power of scale applies to less and less regions. Xiaomi, in particular, delivers that to China where Apple previously slapped and now is becoming a niche player. It's the same as with German car makers. The trend have now reversed, with Chinese manufacturers starting to dominate on foreign markets and it's also something that was unfathomable just a few years back.
They have proven countless of times by now that they are not to be ignored.
When I buy my phones I do not give a flying fuck about "scale". All I care is what do I get for my pesos from various offerings.
What you get for the money IS scale.
Sounds like BS. I got me a nice phone and it is not from Apple
ok, and where was the CPU from? Someone who has scale I presume. Apple isn't alone with that, they're just the biggest.
Are you really cheerleading right now for massive, monopolistic, post-capitalism corporations? The thing you have decided to focus on is not only irrelevant to the topic at hand, but irrelevant in the minds of most consumers.
Current Apple hardware has a number of selling points for me, but the number of iPhones they've carelessly pumped into the world is not one of them. If anything, contemplating the amount of slave labor which Apple has contributed to leads to the opposite effect.
Additionally, in China, Apple maintains around a quarter market share vs Android's three-quarters share. The argument you are making is not even coherent.
I myself would be on a Xiaomi phone if GrapheneOS were able to support one.
https://xcancel.com/lemire/status/2091894299289874926
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xcancel/
And on iOS?
(Also I'd recommend https://libredirect.manerakai.com/)
I can install Firefox (and Chrome) extensions with the Orion Browser. It‘s developed by Kagi https://orionbrowser.com/ I also installed uBlock Origin on Orion, which works quite well on iOS
Ublock Origin or wBlock or AdGuard solid on Safari iOS too.
I have no luck with most of the extensions installed to Orion.
URL Redirects feature, thanks Jeff Johnson! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stopthemadness-pro/id647138029...
it works on orion
Thanks!
I think constraint creates the best innovation, the US is shooting itself in the foot by forcing China to innovate.
Thank you OP for using xcancel.
Is AI helping to improve chip design?
I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0
As usual with claims from China based companies. It's pure lies until we have an independent test with free access.
Two rather rare words in China
Sad thing is that it'll still be running the damn Android and so JVM not C or Swift on the machine.
What a weird, unhinged take. Android is mostly written in C, Android apps are AOT/JIT compiled when written in Java, and the NDK lets you write/port from whatever native you have, which is how you get Chrome to run on it to begin with.
What's the point of the complaint? Is there anything better that is commercially viable?
Your Linux based dream phone is not going to sell more than 10 units.
I think they might be saying that there's still no supported way to build a native-code app on the Android OS. It could be construed as a plea to make that happen in order to unlock greater performance, not necessarily a desire to have a DIY Linux-based OS option.
There's NDK which seems supported. It's been some years since I messed with mobile stuff but https://developer.android.com/ndk
Ignoring the native vs java runtime interface application difference between Android and iOS, which the top poster was was referencing.
Your Linux phone statement is a fallacy.
Ask FuriLabs how many of their phones they have sold.[0] High confident it is more than 10.
FuriLabs moved their batman, battery monitoring application, from Python to C and it really improved performance. Native applications really do keep resource usage low and is beneficial.
[0] https://furilabs.com/
They don't publish sales numbers, but I've never seen one. So probably somewhere between 10 units and significant market share.
I believe the comparison is with iOS not Linux. Android is Linux after all. It’s just that most programs don’t get to run a that level of abstraction, and instead run on top of a jvm. At least in iOS the code does seem to be able to be more efficient due to to higher usage of natively compiled code, which is what I think the op was complaining about.
There's no JVM in Android. Most important parts of an Android app are compiled ahead of time into CPU machine code, rarely used parts are compiled into machine code in runtime using JIT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime
There's no JVM in Android. Never has been.
Apple's *Last Year* CPUs. We're literally about to get a new chip in 2-3 weeks from them.
Still better than what Qualcomm is offering?
I'm not sure that it matters. You can't put a Qualcomm chip in an iPhone and you can't put Apple Silicon in any other device. So there's no really straightforward way to compare them other than specs on paper, which we all know are theoretical until they get integrated.
Why "better than Qualcomm" doesn't matter? You don't have to compare everything with Apple products.
I didn’t make that comparison; you did.
The real concern is supply chains. The US can design but not manufacture, whereas it appears China can do both.
> whereas it appears China can do both
Not these. They seem to be using ARM-designed cores that others already use and TSMC fabs in Taiwan.
In this case, a Chinese company is using a Taiwanese manufacturer (TSMC), so they're not doing both.
This site is just crazy pro-china now. Guess that happens when non-westerners dominate online, sadly.
I don't see any editorializing, mostly just reports that China is actually competing well.
Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.
Have you considered that china has been working on these things for the past decade and they're finally getting results out of that?
And yes, it is known that they do steal tech as samsung discovered in their tech preview phone bust in korea.
That's a profoundly strange take. I've never in my life seen a more anti-China technology forum than HN. Whatever the headline is, say "CO2 levels have been falling for 21 months", if it has "China" in it, it will be ignored. If it has "US", it will make the front page for days. Try Algolia and see for yourself.