this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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The most significant part is probably that getting that extra bit of performance and power savings from a new process is where the most money is.
But for China wanting independence from sanctions, this will probably cover 90% of their needs, and in a few years, they may have caught up completely.
I think most people fail to appreciate how much of a powerhouse China is when they commit serious ressources to something.
It's remarkably easy to build something someone else has built before.
I don't have faith China's factories will lead the charge at going beyond what has already been done, just that they will reach a financial parity with the west.
There is nothing remarkably easy with making a good 7nm chip.
But you know what is remarkably easy by comparison?
That's sending a man to the moon. The process of making modern chips are way harder to develop, than the technology for a manned mission to the moon.
What makes you think China won't beat TSMC? When TSMC once was a newcomer too, that nobody thought would ever beat IBM, DEC, Sun, AMD and definitely not Intel.
What's the difference between TSMC beating everybody else, and China with about 60 times the ressources doing the same to TSMC? I know TSMC had help early on, but China has long since surpassed those initial stages.
This attitude that China can never beat the west is naive, and it's potentially destructive, as it grossly underestimates a rising economy, with a population more than 4 times bigger than their main rival.
People just don't want to believe that China can win at capitalism because it undermines all their internal narratives around the innovation power of liberalism. I say this as someone who does not personally like China and its authoritarianism.
The fact of the matter is with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, you're statistically guaranteed to have enormous pools of talent to draw on. Even a relatively modest per capita investment in education, focused on key objectives and funneled into the portion of the talent pool that they've managed to identify, will be able to yield massive innovation.
A lot of people will suffer under this authoritarianism. The people from these talent pools will be exploited and burnt out at a young age. This is already happening in China. But as a nation, it will be able to position itself extremely well technologically and economically, and this is a reality the rest of the world needs to be prepared to deal with.
I'm very ambivalent about China, but Xi definitely is taking China in the wrong direction politically IMO. He is extremely authoritarian, and also in international politics he is a bully.
It's sad because I believe China was on a path in the right direction before Xi.
But for sure as you say, we need to be prepared for China becoming the #1 economy in the world. The way China behaves now, does not bode well for when China is unmatched.