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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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 in Operation Triangulation, and even hardware experts 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
Impressive silicon progress, but real-world developer experience will hinge on sustained thermal throttling, Linux kernel support, and tooling ecosystem stability.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity. I do not see anything wrong with that.
Secret police in Canada and stuff like this - yes go ahead nail them and kick those out of the country. Has nothing to do with the trade.
> Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity.
No, the GP's comment is an attempt to correct the mistake you were so kind to outline. There's no reason we must stick with the approach set by a previous set of leaders who turned out to be short-signed and naive, and course corrections start with outlining the problems and contradictions of the present course.
What's short-sighted and naive is believing that globalism can be reversed, that economic efficiency can be overcome by political will, and that knowledge can be contained to one country. More and deeper international economic and political entaglements are inevitable. How can an adversarial relationship with one of the most advanced countries with abundant production and labor capacity help anything? Economic nationalism and high tech are incompatible.
> 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 ...
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.
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.
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.
Solar radiation.
Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.
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.
> 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.
> They would lose all of TSMC if they do any military actions.
How is that?
Is there an action movie style self destruct sequence?
"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.
>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.
> 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.
Xi will not be in power in 2049 because he will be dead. He'd be 96yo.
Considering all said so far, and events, it perhaps hardly makes real difference in the diamond era's franchised world.
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
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
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
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.
What are you gonna do the day they don't need tsmc anymore
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...
Really? Surely it can't be unfamiliar at least. So many GOPs anxiously mentioning Dear Leader every chance they get.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
They already consider it as one country. The CCP sees Taiwan as a province of China.
Or mainland China is occupied west Taiwan.
That act could throw us all back into the dark ages, though.
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
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.
What would you consider as good evidence of a backdoor? Apple got plenty of media coverup in Operation Triangulation, and even hardware experts 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.
Intel management engine
“It’s not a vulnerability, it’s a feature!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's manufactured in Taiwan.
I don't think it's by choice just ask all those extinct manufacturers
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
Those thing are not static! Changing them can be a political decision. It was a political decision in China to become excellent at manufacturing.
That depends on if everybody gets along and is willing to trade
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.
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.
Caveat on the unlocking of bootloader.
It is very much harder to do now. There is a lot of friction introduced now to it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder just how different their processes really are, considering both can be safely described as "full custom design".
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.
yeap, it's xiaomi's thing. it dont have the ability.
"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.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
Yea I dont think they show ant signs of slowing down. With how massively slow the West are, they are gonna get swallowed up.
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.
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
Speaking of "us" it seems that Samsung/Mediatek/Xiaomi/Huawei SoCs are not available in the US.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I don't want buy American cars either. European, Korean or Japanese are the way to go.
Odd to list things in reverse order.
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...
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.
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.
Also just directly by the USG, see "Cash for Clunkers".
No, it's actually 200 000 trillion for both countries.
Source: same as yours
The only serious EV maker in the US has received more US subsidizing than any single Chinese maker.
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.
You’re forgetting the 9.3$ billion given to us automakers to bail them out that was never recovered.
Even without the subsidies, at this point, they’re arguably making better cars.
Well, what do you expect him to say? Consider the audience.
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
“…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.
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.
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).
Just get a laptop?
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.
How is this news worthy? The cores are off the shelf C1-Ultra. Even Google got them in the new pixel.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yay free markets China makes a fast chip Yay national security
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.
44mb of cache really highlights the bottleneck of how raw compute is cheap, but the real limit is memory latency.
It is pretty amazing the creativity with compute architecture which is afforded by a zillion transistors.
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)
Impressive silicon progress, but real-world developer experience will hinge on sustained thermal throttling, Linux kernel support, and tooling ecosystem stability.
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
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.
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?
"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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
RIP Mediatek, RIP Qualcomm
Nice. Let's see if they perform well in the real world.
Interesting how quickly they seem to have caught up.
ok but power consumption??
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.
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.
That's fine, US can export movies and alfalfa.
Who is "us"?
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.
I think constraint creates the best innovation, the US is shooting itself in the foot by forcing China to innovate.
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?
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%.
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.
Strix Halo is 256 GB/s.
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.
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!!
Thank you OP for using xcancel.
No mention I can see of power consumption multiple compared to apple's chips at matching perf. My guess is 2x-5x
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Look at the top comment thread: just politics and no discussion of the tech.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
Good, get this qualcomm garbage out of here
"Arm-designed CPU core matches Apple-designed CPU core from a year ago"
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...
can't wait to see Xiaomi enter the GPUs market and beats Nvidia
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.
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.
Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity. I do not see anything wrong with that.
Secret police in Canada and stuff like this - yes go ahead nail them and kick those out of the country. Has nothing to do with the trade.
> Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity.
No, the GP's comment is an attempt to correct the mistake you were so kind to outline. There's no reason we must stick with the approach set by a previous set of leaders who turned out to be short-signed and naive, and course corrections start with outlining the problems and contradictions of the present course.
What's short-sighted and naive is believing that globalism can be reversed, that economic efficiency can be overcome by political will, and that knowledge can be contained to one country. More and deeper international economic and political entaglements are inevitable. How can an adversarial relationship with one of the most advanced countries with abundant production and labor capacity help anything? Economic nationalism and high tech are incompatible.
> economic efficiency can be overcome by political will
It was political will that created that economic efficiency, that you're now trying to convince us is just a fact of nature.
> Economic nationalism and high tech are incompatible.
China is economically (and traditionally) nationalist - that's why they subsidize and protect their important industries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421633
> 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 ...
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!
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
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.
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
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.