Neoliberals will do anything to downplay or outright deny any historical incident where import substitution lead to industrialization. Creating captive markets for the dumping of manufactured products was one of the prime drivers of colonialism, which continued under neocolonialism. With sanctions, the US is unintentionally undermining their own hegemony. Businesses like having access to markets and moats. They are giving moats to one side and stripping access to the other.

Sanctions will do for Chinese chip makers what the great firewall did for Chinese internet giants.

Seeing /u/dylan522p acknowledge reality somewhat is refreshing although the conclusion is the predictable “Washington is just sanctioning wrong, if they followed my foolproof sanction regime it would magically work”. Liberals attacking him for this article is quite hilarious. They’re really intolerant of even the slightest deviation from US state department rhetoric.

• Todd the Father
• Todd the Son
• Todd the Spirit

Yes, there will be progress but that’s not really what Moore’s Law is about. Moore’s Law is not an observation that there will be progress eventually but an observation at specific rate of that progress. It’s not “transistors will double eventually”, or “transistors will increase somewhat every 2 years”.

With exponential growth, the tiniest decrease compounds to a major difference. 2 to the power of 3 is 8; the A16 has 16B transistors not 26B. That’s with the gains of the last DUV nodes, 16->10->7nm. EUV to EUV, 5nm to 3nm doesn’t match up to that. It seems transistor growth with EUV nodes is becoming linear so not really in line with the exponential growth of Moore’s Law.

The chips could be larger but flagship phones would have to become even more expensive, and physically larger to dissipate the extra heat. Dennard Scaling mattered more in practice than Moore’s Law ever did but that ended over a decade ago. At the end of the day, all the microarchitecture and foundry advances are there to deliver better performance for every succeeding generation and the rate of that is definitely decelerating.

In 3 years, the only Android chip that has a perceivable difference in performance from the Kirin 9000 is the 8 Gen 2, which cost $160 just for the chip. That performance difference isn’t even enough to be a selling point; the Mate 60 Pro is in the same price range as those 8 Gen 2 phones yet is still perfectly competitive in that market segment.

SMIC is the fab that Huawei contracts to make the Kirin 9000S. Huawei has the capability to make most other chips itself just not mobile phone SOCs.

AMD always having the process advantage over Intel and Nvidia but still ending up as the underdog is puzzling.

AMD Zen 2 on 7nm should’ve destroyed Comet lake on 14nm but it didn’t. Rocket Lake faired a lot worse against Zen 3 but it was an iffy 10nm to 14nm port job.

AMD Navi GPUs on 7nm somehow were less efficient than Nvidia’s Turing on 12nm(16nm+) while also not having ray tracing or tensor cores. Nvidia were left cocky enough to go for Samsung’s discount 8nm the gen after instead of attaining process parity.

It’s going to get worse because the gains from each succeeding node diminishes so AMD can no longer count on the gains to make them competitive.

The full chart contains most modern chips from the 6 major ARM mobile SOC vendors. I just cropped it because it would’ve way too long otherwise. I also cropped it like that so that the number on the chart can be read as performance relative to the 865 without needing context.

It doesn’t help that Qualcomm’s 888, and 8 Gen 1 were a disappointment. Even more so since they were the debut of ARM’s Cortex-X series of performance cores. Those were supposed to be ARM’s attempt at matching Apple’s custom cores. Thermal throttling issues meant that they weren’t even real upgrades from the 865 in terms of sustained performance.

The original Kirin 9000 was from 2020. Hard to improve performance, if the US government is doing everything to hinder your ability to make chips in the first place. Huawei matching the original TSMC 5nm EUV chip with just SMIC 7nm DUV is a miracle.

Well look at the other contract fabs that could buy EUV scanners if they wanted to.

GlobalFoundries gave up on 7nm so 14/12nm is the best they have. UMC barely makes any 14nm chips so they definitely aren’t pursuing anything below 7nm. Getting to 7nm is an investment few can make and it won’t pay off for most. The number of fabless chip companies that can afford to design for <7nm and need the leading edge in performance is tiny. A high price of entry to serve so few customers.

SMIC is only the third pure play contract fab to offer <=7nm and Samsung needed EUV to get to 7nm unlike SMIC and TSMC.

Judging by the performance and density of the Kirin 9000S, SMIC’s 7nm DUV is at least as good as Samsung’s 5nm EUV. The same A510 cores made with SMIC’s 7nm are as efficient if not more so than those made with Samsung 4nm.

The previous top Huawei phone, the P60 Pro has the 4G variant of the 8+ Gen 1, which was made with TSMC 4nm. The Mate 60 Pro being technically a downgrade in process node is something few if any of its users will actually notice in practice. Huawei could’ve easily just made a 5G modem and paired it with an 8 Gen 2. It would’ve been a lot easier to make a tiny modem yield but they chose the harder option of making an entire SOC. They succeeded in matching if not surpassing the TSMC 5nm made original that stopped being made on September 15, 2020. All the sanctions could do was delay further production of the Kirin 9000 for 3 years.

I don’t think the CPU performance is down to optimization. The 4 custom Taishan performance cores having hyper threading is probably why. The Kirin 9000S has 8 cores / 12 threads, which is why the multi-core score is so high.

The GPU drivers definitely aren’t ready yet; it can’t render Genshin Impact correctly. It’s not an ARM Mali reference design; it’s Huawei own Maleoon 910. The only things from ARM are the Cortex-A510 efficiency cores, and the instruction set.

Transistor density isn’t doubling every 2 years.

N3E is only 1.6x denser than N5 and that only apply to logic transistors. TSMC assumes logic makes up 50% of a hypothetical chip to arrive at 1.3x scaling. It wouldn’t come anywhere near close to actually doubling in real chips.

Analog and SRAM scaling has been decelerating for years. TSMC N3E has the same SRAM cell size as N5. Samsung 4nm has the same SRAM cell size as 7nm. Because they don’t scale with logic, every succeeding generation these components will take up more and more of the silicon hence AMD’s move to chiplets.

The Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the original 9000, which was made using TSMC 5nm. It performs far better than any 7nm chip.

CPU Performance almost matches the 4nm Exynos 2200, which because the 2300 was a no show is the best chip Samsung has.

GPU Performance although not a match for the original 9000 still exceeds the 5nm Snapdragon 888.

Geek Bench 5 Multi/Single core Scores

Geekerwan Review of the Kirin 9000S, with English subtitles

Source of the SD 865 relative performance charts

Men of War

Red Faction Guerilla

Just copy all the contents of the SD card over to be safe. Retroarch might be storing files on the SD card and the BIOS folder might be separate from the ROMs.

Having firmware on the SD card is unique to Linux handhelds. Android handhelds are basically phones so the operating system is in the flash chip on the motherboard.

Starfield demonstrates a complete lack of any cohesive vision in story, themes, and gameplay.

The artstyle has that generic “hard” space sci-fi look. I could just as well be looking at Star Citizen, Interstellar, or The Expanse. The locations might sound interesting in theory but are executed in the most bland way possible. It’s kind of hilarious to think that these tiny settlements are supposed to be interplanetary capital cities. I do understand that unrestricted player movement means that they can’t really place a massive city in the background like in the Mass Effect Trilogy but explicitly calling the places you visit capitals is absurd.

Bethesda tries hard to ape Serenity-esque space westerns with Akila. An interplanetary capital without paved roads in its main thoroughfare. It really clashes with the rest of the game’s attempts at being seen as a believable “hard” sci-fi. A vision of a car free future brought to you by the limitations of the Creation Engine. The game engine is no excuse for not having a space horse though. Traversing procedurally generated terrain on foot is a waste of time.

The vaguely utopian corporate solarpunk of New Atlantis is soulless and not in the satirical good way. Which is ironic because it seems to be inspired by Starship Troopers.

Neon, the cyberpunk offworld oilrig tries and fails to be a hip seedy dystopia. It looks more like the Outer World’s Groundbreaker Promenade than Mass Effect 2’s Omega. It doesn’t illicit feelings of despair from the callous disregard of humanity as a consequence of greed without limits. It’s just a shopping mall with boring corporate suits who try to sound edgy.

The same goes for the music. It doesn’t convey any emotion and isn’t uniquely identifiable. Inon Zur’s work for the Bethesda Fallouts weren’t this forgettable so it’s probably down to Bethesda’s lack of direction. The music doesn’t build into the atmosphere of any location or any story moment. I don’t think Jeremy Soule would’ve made a difference, and it’s good that Bethesda doesn’t associate with an accused rapist. That said I’d still say his work with Oblivion was one the best soundtracks of any game.

Ship combat has controls like Freelancer except it plays terrible. The ships feel heavy and are unresponsive to control so it doesn’t really work as an arcade space combat game. The mouse first controls with no flight stick support, fast travel, and the inability to actually dock/land manually make it an automatic fail as a spaceflight sim. The ability to fast travel instantly to any previously visited location is good though. With its quest design, it would be painful to play Starfield if they went the sim route.

The gun play is identical to Fallout 4 but plays worse due to procedurally placed enemies and levels. It has to rely on the AI, weapons and enemy design. None of those elements are able to make the fights interesting. It’s still a lot better than any of the other spaceflight games with ground combat though.

The bar is being dropped so hard that Mass Effect Andromeda is retroactively becoming a great game. In the universe that Starfield is an 87, Andromeda is at least a 97.

I’ll still play Starfield over Elite Dangerous, or No Man Sky since it has actual content. It isn’t all procedurally generated and has an actual story with characters. I’ll finish the main quest at least, the game isn’t aggressively bad in anyway. It’s just all around sterile and uninspiring. I still have the hope that somewhere out there I might find a branching side quest that is remotely as good as those in Oblivion, or New Vegas.

28nm is the nominal resolution of the scanner. The chips that can be made with a single exposure. In that measure no ASML DUV scanner is 7nm either. The physics of 193nm light makes it impossible for any DUV scanner to have a nominal resolution of 7nm. 7nm chips are made using DUV by exposing 4 times at a 28nm resolution. The same quad patterning techniques allows 22nm chips to be made with a 90nm machine.

The name is also misleading 7nm chips aren’t sub 9nm. TSMC’s 7nm chips are physically 10nm. The marketing names haven’t matched for years. It all started when TSMC sold 20nm FinFET under 16nm branding as they believed the addition of FinFET gave it 16nm performance. Then the entire industry adjusted their naming conventions to match with TSMC.

SMIC, Huawei didn’t get to where they are by compromising. They never would’ve bought the Chinese domestic alternatives if not for sanctions. Price doesn’t matter in this industry, what they’re looking for is the best in the market. This is not the type of capital equipment that subsidies can sell. Which is why when US scanner manufacturers couldn’t compete with ASML, they completely failed as economically viable businesses and their assets were sold off.

China prepared for this 17 years ago. They launched the “02 Special Project” all the way back in 2006. The companies established by those grants have existed years before the sanctions. They were able to develop the products but selling them was another thing entirely, until the sanctions hit causing a massive boom in their revenue. People forget that it was market conditions that killed GlobalFoundries 7nm effort not technical issues. The same reason UMC gave up on anything more advanced than 14nm. Sanctions created the inevitability of Chinese 7nm by wedding the world’s largest telecom equipment vendor, Huawei to SMIC.

It’s an amusing coincidence that by the time ASML will no longer be granted export licenses for their 5nm capable DUV scanners, the NXT:2000i and above, SMEE will be selling a 7nm capable scanner, the SSA/800-10W. A machine easily comparable to the NXT:1980Di that TSMC used to develop their N7 process. The fact that the NXT:1980Di and anything less advanced than it isn’t going to be export restricted is an implicit acknowledgement of the Chinese capability of making competing machines.

5nm capable DUV scanners, such as the SSA/900 still in development, might be a requirement for SMIC N+2 however as the “7nm” Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the TSMC N5 made Kirin 9000. That suggest a density far exceeding anything any other foundry has been capable of with just DUV, such as Intel 7 or TSMC N7/N7P.

Applied Materials and LAM are less of an issue. AMEC has been selling 5nm etching systems to Samsung and TSMC for years.

TSMC made Kirin 9000 ran out in 2021, P50 Pro was the last phone to use it and the Kirin 820 ran out in 2022. It’s only the 5G base stations that still use TSMC made HiSilicon chips.

Although I’d say these channels are more accurately described as apolitical analysis based on facts.

• Cabbage did a 3 video deep dive on the QBZ-191.

• Red Effect covers tanks.

• Eurasia Naval Insight covers warships and planes in the pacific.

• Kalibrated with Scott covers Ukraine.

The only Nintendo console I ever had was a Famiclone so I don’t really have much nostalgia for their games.

It’s just Nintendo ROMs that are disappearing. It’s still easier than ever to find even the most obscure classic PC games on abandonware sites and GOG compilation torrents. It’s also only the SEO abusing ROM sites that are vulnerable to Nintendo’s attacks. Complete ROMsets for their consoles can still be obtained through torrents, Vimm.net, and the r/ROMs megathread especially for the older cartridge consoles.

Emulating a current gen Nintendo console has never been as good as it is for Switch emulators. Any new PC can emulate Switch Triple As at full speed. Android is getting builds of the Yuzu emulator and mobile SOCs have enough power to run less demanding titles. When a lot people who don’t even own a Switch can play Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo is understandably trying to crack down. The portable aspect of the Switch is no longer a unique advantage. It used to be just GPD making those handheld PCs now every brand is trying to compete in that form factor.

Honestly I think the state of emulation in general is experiencing a golden age.

Retroid, Anbernic and AYN are making hardware that is a better solution for most people than trying to jailbreak and refurbish old original portable consoles. The screens, the analogs and the buttons they use are as good if not better than the first party hardware. Unlike bulky handheld PC, their Linux or Android based emulation handhelds are still in the same size and weight class as the PSP.

A couple years ago the Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators were basically just experimental demos. They weren’t stable enough to actually finish any game on and most CPUs weren’t fast enough to run them at full speed. They’re still hit and miss but the list of playable titles will only ever grow.

It has come to the point that the PC can play everything. All previous gen consoles aside from the OG Xbox have emulators at a playable state. There are almost no current gen console exclusives anymore as the PC is getting ports of PS4/PS5 exclusives, the XBone/Series never had any to begin with, and of coarse the aforementioned Switch emulation.

Being given access to accurate intel is no guarantee that they actually leverage it to form their own views.

There are anecdotes of US officials using mainstream media to spoonfeed them their positions on issues as they can’t be assed to do anything resembling actual work.