Well, it really is a hot topic that has its crumbs, since the West’s blockades with China mean competition isn’t fair, but it wouldn’t be without them. he can Made in China nail CPU who rivals the greatest? Well, we must first clarify two points: what we consider to be a manufacturer and what we consider to be a competitor, and this is where everything becomes interesting.
China has an advantage and they have a problem: they are the best at making things in bulk, which doesn’t necessarily mean low quality, but even if they do it very well, they still don’t have something there where the West is at the fore: design and conceptualization. They say everything is designed in the West and everything is made in China, and that’s largely true, but the Chinese have something we’ve lost: the hunger to eat the world, and this article will revolve around that. , although it may not look like it.
Neither China will manufacture everything, nor the West will design everything
The best example we can give is India and on the other hand the Loongson company, which is the part that interests us. China is making some interesting moves with many of its companies, and the problem is, it’s doing it at a very high rate, so much so that the war between NVIDIA, AMD and Intel for x86 and ARM processors may be over .
The Loongson-made Godson CPU, specifically the 3A5000, achieved a brutal 50% improvement over its predecessor, where it also consumed 30% less power. Good data for sure. But beware of the jump in performance of this new generation led by the 3A6000, because the data is even more incredible with a single jump between the two: +37% in INT and +68% in performance in FLOAT. What does this mean compared to Intel and AMD?
Well, considering that the comparison is complicated using another ISA (LoongArccompany property) performance in SPEC 2006 leaves impressive results, as it would belong to the IPC of AMD Zen 3 and Intel Rocket Lake (Gen 11).
So what is China missing to be competitive in CPU?
Well, something very important: the development of scanners and lithographic nodes. In design, it’s more or less clear that they’ll be on par with the West in the next decade, if not above. Neither AMD nor Intel seem to be able to do much to increase performance, but let’s not let this data fool us, because as we said, the design is only an important part of the cake, now it has to be captured and recorded on a wafer with its corresponding chips.
And curiously, China suffers from it. The boycott of the West with ASML in the lead leaves China an orphan, which has to invest a lot of money in designing scanners and substrates that can compete with Westerners. And here another different phase of the game enters, because as we surely know, China considers Taiwan as part of its territory, and of course, Taiwan is home to TSMC, the largest and most advanced semiconductor manufacturer in the world, which makes AMD and NVIDIA, for example. .
The shortest path may be the one that ends up costing the most
So there are two options here: either China invests billions over 10+ years to be able to start competing with ASML, or invade Taiwan, take over TSMC, start a war with the US, Japan, Korea of the South, and perhaps the whole of NATO, is copying ASML technology with EUV and exposing itself to a terrible cost.
Unfortunately, the war scenario is not excluded or a pipe dream. There are fighter jets flying over Taiwanese airspace, the United States has said that if China invades Taiwan, there will be a military war, and in short, it is of little use to China to have a superior CPU architecture if it cannot manufacture the chips in a leader node. Therefore, the answer under this article would be no, China cannot make such a processor, although being accurate, it would rather be a “they won’t let her”but it will do so civilly or criminally, and that could leave AMD and Intel in their infancy if they don’t wake up to the Asian threat.
