I think that the US government must be freaking out right now because I suspect they had a strategy to hamper the Chinese military tech development by cutting off their supply of cutting-edge semiconductors, and it looks like their plan may be starting to fall apart.
I’m trying to figure out whether this is a good thing because it will provide China with more deterrence, should it be a mass produced domestic semiconductor which is catching up on the best semiconductors that Taiwan and the west can produce, or if it’s bad news because it will encourage the US to accelerate their plans for war with China.
I guess I just hope that China can break ahead and reach escape velocity before the US can advance to the point where it feels ready to execute its plans for war.
US is already unable to defeat China in a war. hypersonic missiles are one thing, but China has several other advantages. the PLA Navy has more ships than the US Navy (they are smaller ships, which could be an advantage in modern peer war— smaller target, harder to detect, better maneuverability). manufacturing is a huge advantage China has— even in domestic arms manufacturing, which the US didn’t deindustrialize as drastically as other industries, the US is severely lacking and is dwarfed even by Russia’s production. US is just not ready for a peer war. you could argue that China’s soldiers are untested in battle, and you would be correct, but US tactics and operations are well known and are being studied by PLA personnel. the US strategy doesnt even work well, as evidenced by the horrible performance against countries 10% of their size.
nuclear war is a very real fear, but that would mean mutual destruction or complete destruction of the US with heavy but sustainable damage to China. China has enough of a nuclear arsenal to perform second-strike and even third-strike nuclear attacks. we are also unaware of the efficacy of China’s missile defense systems (they may not be able to defend against nuclear warheads, but i wouldn’t put it past them). also the US nuclear arsenal is old and could have problems that prevent launch
The last thing even vaguely resembling a battle the us miliary was involved in was Fallujah in 2004, 20 years ago, and that was mostly the us encircling the city with heavy weapons then flattening it, not any kind of fight.
where they vastly outnumber the enemy. this was even true im WW2
Kind of true in the European setting and not to defend the US here, but there were a few moments in the Pacific where things were quite balanced against Japan, at least until 1943.
picking your fights and only engaging when you have an advantage is just basic strategy though. if they had the sense to do this on the geopolitical level as well then they wouldn’t be an empire in decline but here we are.
they are only able to do so bc they engage in colonial warfare. fighting the nazis WW2 wasnt a colonial war, but they were only able to fight inferior forces bc the nazis were busy fighting the Soviets. and they are only able to avoid peer wars w Russia bc Ukraine is ruled by compradors who act in the service of amerikan empire. look at the horrible advice US military command is giving Ukraine, having them throw themselves at defensive lines that have materiel and personnel superiority
In WW2 they had general’s like Patton chomping at the bit to continue the war with an invasion of the Soviet Union and ofc MacAuthor wanting to escalate the Korean War into a full scale invasion of China. There has always been the opportunity to conduct a peer war but always someone with a cooler head to prevail.
The great threat to humanity is that we may have passed the threshold where the tragedy of competent anti-communists building a global hegemony will be replaced with the farce of true believers who don’t know their propaganda is propaganda having inherited an empire which their ideological lens will not allow them to accurately understand or assess the strength of itself or it’s enemies and plunge it into an unwinnable war with a nuclear superpower.
Isn’t modern US doctrine that aircraft carriers are the dominant force in the navy? China has limited aircraft carrier capability and lacks the self-sufficiency of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier.
If someone can build a hypersonic missile, someone can also build a hypersonic missile interceptor missile… And you can fit a lot of missiles in a CVBG.
Sure, the CVBG doctrine only really works against the Japanese (where both babies are fighting over small islands that are far from their respective homelands)… But I don’t think that hypersonic missiles obsolete carriers in that role.
I do think that that role is useless against China or Russia given that they aren’t really colonial imperial powers with territory around the world, but…
The whole point of the hypersonic missiles is that you cannot intercept them.
We don’t even have the technology today to intercept (fixed) ballistic missile trajectory at an acceptable rate (the US Patriots had enough problem dealing with Iraqi Scuds made in the 1950s!), and the hypersonic missiles with maneuverable and unpredictable flight paths made them orders of magnitudes harder to intercept.
The Russian Zircons (hypersonic cruise missile) fly at Mach 8-9, which means if a CVBG can detect flying objects 200km from the horizon, they literally have 72 seconds to react. That’s slightly over a minute to detect, track, calculate intercept paths (they can’t against unpredictable targets), and launch the interceptor missiles with literally no second chance if the first wave fails to hit their target (and they will fail).
It doesn’t matter how many missiles you can fit into your entire carrier battle group, if the success rate is 1/1000 (and that’s a BIG if), then good luck lol.
What even is the turning radius of an HGV? Sure, you’re not constrained by silly things like pilot blackout and whatever, but that doesn’t mean it can zig zag at will.
I don’t think hypersonic missile interception is possible, unless the US gets laser weapons working or something like that. Hypersonics are incredibly fast, and Russia’s fighter jet launched hypersonics easily defeated the Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine, when they targeted them. Even intercepting normal supersonic and subsonic cruise missiles is a crapshoot, the iron Dome in Israel gets defeated by homemade rockets at times. Interception technology is very overrated currently.
Also hypersonic missiles fly so fast that they generate a plasma cloud around them and rendering them very difficult to be tracked by radars. So you might not even see them coming at all! And even if you do, your radars can’t track them. And even if you can track them, they’re too unpredictable to calculate an intercept path.
Interceptors are more difficult to make than the missiles themselves, and often are more expensive. They also don’t have 100% interception chance so you need to fire 2-4 just to be sure.
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.
To some extent, SRAM scaling isn’t that limiting of a factor anymore. Current design practices call for tons of dark silicon and highly specialized elements, and the effective density of newer chips is still increasing rather rapidly.
A10 - 16nm TSMC - 3.28B/125mm2
A11 - 10nm TSMC - 4.3B/87mm2
A12 - 7nm TSMC - 6.9B/83mm2
A13 - 7nm TSMC - 8.5B/98mm2
A14 - 5nm TSMC - 11.8B/88m2
A15 - 5nm TSMC - 15B/107mm2
When they don’t get a node shrink, they just blow up the area to get similar transistor count scaling. Is the pace a doubling every 2 years? Not quite, but the effective pace is rather close.
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.
Technically, Moore’s Law relates to the cost curve for any given complexity, not necessarily the transistor count. That is, that the most efficient point of marginal cost/marginal performance approximately doubles every two years (implicitly, as the node shrinks).
The concern people have is that each node shrink isn’t delivering the same benefits as before… But is that true, or is the node-to-node cadence just rising? I pose that the shrinking cadence is simply a problem of lack of funding to the big fabs, not one of the technology becoming intrinsically infeasible.
In particular, I’d like to point out that the switch from planar to FinFET was also largely driven by the planar technology becoming rather infeasible for scaling at that time - we should see a similar transition to GAAFET soon and I’m tentatively hopeful for TSMC’s future GAAFET node densities after they ship N2 (which, itself, is barely a node shrink so much as it is a technology demonstrator).
Unless China can co-develop the EUV machine with the node itself, they will be very very late to this gap in foundry capability. If they can, they will only be very late.
I think that the US government must be freaking out right now because I suspect they had a strategy to hamper the Chinese military tech development by cutting off their supply of cutting-edge semiconductors, and it looks like their plan may be starting to fall apart.
I’m trying to figure out whether this is a good thing because it will provide China with more deterrence, should it be a mass produced domestic semiconductor which is catching up on the best semiconductors that Taiwan and the west can produce, or if it’s bad news because it will encourage the US to accelerate their plans for war with China.
I guess I just hope that China can break ahead and reach escape velocity before the US can advance to the point where it feels ready to execute its plans for war.
US is already unable to defeat China in a war. hypersonic missiles are one thing, but China has several other advantages. the PLA Navy has more ships than the US Navy (they are smaller ships, which could be an advantage in modern peer war— smaller target, harder to detect, better maneuverability). manufacturing is a huge advantage China has— even in domestic arms manufacturing, which the US didn’t deindustrialize as drastically as other industries, the US is severely lacking and is dwarfed even by Russia’s production. US is just not ready for a peer war. you could argue that China’s soldiers are untested in battle, and you would be correct, but US tactics and operations are well known and are being studied by PLA personnel. the US strategy doesnt even work well, as evidenced by the horrible performance against countries 10% of their size.
nuclear war is a very real fear, but that would mean mutual destruction or complete destruction of the US with heavy but sustainable damage to China. China has enough of a nuclear arsenal to perform second-strike and even third-strike nuclear attacks. we are also unaware of the efficacy of China’s missile defense systems (they may not be able to defend against nuclear warheads, but i wouldn’t put it past them). also the US nuclear arsenal is old and could have problems that prevent launch
The last thing even vaguely resembling a battle the us miliary was involved in was Fallujah in 2004, 20 years ago, and that was mostly the us encircling the city with heavy weapons then flattening it, not any kind of fight.
my point exactly, they only engage in fighting where they vastly outnumber the enemy. this was even true in the european front of WW2
Kind of true in the European setting and not to defend the US here, but there were a few moments in the Pacific where things were quite balanced against Japan, at least until 1943.
true, i edited my comment to reflect this
picking your fights and only engaging when you have an advantage is just basic strategy though. if they had the sense to do this on the geopolitical level as well then they wouldn’t be an empire in decline but here we are.
they are only able to do so bc they engage in colonial warfare. fighting the nazis WW2 wasnt a colonial war, but they were only able to fight inferior forces bc the nazis were busy fighting the Soviets. and they are only able to avoid peer wars w Russia bc Ukraine is ruled by compradors who act in the service of amerikan empire. look at the horrible advice US military command is giving Ukraine, having them throw themselves at defensive lines that have materiel and personnel superiority
In WW2 they had general’s like Patton chomping at the bit to continue the war with an invasion of the Soviet Union and ofc MacAuthor wanting to escalate the Korean War into a full scale invasion of China. There has always been the opportunity to conduct a peer war but always someone with a cooler head to prevail. The great threat to humanity is that we may have passed the threshold where the tragedy of competent anti-communists building a global hegemony will be replaced with the farce of true believers who don’t know their propaganda is propaganda having inherited an empire which their ideological lens will not allow them to accurately understand or assess the strength of itself or it’s enemies and plunge it into an unwinnable war with a nuclear superpower.
Isn’t modern US doctrine that aircraft carriers are the dominant force in the navy? China has limited aircraft carrier capability and lacks the self-sufficiency of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The War Nerd: This Is How the Carriers Will Die (2009)
hypersonic missile tech has only become more asymmetric since then
Amen
If someone can build a hypersonic missile, someone can also build a hypersonic missile interceptor missile… And you can fit a lot of missiles in a CVBG.
Sure, the CVBG doctrine only really works against the Japanese (where both babies are fighting over small islands that are far from their respective homelands)… But I don’t think that hypersonic missiles obsolete carriers in that role.
I do think that that role is useless against China or Russia given that they aren’t really colonial imperial powers with territory around the world, but…
The whole point of the hypersonic missiles is that you cannot intercept them.
We don’t even have the technology today to intercept (fixed) ballistic missile trajectory at an acceptable rate (the US Patriots had enough problem dealing with Iraqi Scuds made in the 1950s!), and the hypersonic missiles with maneuverable and unpredictable flight paths made them orders of magnitudes harder to intercept.
The Russian Zircons (hypersonic cruise missile) fly at Mach 8-9, which means if a CVBG can detect flying objects 200km from the horizon, they literally have 72 seconds to react. That’s slightly over a minute to detect, track, calculate intercept paths (they can’t against unpredictable targets), and launch the interceptor missiles with literally no second chance if the first wave fails to hit their target (and they will fail).
It doesn’t matter how many missiles you can fit into your entire carrier battle group, if the success rate is 1/1000 (and that’s a BIG if), then good luck lol.
What even is the turning radius of an HGV? Sure, you’re not constrained by silly things like pilot blackout and whatever, but that doesn’t mean it can zig zag at will.
I don’t think hypersonic missile interception is possible, unless the US gets laser weapons working or something like that. Hypersonics are incredibly fast, and Russia’s fighter jet launched hypersonics easily defeated the Patriot air defense systems in Ukraine, when they targeted them. Even intercepting normal supersonic and subsonic cruise missiles is a crapshoot, the iron Dome in Israel gets defeated by homemade rockets at times. Interception technology is very overrated currently.
Also hypersonic missiles fly so fast that they generate a plasma cloud around them and rendering them very difficult to be tracked by radars. So you might not even see them coming at all! And even if you do, your radars can’t track them. And even if you can track them, they’re too unpredictable to calculate an intercept path.
Interceptors are more difficult to make than the missiles themselves, and often are more expensive. They also don’t have 100% interception chance so you need to fire 2-4 just to be sure.
Aircraft carriers are only good for shows of force against vastly inferior militaries where the US can easily enforce complete air superiority
Otherwise, they’re just a massive sitting defenseless duck against modern anti-ship missiles
China doesn’t have EUV yet, which will limit their semiconductor capabilities even as all the major foundries are shifting to GAA FETs.
It doesn’t really matter in terms of where Chinese technology is today, but Moore’s law isn’t dead yet.
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.
To some extent, SRAM scaling isn’t that limiting of a factor anymore. Current design practices call for tons of dark silicon and highly specialized elements, and the effective density of newer chips is still increasing rather rapidly.
A10 - 16nm TSMC - 3.28B/125mm2
A11 - 10nm TSMC - 4.3B/87mm2
A12 - 7nm TSMC - 6.9B/83mm2
A13 - 7nm TSMC - 8.5B/98mm2
A14 - 5nm TSMC - 11.8B/88m2
A15 - 5nm TSMC - 15B/107mm2
When they don’t get a node shrink, they just blow up the area to get similar transistor count scaling. Is the pace a doubling every 2 years? Not quite, but the effective pace is rather close.
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.
Technically, Moore’s Law relates to the cost curve for any given complexity, not necessarily the transistor count. That is, that the most efficient point of marginal cost/marginal performance approximately doubles every two years (implicitly, as the node shrinks).
The concern people have is that each node shrink isn’t delivering the same benefits as before… But is that true, or is the node-to-node cadence just rising? I pose that the shrinking cadence is simply a problem of lack of funding to the big fabs, not one of the technology becoming intrinsically infeasible.
In particular, I’d like to point out that the switch from planar to FinFET was also largely driven by the planar technology becoming rather infeasible for scaling at that time - we should see a similar transition to GAAFET soon and I’m tentatively hopeful for TSMC’s future GAAFET node densities after they ship N2 (which, itself, is barely a node shrink so much as it is a technology demonstrator).
Unless China can co-develop the EUV machine with the node itself, they will be very very late to this gap in foundry capability. If they can, they will only be very late.
EUIV is already responsible for one of the worse nationalist brain worm pandemics ever seen, I don’t even want to think about what an EUV could do.