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.
palmotea•Aug 24, 2026
> 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).
paxys•Aug 24, 2026
Can we audit American corporations?
ryandrake•Aug 24, 2026
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.
mring33621•Aug 24, 2026
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!
lenerdenator•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
TheDong•Aug 24, 2026
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.
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.
stirfish•Aug 24, 2026
Kind of an okay job, but they could do better. I might feel differently if I lived in Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjian, Myanmar, etc.
lenerdenator•Aug 24, 2026
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.
koverstreet•Aug 24, 2026
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.
lenerdenator•Aug 24, 2026
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?
ok_dad•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
aj_hackman•Aug 24, 2026
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!
onraglanroad•Aug 24, 2026
If I lacked the wit to understand sampling, that would be true.
isityettime•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
lenerdenator•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
benj111•Aug 24, 2026
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?
lenerdenator•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
> 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.
dofm•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
palmotea•Aug 24, 2026
> 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).
like_any_other•Aug 24, 2026
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.
llm_nerd•Aug 24, 2026
>[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.
FpUser•Aug 24, 2026
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.
palmotea•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
t-3•Aug 24, 2026
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.
like_any_other•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
> 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.
int0x29•Aug 24, 2026
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.
like_any_other•Aug 24, 2026
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...
I wonder if the Trump T2 phone will get this chip.
trynumber9•Aug 24, 2026
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.
paimapi•Aug 24, 2026
you say that like American lobbyists and Congress people are at-all technically minded and not just hyperbolic princes seeking influence at any cost
jinzo•Aug 24, 2026
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.
booi•Aug 24, 2026
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.
adolph•Aug 24, 2026
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]
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.
seanmcdirmid•Aug 24, 2026
Did they license an actual chip design from ARM or just the ISA?
monocasa•Aug 24, 2026
They licensed several ARM IP blocks.
khalic•Aug 24, 2026
LPDDR6... that's not enough for speedy inference
rjzzleep•Aug 24, 2026
Maybe,but memory bandwidth is much better than on the DGX Spark at least.
khalic•Aug 24, 2026
I hate this RAMpocalypse so much
fauigerzigerk•Aug 24, 2026
On the other hand, this year's RAMpocalypse could be 2028's RAMbundance ;P
khalic•Aug 24, 2026
RAMvana was right there!!
kcb•Aug 25, 2026
No. its has a 96 bit bus.
CharlesW•Aug 24, 2026
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?
rpdillon•Aug 24, 2026
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.
trvz•Aug 24, 2026
Strix Halo is 256 GB/s.
dust42•Aug 24, 2026
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.
GeekyBear•Aug 24, 2026
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%.
hoherd•Aug 24, 2026
Oh thank heavens, computing hardware that the AI companies will not buy all of the supply of.
otterley•Aug 24, 2026
I'm curious as to the performance per watt. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
diabllicseagull•Aug 24, 2026
no free lunch for a given process node I guess. It's using TSMC’s 3nm N3P.
nerdsniper•Aug 24, 2026
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
throwa356262•Aug 24, 2026
I dont think Geekbench is a good cross-platform benchmark, given what it measures
nerdsniper•Aug 24, 2026
I don’t either, but these are the only benchmarks Xiaomi provided!
simjnd•Aug 24, 2026
Geekerwan has an excellent video [1] where they run the new Spec 2026 benchmark on the development board they received.
Geekbench is the only consumer usable cross-platform benchmark. It matches SPEC differences between platforms
throwa356262•Aug 24, 2026
Does it test hardware, or hardware plus software that can be different on different platforms?
wtallis•Aug 24, 2026
What degree of OS-indepedence do you think is reasonable to expect from a consumer-facing benchmark suite like Geekbench?
wmf•Aug 24, 2026
AFAIK it's mostly self-contained outside of basics like malloc. If you have any evidence to the contrary, post it.
thefourthchime•Aug 24, 2026
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.
cogman10•Aug 24, 2026
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.
RicoElectrico•Aug 24, 2026
> 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)
thesmtsolver2•Aug 24, 2026
Doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Look at the top comment thread: just politics and no discussion of the tech.
bip-bop-robot•Aug 24, 2026
RIP Mediatek, RIP Qualcomm
ajaimk•Aug 24, 2026
Apple's *Last Year* CPUs.
We're literally about to get a new chip in 2-3 weeks from them.
juiceland•Aug 24, 2026
The real concern is supply chains. The US can design but not manufacture, whereas it appears China can do both.
celsoazevedo•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
strictnein•Aug 24, 2026
In this case, a Chinese company is using a Taiwanese manufacturer (TSMC), so they're not doing both.
fg137•Aug 24, 2026
Still better than what Qualcomm is offering?
otterley•Aug 24, 2026
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.
fg137•Aug 24, 2026
Why "better than Qualcomm" doesn't matter? You don't have to compare everything with Apple products.
otterley•Aug 24, 2026
I didn’t make that comparison; you did.
jeffbee•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Thomashuet•Aug 24, 2026
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.
jeffbee•Aug 24, 2026
That's sort of weird though because unless the operating system supports your applications, the performance of the processor cannot be appreciated.
kccqzy•Aug 24, 2026
My applications are generally open-source and volunteers have already compiled them to any and all operating systems whose tool chain is available.
mceachen•Aug 24, 2026
The general workload performance (browsing, text editing) is comparable for neo and m* MacBooks afaict.
Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.
turblety•Aug 24, 2026
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.
da02•Aug 24, 2026
Any thoughts on the "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"?
adgjlsfhk1•Aug 25, 2026
Doesn't meet the same silent or single core perf requirements. probably the closest out there though.
cromka•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
kccqzy•Aug 24, 2026
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.
pmkary•Aug 24, 2026
Sad thing is that it'll still be running the damn Android and so JVM not C or Swift on the machine.
fg137•Aug 24, 2026
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.
otterley•Aug 24, 2026
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.
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.
ksec•Aug 24, 2026
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.
pelagicAustral•Aug 24, 2026
> This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.
And good news for everyone else.
yoz-y•Aug 24, 2026
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.
cromka•Aug 24, 2026
Except this trend is actually reversing now, with fabs being built outside of Taiwan?
cubefox•Aug 24, 2026
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.
TSiege•Aug 24, 2026
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
yet somehow the outcome for the US has been much better. EU wins on paper though, yay!
oblio•Aug 24, 2026
> outcome for the US has been much better
Is this better outcome for the US in the room with us?
nxm•Aug 24, 2026
Compare any measurable economic and investment stat in EU vs US
makingstuffs•Aug 24, 2026
What happens when you compare quality of life? Or workers rights? Pretty sure that your average person cares more about those two data points…
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
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.
AngryData•Aug 24, 2026
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.
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
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.
anon48293•Aug 24, 2026
Pretty sure almost every European would celebrate any of these things
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
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.
oblio•Aug 24, 2026
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...
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
>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.
Dah00n•Aug 24, 2026
Sure if you are Bezos or Musk. Otherwise, no.
holoduke•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Sohcahtoa82•Aug 24, 2026
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.
well_ackshually•Aug 24, 2026
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
preg_match•Aug 24, 2026
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.
wolvoleo•Aug 24, 2026
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.
kroaton•Aug 24, 2026
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.
pydry•Aug 24, 2026
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.
plutomeetsyou•Aug 24, 2026
Countries and institutions should always produce things where they are excellent at producing, in forms of specialization and compete in terms of comparative advantages.
kridsdale1•Aug 24, 2026
This is true until you add a layer of geopolitics to your analysis.
adwn•Aug 24, 2026
This attitude, if followed without qualifications, is dangerously naive and shortsighted, as the last few years of geopolitical events have shown.
PowerElectronix•Aug 24, 2026
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.
kstenerud•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
melasadra•Aug 24, 2026
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
smallstepforman•Aug 25, 2026
Russian are more than happy to sell you NatGas, why do you think they’re weaponising? Watch too much propaganda?
yoz-y•Aug 24, 2026
Supply chain advantages make the country that produces most of the stuff progressively better at doing everything.
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
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?
Yiin•Aug 24, 2026
how is that different from the rest of the world?
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
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.
don_esteban•Aug 24, 2026
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.
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
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
goodluckchuck•Aug 24, 2026
Families should always eat at the restaurants that produce the most excellent cuisine. /s
geysersam•Aug 24, 2026
Those thing are not static! Changing them can be a political decision. It was a political decision in China to become excellent at manufacturing.
xphos•Aug 24, 2026
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
deadlast2•Aug 24, 2026
I don't think it's by choice just ask all those extinct manufacturers
saturn8601•Aug 24, 2026
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.
RobotToaster•Aug 24, 2026
It was a choice, western oligarchs handed China the means of production on a silver platter in the pursuit of short term profits.
wolvoleo•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Grombobulous•Aug 24, 2026
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.
throwaway63467•Aug 24, 2026
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.
coliveira•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
Danox•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Grombobulous•Aug 24, 2026
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.
geysersam•Aug 24, 2026
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.
rayoleary•Aug 25, 2026
What are en
People?
geysersam•Aug 25, 2026
Thanks, should've been "when"
smallmancontrov•Aug 24, 2026
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.
peezd•Aug 24, 2026
I can't imagine it going any other way than what we've seen from every other country in your set of examples, honestly.
faitswulff•Aug 24, 2026
China actually penalizes, imprisons, and even executes its billionaires, so that’s different.
Levitz•Aug 24, 2026
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.
hibikir•Aug 24, 2026
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.
xanthor•Aug 24, 2026
China and Vietnam are the only countries worldwide which have executed bankers for corruption in recent decades. No ahem necessary.
geysersam•Aug 24, 2026
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.
applicative•Aug 24, 2026
Were they guilty?
Danox•Aug 24, 2026
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.
xanthor•Aug 24, 2026
Do you find that far-fetched?
handle584•Aug 25, 2026
Communists have been executing bankers since day one so not just recent decades, if anyone finds that impressive.
applicative•Aug 24, 2026
The industrialization of USA comes after the civil war, thus long after e.g. Charles Dickens, to say nothing of Hamilton.
smallmancontrov•Aug 24, 2026
Hamilton set the strategic agenda. Do you want to argue that US industrialization didn't follow the broad strokes of this plan?
Parallel: the industrialization of China for the most part happened after Deng Xiaoping, but are people wrong to credit him for setting the course?
andelink•Aug 24, 2026
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.
smallmancontrov•Aug 24, 2026
You're pivoting. Alexander Hamilton had the influence on America's foreign policy that I said he had.
rayiner•Aug 24, 2026
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.
yoz-y•Aug 24, 2026
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.
saati•Aug 24, 2026
It's manufactured in Taiwan.
Danox•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Mistletoe•Aug 24, 2026
Who is the fast food place?
rayoleary•Aug 25, 2026
The tension is killing me… who is the fast food joint?
geerlingguy•Aug 25, 2026
I'm guessing Chick-Fil-A?
kevvok•Aug 25, 2026
Can't be them because they franchise. My guess is In-N-Out
nunez•Aug 25, 2026
CFA franchises, but their program is very strict and requires an unusually high amount of upfront capital
Brybry•Aug 24, 2026
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).
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.
Dah00n•Aug 24, 2026
Do you say the same about Intel, Amd, etc. or is it only big bad China?
InTheArena•Aug 24, 2026
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.
linkregister•Aug 24, 2026
Are there any documented cases of backdoors being present in Chinese hardware at time of manufacturing?
bryant•Aug 24, 2026
Two just this year, CVE-2026-66747 and CVE-2026-11405.
linkregister•Aug 24, 2026
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.
hedora•Aug 24, 2026
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.
holoduke•Aug 24, 2026
Too many propoganda leads to expressions like yours. Sorry your story has zero foundation and is fox news quality.
hedora•Aug 24, 2026
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).
Barrin92•Aug 24, 2026
>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
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.
BiteCode_dev•Aug 24, 2026
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.
graemep•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
tensor•Aug 24, 2026
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.
eigenform•Aug 24, 2026
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.
linkregister•Aug 24, 2026
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.
codersfocus•Aug 24, 2026
Intel management engine
antonvs•Aug 24, 2026
“It’s not a vulnerability, it’s a feature!”
theteapot•Aug 24, 2026
Everyone relax. This guy on the Internet is unaware of any.
Dylan16807•Aug 24, 2026
And are you aware of any? If nobody can find evidence then it's probably not a widespread risk.
linkregister•Aug 25, 2026
Are you certain I'm a guy? I could be a particularly well-trained dog.
szatkus•Aug 24, 2026
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.
orbital-decay•Aug 25, 2026
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.
well_ackshually•Aug 24, 2026
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?".
gnfargbl•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
amelius•Aug 24, 2026
That act could throw us all back into the dark ages, though.
bdhdhduuyd•Aug 24, 2026
They already consider it as one country. The CCP sees Taiwan as a province of China.
manithree•Aug 24, 2026
Or mainland China is occupied west Taiwan.
pydry•Aug 24, 2026
They're intentional about economic integration because it will in theory make unification easier without a war.
yieldcrv•Aug 24, 2026
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
0cf8612b2e1e•Aug 24, 2026
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.
cgio•Aug 24, 2026
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.
0cf8612b2e1e•Aug 24, 2026
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.
yieldcrv•Aug 25, 2026
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
m00x•Aug 24, 2026
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.
YetAnotherNick•Aug 24, 2026
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.
conception•Aug 24, 2026
Also the US has very publicly shown they don’t have the ability to effectively wage war over any period of time.
sailfast•Aug 24, 2026
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.
wongarsu•Aug 24, 2026
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
fc417fc802•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
majormajor•Aug 24, 2026
How many boots on the ground could you get and how quickly/safely? The supposed opposition here is MUCH closer to the island.
KPGv2•Aug 25, 2026
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.)
r_lee•Aug 24, 2026
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
AtlasBarfed•Aug 24, 2026
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.
decimalenough•Aug 24, 2026
"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.
larodi•Aug 24, 2026
Considering all said so far, and events, it perhaps hardly makes real difference in the diamond era's franchised world.
wolvoleo•Aug 24, 2026
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.
tw1984•Aug 25, 2026
> 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.
wolvoleo•Aug 25, 2026
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.
Dylan16807•Aug 25, 2026
> 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.
AnimalMuppet•Aug 25, 2026
> 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.
KPGv2•Aug 25, 2026
Xi will not be in power in 2049 because he will be dead. He'd be 96yo.
nl•Aug 25, 2026
> 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...
nemosaltat•Aug 25, 2026
>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`
palata•Aug 24, 2026
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"?
wongarsu•Aug 24, 2026
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
scarab92•Aug 24, 2026
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?
r_lee•Aug 24, 2026
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
mycall•Aug 24, 2026
Can't flee if your island is encircled and shooting down airplanes. China's military drills are executing exactly this.
golem14•Aug 24, 2026
The US could do this TODAY. Just saying.
Dylan16807•Aug 25, 2026
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.
mjevans•Aug 25, 2026
The pay might not be as good but they could also go to Europe. Might depend where they've got family / contacts.
klausa•Aug 25, 2026
> 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?
schrectacular•Aug 24, 2026
If both those are true, then shouldn't we expect China to destroy them as part of first offensive?
mjevans•Aug 25, 2026
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.
deadfoxygrandpa•Aug 25, 2026
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
dataflow•Aug 24, 2026
Let's say they execute that plan. What then? Would it win them anything?
ivewonyoung•Aug 25, 2026
The whole point of the plan is to remove some of the incentive for an invasion, thus making it less likely.
axus•Aug 24, 2026
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.
RussianBot9580•Aug 24, 2026
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.
actionfromafar•Aug 24, 2026
Really? Surely it can't be unfamiliar at least. So many GOPs anxiously mentioning Dear Leader every chance they get.
danparsonson•Aug 24, 2026
> As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.
Are schoolchildren in the US still required to recite the pledge of allegiance...?
hundchenkatze•Aug 25, 2026
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.
What are you gonna do the day they don't need tsmc anymore
nl•Aug 25, 2026
> 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.
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
KPGv2•Aug 25, 2026
> 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.
csomar•Aug 24, 2026
So same as before?
markdown•Aug 24, 2026
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.
sophrosyne42•Aug 24, 2026
This would be interdependence expanding. Manufacturing isn't the only kind of economic activity
mschuster91•Aug 24, 2026
No. Chinese dumpers undercutting everyone else and destroying the competition is never good.
Dah00n•Aug 24, 2026
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).
chasd00•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
Levitz•Aug 24, 2026
>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.
AngryData•Aug 24, 2026
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.
catigula•Aug 24, 2026
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.
germandiago•Aug 24, 2026
From the outside, it is still competition.
If they go too far to impose their system, we stop buying :)
catigula•Aug 24, 2026
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.
xanthor•Aug 24, 2026
Same is true of US, Germany, Britain, etc
catigula•Aug 24, 2026
The US had open markets and low tariffs for a long time; China's automotive tariffs were amongst the strongest in the entire world.
xanthor•Aug 24, 2026
And in the 19th century when US industry was developing?
speed_spread•Aug 24, 2026
If the Linux drivers aren't up upstreamed and the chips aren't sold to anyone else, meh.
cromka•Aug 24, 2026
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.
esperent•Aug 24, 2026
Or allowed you to run Linux on their phone. We can only dream.
cromka•Aug 24, 2026
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.
rootsudo•Aug 24, 2026
Caveat on the unlocking of bootloader.
It is very much harder to do now. There is a lot of friction introduced now to it.
05•Aug 24, 2026
> 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
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).
d3Xt3r•Aug 25, 2026
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.
ksec•Aug 24, 2026
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.
throwawayffffas•Aug 24, 2026
This is probably the plan for xiaomi along with servers and gpus down the road.
camillomiller•Aug 24, 2026
I sense a US blacklisting coming
HumblyTossed•Aug 24, 2026
Is it really this fast or just this fast on benchmarks?
ColdStream•Aug 25, 2026
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.
cma•Aug 25, 2026
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.
KPGv2•Aug 25, 2026
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.
vachina•Aug 25, 2026
Solar radiation.
Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.
pclmulqdq•Aug 25, 2026
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.
faitswulff•Aug 25, 2026
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
hn_submit•Aug 24, 2026
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.
trynumber9•Aug 24, 2026
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.
throwa356262•Aug 24, 2026
After this news they might suddenly be.
hn_submit•Aug 24, 2026
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.
spacedcowboy•Aug 24, 2026
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.
hn_submit•Aug 24, 2026
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.
spacedcowboy•Aug 24, 2026
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.
blackoil•Aug 24, 2026
Xiaomi can and does use TSMC.
dfedbeef•Aug 24, 2026
Yay free markets
China makes a fast chip
Yay national security
trvz•Aug 24, 2026
"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.
gok•Aug 24, 2026
"Arm-designed CPU core matches Apple-designed CPU core from a year ago"
throwaw12•Aug 24, 2026
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)
ford•Aug 24, 2026
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
throwaw12•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
aaroninsf•Aug 24, 2026
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.
creaturemachine•Aug 24, 2026
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.
apparent•Aug 24, 2026
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?
throwaw12•Aug 24, 2026
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
wmf•Aug 24, 2026
Speaking of "us" it seems that Samsung/Mediatek/Xiaomi/Huawei SoCs are not available in the US.
strictnein•Aug 24, 2026
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.
cyp0633•Aug 24, 2026
some chinese youtubers have posted their test results, seems pretty good, but the devices have been provided to them in advance fwiw
StilesCrisis•Aug 24, 2026
I'm sure it benchmarks well, but does it actually have good battery life?
frollogaston•Aug 24, 2026
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.
mort96•Aug 24, 2026
Did their test results include power draw?
zamadatix•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
kccqzy•Aug 24, 2026
No I don’t think you can find a single CPU that can beat Apple CPUs in a single-threaded workload.
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.
throwa356262•Aug 24, 2026
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.
waazy•Aug 24, 2026
44mb of cache really highlights the bottleneck of how raw compute is cheap, but the real limit is memory latency.
comboy•Aug 24, 2026
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.
culi•Aug 24, 2026
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
rshm•Aug 24, 2026
Is DUV inherently 5nm a 20% yield class or it's matter of process improvement that China is struggling compared to taiwan or Intel ?
culi•Aug 24, 2026
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.
amluto•Aug 25, 2026
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.
kajaktum•Aug 25, 2026
Yea I dont think they show ant signs of slowing down. With how massively slow the West are, they are gonna get swallowed up.
ur-whale•Aug 24, 2026
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...)
cromka•Aug 24, 2026
This worked just as well in the 1980s when they wanted to protect their auto industry...
Alien1Being•Aug 24, 2026
Xiaomi also make amazing cars.
"WSJ
I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don't Want to Buy American Cars Anymore.
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
testing22321•Aug 24, 2026
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.
dirck-norman•Aug 24, 2026
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.
testing22321•Aug 24, 2026
You’re forgetting the 9.3$ billion given to us automakers to bail them out that was never recovered.
oblio•Aug 24, 2026
The US auto industry is also subsidized by all aspects of American life requiring a car outside of NYC and a few big cities.
fedpost•Aug 24, 2026
Also just directly by the USG, see "Cash for Clunkers".
thefourthchime•Aug 24, 2026
Yep, it's pretty much just illegal dumping.
Dylan16807•Aug 24, 2026
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.
runako•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
dirck-norman•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Dylan16807•Aug 24, 2026
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.
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.
dirck-norman•Aug 24, 2026
> I literally didn’t say that it was?
> and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.
Textbook false equivalence.
maxglute•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Carbon credits where open to any companies, so it wasn't a unfair subsidy.
EV incentives where also not limited to us companies.
runako•Aug 24, 2026
Every country distorts its markets in different ways. It's still silly to pretend the US is free of these kinds of distortions.
gpt5•Aug 24, 2026
That's just whataboutism that ignores the order of magnitude scale differences of the subsidies that were provided in China in the original comment.
runako•Aug 24, 2026
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.
cpursley•Aug 24, 2026
Even without the subsidies, at this point, they’re arguably making better cars.
7734128•Aug 24, 2026
No, it's actually 200 000 trillion for both countries.
Source: same as yours
asadotzler•Aug 24, 2026
The only serious EV maker in the US has received more US subsidizing than any single Chinese maker.
twobitshifter•Aug 25, 2026
Isn’t this just good strategy? Shouldn’t government subsidize the things it wants more of?
slashdave•Aug 25, 2026
Well, what do you expect him to say? Consider the audience.
thefourthchime•Aug 24, 2026
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.
ilyassanida•Aug 24, 2026
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
ColdStream•Aug 25, 2026
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.
weezing•Aug 24, 2026
I don't want buy American cars either. European, Korean or Japanese are the way to go.
markdown•Aug 24, 2026
Odd to list things in reverse order.
alasano•Aug 24, 2026
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.
ColdStream•Aug 25, 2026
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.
yaro330•Aug 24, 2026
How is this news worthy? The cores are off the shelf C1-Ultra. Even Google got them in the new pixel.
cute_boi•Aug 24, 2026
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.
StrLght•Aug 24, 2026
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.
romanovcode•Aug 24, 2026
Good. Competition is great for consumers.
brcmthrowaway•Aug 24, 2026
If China has technological superiority to the US in every facet of science and engineering, is that really good for us though?
wds•Aug 24, 2026
Not good for us if it gets banned domestically because the US can't compete in a free market.
palmotea•Aug 24, 2026
> 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.
warkdarrior•Aug 24, 2026
That's fine, US can export movies and alfalfa.
tambourine_man•Aug 24, 2026
“…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.
Schiendelman•Aug 24, 2026
And reportedly early next year they have another coming out of band.
smith7018•Aug 24, 2026
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.
nazgulsenpai•Aug 24, 2026
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.
LPisGood•Aug 24, 2026
Suspiciously ignored is power consumption. That’s the biggest and most useful metric often ignored because it’s less flashy than speed.
subscribed•Aug 24, 2026
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.
LPisGood•Aug 24, 2026
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.
subscribed•Aug 24, 2026
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?
lukan•Aug 24, 2026
Or maybe just a joke, that most of the world does not care so much about security, unlike security minded people would like to?
MBCook•Aug 24, 2026
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.
dannyw•Aug 25, 2026
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.
maxglute•Aug 24, 2026
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.
Lagoon3384_SWE•Aug 24, 2026
This site is just crazy pro-china now. Guess that happens when non-westerners dominate online, sadly.
gameman144•Aug 24, 2026
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.
lbrito•Aug 24, 2026
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.
bee_rider•Aug 24, 2026
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?
MBCook•Aug 24, 2026
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.
mschuetz•Aug 24, 2026
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.
mrheosuper•Aug 25, 2026
The air m4 is really the best sub-thousand-dollar laptop.
jorvi•Aug 24, 2026
Linus specifically always buys Apple laptops to run Linux on because they're just that good. Even despite all the paper cuts.
throwa356262•Aug 24, 2026
Linus Torvalds has in past used laptops from Apple, Lenovo and Dell and probably many more.
His current laptop is an Intel laptop.
RossBencina•Aug 25, 2026
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.
dmitrygr•Aug 24, 2026
No mention I can see of power consumption multiple compared to apple's chips at matching perf. My guess is 2x-5x
calf•Aug 24, 2026
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.
trynumber9•Aug 24, 2026
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.
calf•Aug 24, 2026
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.
mrheosuper•Aug 25, 2026
It's already flattening out. The rate of progress is much faster in 90-00s then now.
aaroninsf•Aug 24, 2026
Thank you OP for using xcancel.
Preston67•Aug 24, 2026
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
simjnd•Aug 24, 2026
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.
snowram•Aug 24, 2026
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.
simjnd•Aug 24, 2026
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).
lostmsu•Aug 24, 2026
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.
simjnd•Aug 24, 2026
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.
jayd16•Aug 25, 2026
Just get a laptop?
formvoltron•Aug 24, 2026
Is AI helping to improve chip design?
ilyassanida•Aug 24, 2026
can't wait to see Xiaomi enter the GPUs market and beats Nvidia
ErrorNoBrain•Aug 24, 2026
ok but power consumption??
kikimora•Aug 24, 2026
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.
amelius•Aug 24, 2026
Yeah, well, I'm still waiting for 1 Apple Car ...
Almondsetat•Aug 24, 2026
Why are you waiting for something that was never announced?
amelius•Aug 24, 2026
You never heard of project Titan? It even has a wikipedia page.
"around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018."
Almondsetat•Aug 24, 2026
Was it announced?
amelius•Aug 24, 2026
What difference does that make. It's the end result that counts.
Dylan16807•Aug 24, 2026
This is a discussion of whether company announcements are true or not in various circumstances. It makes all the difference.
maxglute•Aug 24, 2026
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.
maxglute•Aug 24, 2026
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.
bizstrategy10•Aug 24, 2026
I think constraint creates the best innovation, the US is shooting itself in the foot by forcing China to innovate.
cherioo•Aug 24, 2026
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)
ezekiel68•Aug 24, 2026
"Let's isolate China's semiconductor industry," they said.
"This will all turn out well," they said.
trynumber9•Aug 24, 2026
There is a nuance: Xiaomi is not Huawei. They were not sanctioned. This chip is made in Taiwan like all the non-Samsung competition.
ezekiel68•Aug 24, 2026
Argh -- perfectly read. I was thinking of Huawei.
russli1993•Aug 25, 2026
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
kjeldsendk•Aug 24, 2026
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
angry_octet•Aug 24, 2026
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?
Xiaomi are implementing ARM cores on an ARM ISA so any architectural defects would also affect other ARM processors.
micromacrofoot•Aug 24, 2026
Good, get this qualcomm garbage out of here
tpurves•Aug 24, 2026
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).
ChuckMcM•Aug 24, 2026
It is pretty amazing the creativity with compute architecture which is afforded by a zillion transistors.
pranav_tech26•Aug 24, 2026
Impressive silicon progress, but real-world developer experience will hinge on sustained thermal throttling, Linux kernel support, and tooling ecosystem stability.
sinuhe69•Aug 25, 2026
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.
nomendos•Aug 25, 2026
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.
yanhangyhy•Aug 25, 2026
yeap, it's xiaomi's thing. it dont have the ability.
mrheosuper•Aug 25, 2026
Everyone has to start somewhere, they achieve better performance than Tensor CPU on Pixel, to me that's an achievement.
dcrazy•Aug 25, 2026
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.
Melatonic•Aug 25, 2026
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
52 Comments
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).
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.
I'm into funny electric vehicles and China makes some beauties!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I wouldn't tell a Chinese company to buy from Cisco. I wouldn't tell an American one to buy from Huawei.
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...
I don't think they have any angle with that.
Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.
1. https://wccftech.com/xiaomi-xring-03-official-tsmc-3nm-n3p-l...
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
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCJuOopLK8
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.
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)
Not these. They seem to be using ARM-designed cores that others already use and TSMC fabs in Taiwan.
Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.
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.
This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.
Your Linux based dream phone is not going to sell more than 10 units.
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.
And good news for everyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0
Is this better outcome for the US in the room with us?
All three will be going away sooner or later.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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 tendency to protect corporate profit margins is the western Achilles heel and China knew they could exploit that.
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.
... Except when they can't in any meaningful span of time.
- 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
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
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
Now Japan is known for quality electronics and options and Taiwan for state of the art semiconductors.
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.
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.
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.
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
China: 525 gCO2/kWh
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
A bit of selective memory necessary for that take given good old Crypto AG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Now that US has already opened the gate to labelling nation head as drug seller, this just eases things for China.
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.
No guerilla warfare, no insurgents, 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.
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.)
I feel like Russia thought the same of Ukraine, even though it is way bigger
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.
But I agree that pretty much everybody will happily take the status quo over armed invasion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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`
But at the same time everyone understands that the Taiwanese would destroy the facilities before they fall into Chinese hands
The talent is still there, so they could rebuild, or recruit the talent to work for Chinese mainland fabs instead?
maybe easier said than done but still
Would you voluntarily work in a country that invaded and taken over yours?
Would you ask the same about Russia recruiting Ukrainians?
Effectively the semantics are like a game of chicken and hostage combined. Might as well be a Prisoner's Dilemma.
As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.
Are schoolchildren in the US still required to recite the pledge of allegiance...?
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...
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.
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
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.
dumping is always 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.
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.
If they go too far to impose their system, we stop buying :)
This is geopolitics 101; your fantasy version is decades out of date.
It is very much harder to do now. There is a lot of friction introduced now to it.
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
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.
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.
Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.
That probably explains why there's so few of these CPUs around: the yields of the domestic Chinese lithography processes (non-EUV) are awful.
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.
Reputation is a fickle thing, so difficult to build, and so easy to lose.
And multithreaded is 10 cores vs 6 cores.
I appreciate Apple being kept on their feet, but they're not dethroned yet.
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)
I'm right there with you questioning Meta's value for society, but I do believe it has less opportunity for abuse/manipulation
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.
Same is very difficult to do in China (look what happened to Jack Ma) or in Europe, because you have to follow some regulations
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.
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.
Their next Fold phone (TBA September) will use O3. I guess we will find out very soon.
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.
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...)
"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...
"
They know they are inferior, and choose not to compete, just lobby for more regulations to keep competitors out. Free market, haha.
250 billion in EV subsidies from China. 10 billion by the U.S.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.
Textbook 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
EV incentives where also not limited to us companies.
You're also ignoring the most important point, my last point about values. The comment is still up, feel free to re-read it.
Source: same as yours
No idea about reliability or anything else but just as pure tech demos they seem incredible.
I'm too stupid or too mad a Trump to care.
I’m pretty sure they will, as they have, like clockwork, in the same month, for over a decade.
Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.
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.
Or maybe that security doesn't have a practical application?
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.
(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.
Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.
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?
Do you want to compare to Intel/AMD? If these are destined for phones that’s not a useful comparison by your metric.
His current laptop is an Intel laptop.
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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project
"around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018."
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.
"This will all turn out well," they said.
Two rather rare words in China
See eg LoongLeak and the Loongson processor: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26/presentat...
(as long as you take similar assumptions in die size, advanced packaging and power envelope).
That difference amounts to who, if anyone, gets the credit for being competitive with Apple.