China steals IP and uses it to keep pace with innovation they are incapable of producing themselves. More news at eleven.
Good, fuck Samsung because they have been part of the cartel that has been blatantly increasing prices slowly over the years and then joined the AI slop fest and increased prices exponentially and they show no signs of reducing prices to make tech that’s using their chips more affordable so again fuck Samsung and let’s open the floodgates and start the chipocalypse!
explosive testimony delivered in Seoul
Why would a Chinese engineer go to South Korea to testify this?
It was a Samsung engineer that allegedly copied the information.Samsung spent over five years and roughly $1 billion to develop and refine this specific 18nm manufacturing node.
CXMT was founded in 2016 according to the article, in 2016, even AMD had 14 nm process production for their Ryzen CPU.
And if I remember correctly Intel had 14 nm for 4 years at that time, and Samsung and TSMC introduced 10 nm in 2016 so this was the year TSMC arguably surpassed Intel for the first time.So stealing 18nm technology AFTER 2016, is stealing already pretty old technology. And I bet SMIC ( The leading Chinese manufacturer ) would have been pretty close to 18 nm that at the time, as they introduced 14nm in 2019.
So this does not pass the smell test IMO.
Also Samsung stole technology from TSMC, and TSMC got theirs early on from Intel.
TSMC however did this AFAIK in a legal agreement with Intel. And the founder of Intel of course invented the semi conductor, so they are probably in the clear.if ITC rules that CXMT relied on misappropriated trade secrets. ITC could issue a blanket ban blocking those products from entering the U.S market.
Just as I suspected even before having read the article.
First they deny China access to the best chips to prevent them from being competitive, and now they want to prevent China from exporting their chips.
The 22nm process they began to use in 2019 seems like the same 22nm process SMIC used until 2019 where they introduced a new 14nm process. It seems much more likely that CXMT got their process tech from SMIC.I kind of hope USA will ban the Chinese chips so we can get more here in Europe. China will manage anyway, and USA will become less competitive.
Cool scheme the US got there. If only they hadn’t destroyed most of the soft power they had created for over half a century, we might have played along.
USA is not an ally anymore, so not much need to sacrifice our own economy just to please them.
They won’t come to our aid if we need it, we can see that already with Ukraine.
former Samsung engineer
It’s a guy who supposedly took a bribe to transfer secrets to CXMT, not a CXMT engineer
Thanks that is true, I have read the article now, but it doesn’t make the story more trustworthy at all IMO.
It still reeks very badly.
How would he know that that was the plan from the beginning and how much it helped CXMT?
This reeks of an effort to block Chinese chips.
First we won’t sell chips to China, and now they probably try to prevent us from buying chips from China.
This sounds so staged. Also remember South Korea had a bit of a stock market crisis in part because RAM stock dropped.The leaked process recipe allowed CXMT to shave off decades from its manufacturing process
This is 100% a lie.
CXMT managed to mass produce DDR4 memory on a 22nm node in 2019
SMIC introduced 14nm that year, with 22nm being their old process, so it sounds more like CXMT got their process from SMIC.
if ITC rules that CXMT relied on misappropriated trade secrets. ITC could issue a blanket ban blocking those products from entering the U.S market.
Just as I suspected even before having read the article.
Splendid
Good. Fuck intellectual property, I just want cheap RAM lmao. Hope they start exporting.
Doesn’t make financial sense to start exporting at this point when they need RAM at home for their AI and computers.
If they do start selling abroad, it’ll probably be comparable price to the big 3 since they also want profit, unless they manage to get enough volume going to just strangle the big 3, sell RAM for much less than it costs to make and then ramp up the prices when there’s no competition anymore.
Could it make strategic sense? As in if they do export consumer grade ram, they could encourage more llm selfhosting, and as the approach from qwen and deepseek appears to be to release quite advanced models as open (from what I have read) they could potentially undermine large ai firms not open sourcing their models. Just a thought
Well then they also lose potential customers who’d pay for their own hosted variants. Not sure anyone wants that.
It’s bad business nowadays not to steal.
when us was only rising up - we were stealing from europe.
Good. IPs are bullshit that prevent progress for humanity
Cool. We need the chips.
Besides, no corporation seeks doing it the hard way if they can copy, reverse engineer, etc. from its competitors. I’ve worked for several corporations that had a Competitive Intelligence departments whose job was to acquire competitors’ products, disassemble, catalog parts, reverse engineer the interesting bits so they could make recommendations for what to copy in their own products.
Not only do companies do this themselves. But it’s an entire industry in itself of businesses that do this as a service.
They then charge ridiculous prices for you to search through the data to find parts you are looking for. But it’s actually quite useful and saves a bunch of time hunting and breaking things apart.
E.g. Munro and Associates.
amazing, if they don’t want to produce more chips, then others should be able to.
Just a chip maker trying to get at level with the others
Reached for comment, one CXMT employee probably responded “你能把我怎么样?”
