Right, and on top of it Huawei is coming up with new ways to arrange transistors with stuff like Tau folding architecture, which combined wtih EUV might actually allow Chinese chip makers to push far ahead of traditional chip designs.
The future of Chinese chip manufacturing is definitely bright it’s simply not here quite yet until the new machine succeeds in passing the final and most important hurdle of taping out a chip of acceptable quality.
So, the gap really isn’t that big in practice. Also worth noting that software side plays just as much role here as well. Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and even Linux all have a lot of legacy decisions baked into them for backwards compatibility needed to support existing software. Huawei building a fresh stack on top of HarmonyOS allows them to make a much leaner stack that’s not saddled with all the prior baggage. And that can make overall user experience a lot better even on slower hardware. Modern software is incredibly bloated, and addressing the bloat is a low hanging fruit that can be plucked right now without the need for EUV machines. The benefits will stack with faster chips as well just the same way Tau will stack with EUV.
In a way, decoupling from Western tech stack could actually provide a lot of benefits because it opens up the way for doing things differently without having to worry about the way existing legacy stack works.
Right, and on top of it Huawei is coming up with new ways to arrange transistors with stuff like Tau folding architecture, which combined wtih EUV might actually allow Chinese chip makers to push far ahead of traditional chip designs.
The future of Chinese chip manufacturing is definitely bright it’s simply not here quite yet until the new machine succeeds in passing the final and most important hurdle of taping out a chip of acceptable quality.
It seems like Tau architecture might close the performance gap even without EUV though. Similarly Huawei managed to get clever with optical connections in their Ascend clusters to actually outperform NVIDIA for AI training. https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3315068/how-huaweis-ascend-ai-chips-outperform-nvidia-processors-running-deepseeks-r1-model
So, the gap really isn’t that big in practice. Also worth noting that software side plays just as much role here as well. Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and even Linux all have a lot of legacy decisions baked into them for backwards compatibility needed to support existing software. Huawei building a fresh stack on top of HarmonyOS allows them to make a much leaner stack that’s not saddled with all the prior baggage. And that can make overall user experience a lot better even on slower hardware. Modern software is incredibly bloated, and addressing the bloat is a low hanging fruit that can be plucked right now without the need for EUV machines. The benefits will stack with faster chips as well just the same way Tau will stack with EUV.
In a way, decoupling from Western tech stack could actually provide a lot of benefits because it opens up the way for doing things differently without having to worry about the way existing legacy stack works.