A few days ago it was highlighted by various media that China had managed to become at the forefront in terms of chip manufacturing. During a briefing, Cheng-Wen Wu, president of the National Science Council of Taiwan, was forceful when asked about this. Specifically, he said that China there is one decade by behind of Taiwan and TSMC regarding the manufacturing of semiconductors.
Last week we saw a review from the Japanese media PC Watch that had had access to the Zhaoxin KX-7000 processor. This Chinese processor has 8 cores and 8 threads working at a frequency of 3.7 GHz.
This Chinese processor was compared in the review with the Intel Core i3-8100. This processor is now about seven years old and has been discontinued by Intel. As if that were not enough, this chip has 4 cores and 4 threads, with a fixed frequency of 3.6 GHz. The Chinese processor was barely capable of overshadowing it, which shows that they are not at the forefront, far from it.
China is a decade behind in chip manufacturing
Recently, Huawei has launched the Pura 70 smartphone which uses a 7 nanometer processor. This processor, apparently, would be manufactured by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC)China’s leading chip manufacturer.
Different media specialized in analyzing smartphones have dismantled the terminal and carried out different tests. They claim that the processor of this smartphone is on par with other terminals on the market.
During a session of the Taiwanese legislature, legislator Wu Pei-Yi presented Cheng-Wen Wu on the matter. Specifically, he asked if China, after the reviews of the Pura 70, would indeed be about three years behind TSMC.
Wu has been quite forceful and has highlighted that he “doubted” that China could have advanced so much to the point of being only three years behind Taiwan. In addition, he highlighted that in 2025, the TSMC foundry will begin manufacturing chips under the 2 nanometer node. This implies, according to Wu’s assessments, that China there would be at least one decade by behind of Taiwan.
Let us remember that the mass production phase of chips under TSMC’s 7 nanometer node began in 2018. Subsequently, several optimizations of this process arrived and then the jump to 5 nanometers.
We have to make it clear that China does not have access to the latest chip manufacturing machines based on the EUV process. In addition, Taiwan to manufacture chips at the 2 nanometer node will use the so-called High NA EUV machines, which are more advanced than “normal” EUVs.
The review of the Zhaoxin KX-7000 processor shows how far behind China is in chip manufacturing. This processor has twice as many cores as Intel’s Core i3 chip, but despite that it performs worse in games and synthetic tests.
It should be noted that a large part of industrial and automation semiconductors are manufactured with older processes. They are manufactured in older processes because there is not so much demand for performance and they are simple to produce. Precisely, they are creating solutions for the national supply chain due to the high demand that currently exists.
