Thread

1. HarHarVeryFunny · 1789937583 · focus · HN ↗

   On a related note, I was reading yesterday that apparently the real bottleneck for Chinese production of AI accelerators is HBM production, not processors or ASML equipment.

   The lack of ASML EUV machines certainly hurts, and pushing DUV so hard results in abysmal yields of good chips, but you can compensate by running more wafers or making smaller chips, and the net result is that Huawei's Ascend production volume is limited by CXMT's HBM capacity not processor dies.

   The problem is that HBM manufacture requires many steps (die thinning, via drilling, plating, alignment) where the equipment used by everyone else (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) is also blocked by sanctions, so the Chinese are having to develop all of this themselves too, which they have, but yields are currently low, even when using shorter HBM stacks.

   1. jacquesm · 1789951954 · focus · HN ↗

      The only thing the West is achieving here is that sooner or later China will be able to compete on their own terms rather than ours. It may buy some time but the end result is very predictable.

      1. bigcat12345678 · 1789960301 · focus · HN ↗

         As other comments pointed out, that was always China's plan, the value here is really that when the Chinese overlord annillate the world's industrial competition, they'll have the moral high ground of being out of self-reliance and hostility by western monopolists.

         Edit:

         And, that, my fellow keyboard high-minded thinker but powerless corp peons, was also part of the China's plan all along.

         1. fangspire · 1789965791 · focus · HN ↗

            [dead]

            1. vkou · 1789973334 · focus · HN ↗

               > Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate?

               No, that's generally what happens when countries stop being poor. Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, all have similar fertility rates.

               1. rmunn · 1789976036 · focus · HN ↗

                  But none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.

                  1. vkou · 1789982694 · focus · HN ↗

                     And yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China.

                     On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.

                     1. inglor_cz · 1789993018 · focus · HN ↗

                        Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of punishment that omnipotent governments sometimes visit upon their folk.

                        I don't believe that even the CCP itself, in hindsight, considers the one-child policy to have been a good decision. At the very least it should have been ended some 15 years earlier.

                        1. reeredfdfdf · 1790010975 · focus · HN ↗

                           Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high.

                           The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population.

                           I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.

                        2. maxglute · 1790011848 · focus · HN ↗

                           No, a remarkably farsighted policy that prevented PRC from having to deal with additional 200m-400m subsistent farmers. If anything it wasn't done sooner/aggressive enough. Like you can literally wipe away 200-400m from PRC button quantile and PRC would be net better off due to increase per capita resources and wealth. This hindsight will be historically obvious in 20-30 years when you see the outcome of India with 1.6B people with 1.2B poor, vs PRC with 1.4B people with 400m poor. The drag of having disproportionate, bluntly, worthless bodies is not linear for governance, and it's not because India hasn't tried aggressive family planning of their own, they simply failed unlike PRC. Who very much regards family planning as largely successful demographic management system that enabled proper allocation of resources away from generating peasants to building industry and the largest pool of high end human talent in recorded history, where frankly any tertiary dividend is worth 50 farmers in terms of productivity.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.