Recently, some media reported that although China lags behind the United States several generations in chip technology, most of China's performance in military weapons has surpassed that of the United States.
For example, advanced military drones, as well as fighter jets, advanced missiles, rocket artillery, naval combat ships, etc., these equipment have surpassed the United States, and even Russian military expert Vasily Kashin said that China's military strength has surpassed Russia and become the world's second military power.
So the question is, today's weapons and equipment are all made by high technology and chips, why is the chip technology backward, but in terms of terminal weapons, it can surpass the United States?
The reason is very simple, that is, the chips needed for weapons and equipment are not as advanced as possible, but enough, but the more advanced the chips, the worse the anti-interference ability, and the stability is not as good as the mature chips.
In addition, we must be clear about the fact that in weapons and equipment, the use of general-purpose comprehensive computing chips such as CPUs and Socs is actually less, and more professional chips such as ASIC, FPGA, and ASSP are used.
Because for weapons and equipment, there is no need to carry out complex calculations, but focus on executing a specific instruction, and the chip does not need to have strong comprehensive computing power, as long as it is stable and able to execute the instructions it should execute.
Therefore, professional chips such as ASIC, FPGA, and ASSP are more suitable, such professional chips are simple and mature, with extremely low process requirements, and even 130nm+ processes are sufficient, and they run stably at the same time.
For example, many Russian weapons basically do not use these so-called chips, many use electron tubes, etc., which have excellent performance, which shows that for weapons and equipment, the chip process is really not so important.
In addition, we know that compared with mature processes, advanced processes are nothing more than higher transistor density, lower power consumption, smaller area, and lower cost.
But for weapons, area, power consumption, cost is not the most important, if the performance is really stacked, it is completely possible to make the chip area larger and pile more transistors into the mature process, and the same can achieve high performance.
For example, without considering the cost, chip area, and power consumption, we can completely achieve the same performance as the 5nm chip with the 65nm process chip, which is nothing more than a large area and large power consumption.
Therefore, whether the chip technology is advanced or not is really not the key factor in the advancement of weapons, otherwise countries with backward chip technology will have no military strength to speak of in the context of modern warfare.