Since last year, chips have become the focus of Sino-US technology competition, how long will it take for this war without gunpowder to be decided? Can we win?
Seeing the continuous progress of China's chips, the whole world is shouting wolf, China is going to beat the price of chips to the price of cabbage, is this a real thing or is the Americans deliberately telling stories to exaggerate the Chinese threat? What will happen in 2024?
Since last year, the chip competition between China and the United States has intensified, and the most laughable thing is the three things that have happened recently, which make people feel that Americans are really in a hurry.
First thing, on April 11, at Huawei's Spring HarmonyOS Ecological Communication Conference, Huawei released a new generation of MateBook X Pro laptops.
Not only does this computer set a record of 980 grams of thinness after Apple's Macbook, but it is also an AI computer equipped with Intel's high-performance chip!
Now some people in the United States are really anxious. Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik and Michael McCaul, among others, launched a strong condemnation of the Biden administration and demanded that Intel's license to sell chips to Huawei be withdrawn.
Elise Stefanik said the U.S. Commerce Department gave Huawei the green light to export the new chip. It is unacceptable that the Biden administration has allowed our biggest strategic adversary access to cutting-edge U.S. technology.
His words inadvertently revealed the truth that Huawei is their "biggest strategic rival" and not some security threat.
Intel then disclosed that the performance of the 5nm special chip provided to the Chinese market will plummet by 92%, and it will be launched in June at the earliest.
Until then, how many chips Huawei can buy in advance, Intel did not say, and no one knows.
This important statement can be regarded as a step down for the Biden administration, and it is difficult to say whether there will really be in June, or whether the R&D plan will be postponed.
Second, at the end of 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce updated the chip rules and strongly demanded that AI chip company Nvidia not take advantage of loopholes. However, recently Nvidia has released a special version of the chip.
If you look at this matter from the perspective of globalization 10 years ago, it is very absurd, but today it has become a reality.
But this time it's different, Nvidia can no longer do whatever it wants, it has a strong competitor in China.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed at the GTC 2024 conference in February 2024 that two samples of the new China-specific version of the chip have been provided to Chinese customers for testing.
However, not long ago, our relevant departments have put forward a request that Chinese customers purchase Nvidia's special version of the chip, and they need to explain the reason, why they want to buy their castrated version of the chip, instead of buying the domestic one.
As early as 2023, Huawei's AI chip Ascend 910B made a strong comeback, and various test results showed that its performance was twice that of NVIDIA's H20 chip, which was specially supplied to China at that time.
A number of media broke the news that Huawei's Ascend 910B shipments will reach more than 400,000 pieces this year, and market forecasting agencies believe that Huawei's annual chip production capacity will reach about 60 million to 80 million.
The third thing, from the end of 2023 to the beginning of 2024, the Americans have patched the chip rules twice, and this is not enough, recently they have put pressure on the Dutch and Japanese to strengthen the control of lithography machines and their industrial chains.
Everyone has seen that chip restrictions have been a thing since the second half of last year, since Huawei launched the Mate60Pro mobile phone, the United States has begun to intensify.
We can also understand that we suddenly exerted force and caught the Americans off guard, and they were a little nervous and even panicked.
Now it seems that these bad things that the Americans did with Intel and Nvidia have instead achieved China's breakthrough in high-end chips and completed the final "divine assist".
The story of China's chips in the past two years can definitely be recorded in the history of China's scientific and technological development, and we seem to have broken through in such an important field all at once.
Some people say that if the Americans do not restrict us and still sell to us in large quantities as they did in previous years, we may still be frogs in warm water, and we will continue to prefer to spend money on them rather than invest in research and development.
This is true, two years ago, when Lenovo was controversial, someone dug up the development history of Chinese chips. If we had continued to insist after the 1950s, it is estimated that there would be nothing to do with the Americans.
It can even be said that the huge price we pay today is actually paying for our past mistakes, which also makes us completely sober, we can no longer count on the Americans to be kind, we must make breakthroughs on our own.
Under pressure, with the power of the whole country, we will burst out with unimaginable power in the Americans, and the speed of breakthrough is beyond imagination.
Recently, Huawei's new brand flagship mobile phone Pura is about to be released, and it is estimated that Americans are shocked again.
Therefore, the final high-end killing game of Chinese and American chips is expected to end soon.