Computer

Can China manufacture a processor to match Intel or AMD?

Well, it is really a hot topic that has its crumb, since the blockades of the West with China mean that the competition is not fair, but it would not be fair without them. Can China manufacture a CPUs who competes with the largest? Well, first of all we have to clarify two points: what we consider as manufacturing and what we consider as competing, and this is where everything gets interesting.

China has an advantage and it has a problem: it is the best at manufacturing things in bulk, which does not have to mean low quality, mind you, but even if they do this very well, they still do not have something where the West is at the forefront: design and conceptualization. It is said that everything is designed in the West and everything is manufactured in China, and it is largely true, but the Chinese have something that we lost: the hunger to eat the world, and this article will revolve around it, although it may not seem like it.

Neither China will manufacture everything, nor will the West design everything

The best example we can give is India and on the other hand the Loongson company, which is the part that interests us. China is making interesting advances with many of its companies, and the problem is that it is doing so at a very high rate, so much so that the war between NVIDIA, AMD and Intel for x86 and ARM processors may be outdated.

Loongson-3A6000-china-make-cpu

The Godson CPU manufactured by Loongson, specifically the 3A5000, achieved a brutal improvement of 50% compared to its predecessor, where it also consumed 30% less. Good data for sure. But pay attention to the performance jump of this new generation led by the 3A6000, because the data is even more incredible with just one jump in between: +37% in INT and +68% performance in FLOAT. What does this mean compared to Intel and AMD?

Well, taking into account that the comparison is complicated by using another ISA (LoongArchproperty of the company) the performance in SPEC 2006 leaves some impressive results, since it would be up to the IPC of the AMD Zen 3 and the Intel Rocket Lake (Gen 11).

So what is China missing to compete in CPU?

Well, something very important: the development of scanners and lithographic nodes. In design it is more or less clear that they will be at the height of the West in the next decade, if not above. Neither AMD nor Intel seems to be able to do much to increase performance, but don’t let this data fool us, because as we have said, the design is only an important part of the cake, now it has to be captured and recorded on a wafer with its corresponding chips.

ASML

And curiously, China suffers there. The boycott of the West with ASML in the lead leaves China an orphan, which has to invest a lot of money in designing scanners and substrates that can rival Western ones. And here another different phase of the game enters, because as we surely know, China considers Taiwan part of its territory, and of course, Taiwan is home to TSMC, the largest and most cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturer in the world, which manufactures AMD and NVIDIA, for example. .

The shortest path may be the one that ends up costing the most

So there are two options here: either China invests billions over 10+ years to be able to start competing with ASML, or invade Taiwan, take over TSMC, start a war with the US, Japan, South Korea The South, and possibly the entire NATO, copies ASML technology with EUV and exposes itself at terrible cost.

Unfortunately, the war scenario is not ruled out or a chimera. There are warplanes flying over Taiwanese airspace, the US has declared that if China invades Taiwan there will be a military war, and in short, it is of little use to China to have a superior CPU architecture if it cannot manufacture the chips in a leading node. Therefore, the answer to the headline of this article would be no, China cannot manufacture such a CPU, although being precise it would be more of a “they don’t let her”but it will do it civilly or criminally, and it may leave AMD and Intel in their infancy if they don’t wake up to the Asian threat.

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