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Portables (Apple)

Apple Plans OLED Displays for MacBooks, Evaluates Foldable iPads: Report (nikkei.com) 26

Apple will expand its use of advanced OLED screens to iPads and MacBooks and is considering eventually introducing foldable tablets, a move set to further shake up the $150 billion display industry as it shifts away from traditional LCD screens, Asian news outlet Nikkei reported Friday. From the report: OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, displays are already used in most premium smartphones, including iPhones. Apple plans to deploy the tech in its high-end iPads next year, multiple tech industry executives told Nikkei Asia. An OLED MacBook model is also under development for production in the second half of 2025 at the earliest, the people said. The growing penetration of OLED is a significant win for Samsung Display and LG Display of South Korea and China's BOE Technology Holding, which have all bet heavily on this expensive display technology.

On the flip side, it could be a blow to display makers that do not have much presence in this segment, including JDI and Sharp of Japan, and AUO and Innolux of Taiwan. Apple has also started evaluating the possibility of making foldable iPads after it deploys the flexible OLED screens on the tablet, but it does not have a concrete timeline for doing so, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The iPhone maker is not the first company to adopt OLED displays for tablets. Huawei, for instance, has been a significant driver of this trend, which in turn has helped strengthen the Chinese display supply chain.

China

Huawei To Start Building First European Factory In France (reuters.com) 35

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: China's Huawei will start building its mobile phone network equipment factory in France next year, a source familiar with the matter said, pressing ahead with its first plant in Europe even as some European governments curb the use of the firm's 5G gear. The company outlined plans for the factory with an initial investment of 200 million euros ($215.28 million) in 2020, but the roll-out was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the source said on Monday. The source did not give a timeline for when the factory in Brumath, near Strasbourg, will be up and running. A French government source said the site was expected to open in 2025. Further reading: 'How Washington Chased Huawei Out of Europe'
China

Nvidia Delays Launch of New China-focused AI Chip (reuters.com) 10

Nvidia has told customers in China it is delaying the launch of a new AI chip it designed to comply with U.S. export rules until the first quarter of next year, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The delayed chip is the H20, the most powerful of three China-focused chips Nvidia has developed to comply with fresh U.S. export restrictions, the sources said, and could complicate its efforts to preserve market share in China against local rivals like Huawei. The California-based AI chip giant had been expected to launch the new products as early as Nov. 16, chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis reported this month.

However, the H20 launch has now been pushed back until the first quarter of next year, the sources said, with one saying they were advised it could take place in February or March. The sources said they were told that the H20 was being delayed due to issues server manufacturers were having in integrating the chip.

China

China Claims World's Fastest Internet With 1.2 Terabit-Per-Second Network (bloomberg.com) 45

Huawei and China Mobile have built a 3,000 kilometer (1,860-mile) internet network linking Beijing to the south, which the country is touting as its latest technological breakthrough. From a report: The two firms teamed up with Tsinghua University and research provider Cernet.com to build what they claim is the world's first internet network to achieve a "stable and reliable" bandwidth of 1.2 terabits per second, several times faster than typical speeds around the world. Trials began July 31 and it's since passed various tests verifying that milestone, the university said in a statement.

Tsinghua, Chinese President Xi Jinping's alma mater, is plugging the project as an industry-first built entirely on homegrown technology, and credits Huawei prominently in its statement. The Chinese firm in August made waves when it released a 5G smartphone with a sophisticated made-in-China processor, inspiring celebration in Chinese state and social media. That event also spurred debate in Washington about whether the Biden administration has gone far enough in attempts to contain Chinese technological achievement.

China

Nvidia's Great Wall of GPUs: China's Hoarding Spree (tomshardware.com) 50

Press2ToContinue writes: 01.AI, a Chinese AI startup, has stockpiled enough Nvidia AI and HPC GPUs to last 18 months, in anticipation of a U.S. export ban. Looks like 01.AI is taking "goo big or go home" to a new level with their GPU shopping spree. They're basically the dragon from "The Hobbit," but instead of gold, they're hoarding Nvidia chips. Maybe they're planning the ultimate LAN party or just really into extreme Minecraft graphics. Either way, it's like they say: "In the land of tech embargoes, the one with the secret GPU stash is king." Or in this case, playing 4D chess while the rest of us are stuck figuring out which port the HDMI cable goes into. "We have stockpiled a lot of Nvidia chips," said 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with Bloomberg. "The jury is out on whether China in 1.5 years can make equivalent or nearly as good chips."

"We will have two parallel universes. Americans will supply their products and technologies to the U.S. and other countries and Chinese companies will build for China and whoever else uses Chinese products. The reality is that they will not compete very much in the same marketplace."
China

Baidu Placed AI Chip Order from Huawei in Shift Away From Nvidia (reuters.com) 31

Baidu ordered AI chips from Huawei this year, Reuters reported citing two people familiar with the matter, adding to signs that U.S. pressure is prompting Chinese acceptance of the firm's products as an alternative to Nvidia's. From the report: One of the people said Baidu, one of China's leading AI firms, which operates the Ernie large language model, placed the order in August, ahead of widely anticipated new rules by the U.S. government that in October tightened restrictions on exports of chips and chip tools to China, including those of U.S. chip giant Nvidia.

Baidu ordered 1,600 of Huawei's 910B Ascend AI chips - which the Chinese firm developed as an alternative to Nvidia's A100 chip - for 200 servers, the source said, adding that by October, Huawei had delivered more 60% of the order, or about 1,000 chips, to Baidu. The second person said that the order's total value was approximately 450 million yuan ($61.83 million) and that Huawei was to deliver all of the chips by the end of this year. Although the order is tiny relative to the thousands of chips top Chinese tech firms have historically ordered from Nvidia, the sources said it was significant, as it showed how some firms could shift away from the U.S. company.

China

Huawei and Tencent Spearhead China's Hold on Cybersecurity Patents (nikkei.com) 28

China's presence is growing in cybersecurity technology, with companies such as Huawei and Tencent accounting for six of the top 10 global patent holdings in the sector as of August. From a report: Chinese companies have made headway in technological fields that affect economic security, according to industry insiders, as they focus on fostering their own tech amid the growing standoff between the U.S. and China. The rankings, compiled by Nikkei in cooperation with U.S. information services provider LexisNexis, are based on patents registered in 95 countries and regions, including Japan, the U.S., China and the European Union. Patent registrations were screened for the cybersecurity field using such factors as the international patent classification, with filings of the same patent in multiple countries counted as a single patent.

As of August, IBM led the rankings with 6,363 patents. Huawei Technologies came in second with 5,735 patents and Tencent Holdings placed third with 4,803. Other Chinese companies in the top 10 included financial services provider Ant Group in sixth with 3,922 patents, followed by power transmission company State Grid Corp. of China with 3,696, Alibaba Group Holding with 3,122 and sovereign wealth fund China Investment with 3,042. Patent applications filed by Chinese companies have increased since around 2018, when the U.S. began to impose full-scale export controls on Chinese high-tech companies. Compared with 10 years ago, IBM's patent holdings increased by a factor of 1.5. In contrast, holdings for Huawei and Tencent were 2.3 times and 13 times higher, respectively.

The Internet

Russia Blocks 167 VPNs, Steps Up OpenVPN and WireGuard Disruption (torrentfreak.com) 42

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The head of the Russian department responsible for identifying threats to the "stability, security and integrity" of the internet, has revealed the extent of the Kremlin's VPN crackdown. Former FSO officer Sergei Khutortsev, a central figure in Russia's 'sovereign internet' project, confirmed that 167 VPN services are now blocked along with over 200 email services. Russia is also reported as stepping up measures against protocols such as OpenVPN, IKEv2 and WireGuard. [...]

An in-depth report published by TheIns.ru has details of the monitoring/blocking system reportedly deployed in Russia, how much it costs (4.3 billion rubles/$43 million in 2020, 24.7 billion rubles/$247 million for 2022-2024), and the names of the companies supplying the components. The publication also obtained original documents that apparently show some of the protocols Russia initially intended to block. They include older VPN protocols IPSec, L2TP, and PPTP, plus the BitTorrent protocol still widely used today. The full report on the system, which reveals the use of Intel chips/chipsets in 965 servers manufactured by Huawei and already purchased by Russia, plus another 2400+ servers for 2023/24, is available here.

Businesses

Apple's Dark Cloud Might Linger (wsj.com) 64

Winter has come early for Apple, and it might last a while. From a report: The world's largest company by market value has become worth considerably less over the past three months. Apple's share price has slid 11% since the company reported its fiscal third-quarter results on Aug. 3, erasing nearly $400 billion in market value. It is hardly a typical swing given the fact that the company has long used the fall season to launch its biggest products for every year, including new iPhones. This is the first year since 2015 that Apple shares have lost ground between the company's key Worldwide Developers Conference in June and its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report that typically takes place in late October.

That report is expected Thursday afternoon, and it will be the first to reflect sales of the iPhone 15 family that was launched in late September. Investors are worried that Apple's largest business is now facing new and potentially long-term threats. The growing geopolitical rift between the U.S. and China has finally caught Apple in its vortex, spurring reports of Chinese authorities considering a ban on the use of iPhones and other Apple devices by government employees. To make matters worse, Apple's old China-based rival Huawei appears to have made a comeback. The company launched a new smartphone called the Mate 60 Pro in September that reportedly is capable of 5G speeds, even though U.S. sanctions were supposed to deny the company the chips necessary for such an accomplishment.

Government

America's Net Neutrality Question: Should the FCC Define the Internet as a 'Common Carrier'? (fcc.gov) 132

The Washington Post's editorial board looks at America's "net neutrality" debate.

But first they note that America's communications-regulating FCC has "limited authority to regulate unless broadband is considered a 'common carrier' under the Telecommunications Act of 1996." The FCC under President Barack Obama moved to reclassify broadband so it could regulate broadband companies; the FCC under President Donald Trump reversed the change. Dismayed advocates warned the world that, without the protections in place, the internet would break. You'll never guess what happened next: nothing. Or, at least, almost nothing. The internet did not break, and internet service providers for the most part did not block and they did not throttle.

All the same, today's FCC, under Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, has just moved to re-reclassify broadband. The interesting part is that her strongest argument doesn't have much to do with net neutrality, but with some of the other benefits the country could see from having a federal watchdog keeping an eye on the broadband business... Broadband is an essential service... Yet there isn't a single government agency with sufficient authority to oversee this vital tool. Asserting federal authority over broadband would empower regulation of any blocking, throttling or anti-competitive paid traffic prioritization that they might engage in. But it could also help ensure the safety and security of U.S. networks.

The FCC has, on national security grounds, removed authorization for companies affiliated with adversary states, such as China's Huawei, from participating in U.S. telecommunications markets. The agency can do this for phone carriers. But it can't do it for broadband, because it isn't allowed to. Or consider public safety during a crisis. The FCC doesn't have the ability to access the data it needs to know when and where there are broadband outages — much less the ability to do anything about those outages if they are identified. Similarly, it can't impose requirements for network resiliency to help prevent those outages from occurring in the first place — during, say, a natural disaster or a cyberattack.

The agency has ample power to police the types of services that are becoming less relevant in American life, such as landline telephones, and little power to police those that are becoming more important every day.

The FCC acknowledges this power would also allow them to prohibit "throttling" of content. But the Post's editorial also makes the argument that here in 2023 that's "unlikely to have any major effect on the broadband industry in either direction... Substantial consequences have only become less likely as high-speed bandwidth has become less limited."
China

Huawei's Profit Doubles With Made-in-China Chip Breakthrough (yahoo.com) 148

Bloomberg thinks they've identified the source of the advanced chips in Huawei's newest smartphone, citing to "people familiar with the matter". In a suggestion that export restrictions on Europe's most valuable tech company may have come too late to stem China's advances in chipmaking, ASML's so-called immersion deep ultraviolet machines were used in combination with tools from other companies to make the Huawei Technologies Co. chip, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing information that's not public. ASML declined to comment.

There is no suggestion that their sales violated export restrictions... ASML has never been able to sell its EUV machines to China because of export restrictions. But less advanced DUV models can be retooled with deposition and etching gear to produce 7-nanometer and possibly even more advanced chips, according to industry analysts. The process is much more expensive than using EUV, making it very difficult to scale production in a competitive market environment. In China, however, the government is willing to shoulder a significant portion of chipmaking costs.

Chinese companies have been legally stockpiling DUV gear for years — especially after the U.S. introduced its initial export controls last year before getting Japan and the Netherlands on board... According to an investor presentation published by the company last week, ASML experienced a jump in business from China this year as chipmakers there boosted orders ahead of the export controls taking full effect in 2024. China accounted for 46% of ASML's sales in the third quarter, compared with 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in the three months ending in March.

Another article from Bloomberg includes this prediction: The U.S. won't be able to stop Huawei and SMIC from making progress in chip technology, Burn J. Lin, a former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. vice president, told Bloomberg News. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp should be able to advance to the next generation at 5 nanometers with machines from ASML Holding NV that it already operates, said Lin, who at TSMC championed the lithography technology that transformed chipmaking.
The end result is that Huawei's profit "more than doubled during the quarter it revealed its biggest achievement in chip technology," the article reports, "adding to signs the Chinese tech leader is steadying a business rocked by US sanctions." The Shenzhen company reported a 118% surge in net profit to 26.4 billion yuan ($3.6 billion) in the September quarter, and a slight rise in sales to 145.7 billion yuan, according to Bloomberg News calculations from nine-month results released Friday. Those numbers included initial sales of the vastly popular Mate 60 Pro, which began shipping in late August... The gadget sold out almost instantly, spurring expectations it could rejuvenate Huawei's fortunes and potentially cut into Apple Inc.'s lead in China, given signs of a disappointing debut for the iPhone 15...

A resurgent Huawei would pose problems not just for Apple but also local brands from Xiaomi Corp. to Oppo and Vivo, all of which are fighting for sales in a shrinking market.

United States

US Chip Curbs Give Huawei a Chance To Fill the Nvidia Void In China (reuters.com) 23

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. measures to limit the export of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China may create an opening for Huawei to expand in its $7 billion home market as the curbs force Nvidia to retreat, analysts say. While Nvidia has historically been the leading provider of AI chips in China with a market share exceeding 90%, Chinese firms including Huawei have been developing their own versions of Nvidia's best-selling chips, including the A100 and the H100 graphics processing units (GPU).

Huawei's Ascend AI chips are comparable to Nvidia's in terms of raw computing power, analysts and some AI firms such as China's iFlyTek say, but they still lag behind in performance. Jiang Yifan, chief market analyst at brokerage Guotai Junan Securities, said another key limiting factor for Chinese firms was the reliance of most projects on Nvidia's chips and software ecosystem, but that could change with the U.S. restrictions. "This U.S. move, in my opinion, is actually giving Huawei's Ascend chips a huge gift," Jiang said in a post on his social media Weibo account. This opportunity, however, comes with several challenges.

Many cutting edge AI projects are built with CUDA, a popular programming architecture Nvidia has pioneered, which has in turn given rise to a massive global ecosystem that has become capable of training highly sophisticated AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-4. Huawei own version is called CANN, and analysts say it is much more limited in terms of the AI models it is capable of training, meaning that Huawei's chips are far from a plug-and-play substitute for Nvidia. Woz Ahmed, a former chip design executive turned consultant, said that for Huawei to win Chinese clients from Nvidia, it must replicate the ecosystem Nvidia created, including supporting clients to move their data and models to Huawei's own platform. Intellectual property rights are also a problem, as many U.S. firms already hold key patents for GPUs, Ahmed said. "To get something that's in the ballpark, it is 5 or 10 years," he added.

China

Apple's iPhone Loses Top Spot In China To Huawei (cnbc.com) 37

According to a report from Jefferies analysts, Huawei has overtaken Apple's iPhone as the smartphone market share leader in China. CNBC reports: The analysts said smartphone sales in China have showed positive growth year over year, driven primarily by high double-digit growth in Android sales led by Huawei, Xiaomi and Honor devices. But Apple's iPhone has seen a significant, double-digit decline, and its volume growth year over year has been negative since the iPhone 15 launched, according to the analysts.

"We believe weak demand in China would eventually lead to lower-than-expected global shipments of iPhone 15 in 2023," the analysts wrote, adding that the trend suggests the iPhone will "lose" to Huawei next year. The Jefferies analysts wrote that Android's volume growth can't be chalked up to discounts and that discounts on iPhones, excluding the iPhone 15 models, have been stable, while the average discount for Android "is not high." The analysts noted that resale iPhone 15 devices are all "trading at discounts to official selling prices," which also reflects the weak demand in China.

Technology

RISC-V Group Says Restrictions on Open Technology Would Slow Innovation 29

The chief executive of RISC-V International says that possible government restrictions on the open-source technology will slow down the development of new and better chips, holding back the global technology industry. From a report: The comments come after Reuters last week reported that a growing group of U.S. lawmakers are calling on the Biden administration to impose export control restrictions around RISC-V, the open-source technology overseen by the RISC-V International nonprofit foundation. RISC-V technology can be used as an ingredient to create chips for smartphones or artificial intelligence. Major U.S. firms such as Qualcomm and Alphabet's Google have embraced RISC-V, but so too have Chinese firms such as Huawei, which the U.S. lawmakers argue constitutes a national security concern.

In a blog post, Calista Redmond, chief of RISC-V International, which coordinates work among companies on the technology, said RISC-V is no different than other open technology standards like Ethernet, which helps computers on the internet talk with each other. "Contemplated actions by governments for an unprecedented restriction in open standards will have the consequence of diminished access to the global marketplace of products, solutions, and talent," Redmond wrote. "Bifurcating on the standards level would lead to a world of incompatible solutions that duplicate effort and close off markets."
United States

Some US Lawmakers Want to Restrict American Companies From Working on RISC-V Chip Technology (reuters.com) 162

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China — a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders...

RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence... The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V...

Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google saying it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips...

Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy." "It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."

One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was "abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.

"U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."
China

Apple Enforces New Check on Apps in China as Beijing Tightens Oversight (reuters.com) 57

Apple has started requiring new apps to show proof of a Chinese government licence before their release on its China App Store, joining local rivals years that had adopted the policy years earlier to meet tightening state regulations. From a report: Apple began last Friday requiring app developers to submit the "internet content provider (ICP) filing" when they publish new apps on its App Store, it said on its website for developers. An ICP filing is a longtime registration system, required for websites to operate legally in China, and most local app stores including those operated by Tencent and Huawei have adopted it since at least 2017.

To get an ICP filing licence, developers need to have a company in China or work with a local publisher, which has been an obstacle for a large number of foreign apps. Apple's loose ICP policy has allowed it to offer far more mobile apps than local app rivals and helped the U.S. tech giant boost its popularity in China, its third-largest market behind the Americas and Europe. The decision by Apple comes after China further tightened its oversight over mobile apps in August by releasing a new rule requiring all app stores and app developers to submit an "app filing" containing business details with the regulators. Chinese regulators last week released names of the first batch of mobile app stores that have completed app filings, but Apple's App Store was not among those on the list.

Linux

If the Linux Foundation Was a Software Company, It'd Likely Be the Biggest in the World (theregister.com) 20

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has returned to Shanghai for the city's first Kubecon since the pandemic. During a keynote that switched languages several times, demonstrating the challenges faced by both AI and human translators in keeping up, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, threw out several crowd-pleasing statistics while also highlighting some projects likely to make one or two companies squirm a little. On the statistics front, Zemlin joked that the Linux Foundation was likely the largest software company in the world, noting that if one took an average software developer's salary -- he put the worldwide mean as being $40,000 -- and multiplied it by the number of developers contributing to the foundation, the payroll would come to around $26 billion -- more than Microsoft's $24 billion R&D payroll.

The statistic was somewhat tongue in cheek as Zemlin pointed out that none of the developers working on Linux Foundation projects actually work for the Linux Foundation. However, the sheer quantity of engineers involved highlighted another issue noted by Zemlin: the "paradox of choice" when selecting the correct open source project for a given purpose when the number on offer reaches the hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Reflecting the increasing maturity of some elements of the open source world, he also emphasized the opportunities for companies to increase revenues and profits through the use of open source. WeChat, Alibaba, and Huawei all received nods -- unsurprising considering the location -- as Zemlin noted a virtuous circle whereby improvements go back into projects, meaning better profits, meaning more improvements, and so on. It all sounded very utopian, although darkening clouds were signaled by the addition of OpenTofu to the list of projects Zemlin was keen to boast about, including open source efforts around large language models.

China

China Lists Mobile App Stores That Comply With New Rule, But Apple Missing (reuters.com) 11

China's cyberspace regulator released on Wednesday names of the first batch of mobile app stores that have completed filing business details to regulators, signalling it has begun to enforce new rules that expand its oversight of mobile apps. From a report: A total of 26 app stores operated by companies including Tencent, Huawei, Ant Group, Baidu, Xiaomi and Samsung have submitted filings to the authority, according to the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Apple's App Store is not among the app stores on the list. Beijing has been expanding oversight of smartphone and mobile app usage over the past several years. The country now requires mobile app stores and mobile apps to submit business details to the government. These rules are causing consternation in the industry that publishing apps in the world's second largest economy will become very difficult and many apps may need to be taken down.
China

Huawei Mostly Omits Mentioning Mate 60 Phone in Two-Hour Event (bloomberg.com) 13

Huawei largely omitted mention of its Mate 60 smartphone series at a grand showcase of its new consumer products on Monday. From a report: The Shenzhen-based company will increase smartphone production in response to demand, said consumer division chief Richard Yu, without naming the handset triggering that surge. The Mate 60 Pro earned international notoriety with its advanced made-in-China processor last month, causing concern in Washington about Huawei's progress toward developing in-house chipmaking capabilities despite US trade curbs. Huawei's new phones have fired up the company's sales and were among the top sellers in China in the week before Apple's latest iPhone launch. They are the first 5G-capable handsets that Huawei's put on sale since the Trump administration's sanctions cut it off from advanced tech suppliers. That connectivity is provided by the 7-nanometer Kirin 9000s processor inside -- made by Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. -- which is accompanied by a broad range of China-made components inside each phone.
China

Huawei's New SoC Features Processor Cores Designed In-House (arstechnica.com) 88

"Huawei is emulating Apple in developing the processors that power its latest smartphone," reports Ars Technica, "a breakthrough that will help the Chinese company to reduce its reliance on foreign technology as it confronts US sanctions." Analysis of the main chip inside the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which launched at the end of last month and immediately sold out, reveals that Huawei has joined the elite group of Big Tech companies capable of designing their own semiconductors. Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro's "system on a chip" (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones. The other four CPUs are Arm-based but feature Huawei's own designs and adaptations, according to three people familiar with the Mate's development and Geekerwan, a Chinese technology testing company that took a closer look at the main chip...

While Huawei is still licensing Arm's basic designs, its own HiSilicon chip design business has improved on them to build its own processor cores on the Mate's Kirin 9000S SoC. This will give it the flexibility needed to produce high-end smartphones despite the constraints of US export controls, said analysts and industry insiders. The Kirin 9000S also features a graphics processing unit and neural processing unit developed by HiSilicon. Its predecessor, the Kirin 9000 SoC, had relied completely on Arm for its CPUs and GPU...

Huawei was able to produce its own phone processors by adapting CPU core designs that were originally used in its data center servers, according to people with direct knowledge of its development. The strategy resembles Apple's moves to turn its iPhone processors into chips capable of powering its Mac computers — but in reverse. "No one ever did this before," said analyst Brady Wang of Counterpoint Research of Huawei's server-to-phone innovation...

Various testing teams, including Geekerwan's, have found that Huawei's semiconductor capabilities are one to two years behind those of chips made by the US's Qualcomm, the leading mobile chipmaker. Huawei's chips also consume more power than its competitors', according to measurements, and can cause the phone to heat up.

Reuters reports that "The United States has no evidence that Huawei can produce smartphones with advanced chips in large volumes, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Tuesday."

But meanwhile, a Huawei Technologies unit "is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras, in a fresh sign the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of U.S. export controls, two sources briefed on the unit's efforts said." The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company's HiSilicon chip design unit started this year, according to one of the sources, and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said at least some of the customers were Chinese...

"These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors," said the source familiar with the surveillance camera industry's supply chain, adding that HiSilicon's return would shake up the market... Before the U.S. export controls, it was the dominant chip supplier to the surveillance camera sector, with brokerage Southwest Securities estimating its global share in 2018 at 60%. By 2021, HiSilicon's global market share plummeted to just 3.9%, according to data from consulting firm Frost & Sullivan...

TechInsights analyst Dan Hutcheson said their analysis of the Mate 60 Pro and other components such as its radio frequency power chip also suggested that Huawei had access to sophisticated electronic design automation (EDA) tools that "they are not supposed to have".

"We don't know if they got them illicitly, or more probably the Chinese developed their own EDA tools," he said.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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