XScale was bought from Digital Equipment Corporation. Back then it was called StrongARM. Intel never quite knew what to do with it despite it selling reasonably well in PDAs like the Compaq iPAQ and others at one point. Then Apple came to Intel, which was their CPU vendor for desktops, and asked them to make a CPU for the iPhone. And Intel refused. Only to later try to make downscaled x86 versions for Android smartphones which no one wanted to buy. So it is that we get here.

Price increases don't happen the moment you print the money. It takes time until it filters out to the real economy and prices rise. Typically 2 years.
Oops.

Had Elop never been the CEO. Maybe Maemo would have had a chance.
Fact is, Nokia had decided to use Qt as the library to write applications for. And it ran on both Symbian and Maemo. So application developers had a migration path. Plus Maemo was a pretty decent OS when it came out. It still is ok.

Instead we got Windows Phone where they broke compatibility with prior apps not once, but thrice.

Thanks a lot Microsoft.

The Russians spent billions building those pipelines. They financed like 50% of their construction. And if they wanted to cut the gas supply they just needed to close the taps. Why bother destroying the pipelines.

I think it is fairly clear who sabotaged Nord Stream. Just follow the money. Who earned the most from the closure of Nord Stream? Who said that Nord Stream wouldn't stay operational if Russia attacked Ukraine?

It is pretty obvious the US blew up Nord Stream 1/2. And it is pretty obvious the Russians blew up this Finnish pipeline.

Among others, it's been accused of being a Taiwanese chip that they bought a bunch of just before the sanctions went into effect, or a South Korean chip that they can't continue to obtain long term without the ongoing cooperation of the relevant Korean company.

That is impossible. The Kirin 9000S uses the Cortex A510 core which was developed by ARM Cambridge after the US sanctions. And people have analyzed the chips with a microscope, they use their own process.

China today is a huge consumer economy. Largest relatively uniform group of consumers in the world. With vast spending power. So is it that surprising that companies are showing up to create products specific to that market? And that they manufacture those products in China? Using Chinese components?

Then there is the vast state support that the Chinese government, both central and local, gives for building an electronics fab. You might claim those are market distorting subsidies. But other countries in the Far East like Singapore have similar policies. And now the US has the CHIPS Act. Which even forces companies which sign up for it to abandon the idea of opening new fabs in China altogether. If China went to the WTO with a court case on that I can bet on who would win. None of the Chinese incentives are anti-competitive like that.

Chinese fabs had grown their clientele portfolio quite a bit. SMIC for example raised cash on the Chinese stock market to fund expansion into newer processes. However the US torpedoed that expansion by denying China the acquisition of EUV machines. The thing is a leading edge EUV fab costs like 2x the price of an older generation DUV fab. Which the US also denied them buying machines for. And 28nm DUV fabs are probably like 4x cheaper than EUV. So with all that cash from the stock market guess what SMIC is plowing their money into? Instead of building a single EUV fab they are building four DUV ones for 28nm.

The US now claims the market for old chips is saturated. But yet just last year everyone was talking about the lack of older generation chips, and that there weren't enough old chips to make cars, etc. Everyone is now building fabs for older chips. China, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, and the US. Also, by threatening to cut China from Western chips entirely, the US just gave the Chinese economy the extra push to vastly expand their own facilities as quickly as possible. So the US government is just reaping what they sowed.

As for the notion they can stop the Chinese from making 28nm chips. Good luck with that. In two years tops the Chinese will be able to make their own machine tools, and they won't even need to buy them from the West anymore. The US is like 10 years too late to this party. If they wanted to cut China from chips then they are just way too late.

And China can retaliate to Western sanctions on chips in several ways. The US does not even know what shit they put themselves into. Nearly all the PCBs today are made in China. A significant amount of the world's DRAM and NAND is also made there. Plus several critical materials. The US is quite lucky the Chinese did not decide to pay them back in kind yet.

And so it starts. One side accepts patches, and the other does not. Red Hat is going to go down the tubes.

IBM just had to screw up a perfectly fine Linux company.

Or Lavabit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"Lavabit is an open-source encrypted webmail service, founded in 2004. The service suspended its operations on August 8, 2013 after the U.S. Federal Government ordered it to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys, in order to allow the government to spy on Edward Snowden's email. ...
On August 8, 2013, Lavabit suspended its operations, and the email service log-in page was replaced by a message from the owner and operator Ladar Levison. ...
Levison stated in an interview that he has responded to "at least two dozen subpoenas" over the lifetime of the service. He hinted that the objectionable request was for "information about all the users" of Lavabit.
Levison explained he was under gag order and that he was legally unable to explain to the public why he ended the service. ...
Levison said that he could be arrested for closing the site instead of releasing the information, and it was reported that the federal prosecutor's office had sent Levison's lawyer an email to that effect. ...
Lavabit is believed to be the first technology firm that has chosen to suspend or shut down its operation rather than comply with an order from the United States government to reveal information or grant access to information. ...
The court records show that the FBI sought Lavabit's Transport Layer Security (TLS/SSL) private key. Levison objected, saying that the key would allow the government to access communications by all 400,000 customers of Lavabit.
"

Your phone will be thicker. Whoop de doo. I would much rather have swappable batteries.

That might have been true when the long connector came out. But it stopped being true when Apple switched to Lightning. By then everyone but them was using USB.

China has their own supply chain for lithography. They have RSLaser as a light source supplier and UP Optotech as a lens supplier for DUV for example.

https://www.en.etowncapital.co...
https://www.wsj.com/market-dat...

As for SMIC's capability, or lack of it, they proved capable of mass producing 14nm FinFET. They produced the HiSilicon Kirin 710A in large volume.
There are also claims their 10nm process has been serially produced, and they were able to produce 7nm ASICs for cryptomining.

Their yields might be low however because they were not allowed to buy the most advanced DUV tools.

The advanced process design team at SMIC used to work at TSMC and Samsung. So I do not know why you think they lack capability. Their only restriction is lack of access to production tools.

Intel refused to buy EUV machines to put in their main production facilities. They only had a much older prototype EUV model for test purposes. The EUV machines were very expensive and initially had low production rate. Intel tried to milk their DUV machines all the way to 7nm or more with a proprietary highly complex multi-patterning process which they never quite got to work. Now Intel decided to skip the initial generation of EUV and go straight into high NA EUV.

The reason the Japanese never got their EUV machine into mass production is because they lacked the orders. Gigaphoton in Japan developed an EUV light source. But with no clients and firm orders it made no financial sense to start production. The Japanese semi industry itself has severely fallen behind in terms of fabrication facilities and the other major client of Japanese semi tools, Intel, was not interested in production EUV either.

The cost of these tools is severely high and demand for these tools even worldwide is in quite low numbers. As tools get more expensive, less and less new fabs get built, and production gets increasingly concentrated into less and less players. By not allowing the Chinese to buy their own tools, they basically forced them to develop their own. Japan basically managed to develop all the components for EUV by themselves. They just never put them into production. Yet somehow people think that China, an economy with like 10x more population than Japan, with GDP in PPP that is higher than the US cannot develop the technology. Right.

China has the world's largest single market for chips. They also have reasonable knowledge of semis with capabilities in every single sector of chipmaking. This means they will get there regardless of if the US wants it to happen or not.

SMIC only isn't doing better as a foundry because there are no better machines in the market for them to acquire. They are banned from getting any leading edge Western machine tools. But the Chinese's own semi tools market has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past decade. Much faster than the rest of the world market in semi tools. So it is only a matter of time really.

As for EUV, the Chinese state is funding R&D in at least three different light source technologies, plus the other components required to get it to work. They have been working on it for over a decade. Once the subcomponents are mature enough they will try to make a machine.

I would not be surprised if in a decade the Chinese were pretty close to leading edge.

You forgot Toshiba. That is also an option.