Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer
Well, I think they can do it in their labs, just not in mass production.
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Yeah, IBM still seems interested in the research part of it. Which seems a bit… left-hand-right-hand to me? Like someone forgot to tell them that their semiconductor business no longer exists?
Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer
Either way, the number of companies that can do any kind of mass-produced SOCs capable of powering modern computers (including smartphones) is pretty small. We might need to add Xiaomi to that list, since I think they are fabbing their own chips at this time? Maybe?
It's a small list.  |
I don't think Xiaomi has chips. Huawei does (HiSilicon), but they're fabless; most (all?) of their stuff seems to be TSMC. I wouldn't be shocked to see pressure from China for HiSilicon to move from TSMC to SMIC. China can't be too happy about its fabless companies needing to partner with a Taiwanese company.
It's definitely an extremely small list. To be clear, there are other companies still that have fabs. NXP/Freescale (formerly Philips and Motorola), STMicroelectronics, Renesas (Hitachi/Mitsubishi/NEC) and a few others still have fabs. But the smaller the process node becomes, the more companies throw the towel (for example, Panasonic gave up in 2019).