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Qualcomm To Manufacture Custom Chips For Chinese Market (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: Qualcomm president Derek Aberle has suggested that the semiconductor giant is preparing to produce its own custom chips for the Chinese market. [A Wall Street Journal interview with] Aberle revealed that the American company had entered into a joint venture with the local government in Guizhou province to manufacture custom chips starting in the second half of 2016. According to Aberle, the Guizhou government owns 55% of the venture, while Qualcomm owns the remaining 45%. Aberle told the Wall Street Journal that he expects China's server demand to dwarf that of the U.S.. He said of the government-backed venture: "This is really going to be the primary vehicle from which we build our data center business in China. We are actually trying to create the company that is going to be able to win the market here as opposed to just licensing old technology."
This will turn out like the North Korean business partnerships where once everything is rolling smoothly the foreign investors suddenly find themselves being shut of things, and then one day the joint venture (and all its assets in the country) get seized for some reason. Then it just becomes a wholly state-owned company with start-up costs and IP essentially donated by the former partner.
It just wont be done so blatantly in China.
China already gets powerful multi-core ARM chips at dirt cheap prices, so this isn't a matter of saving money. The only logical reason they would be making custom chips (and so soon) is they are modifying an existing chip and adding a hardware backdoor. With hardware backdoors in every server in china, they can control information much easier and identify dissidents.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I have been involved in the Chinese market for a long time and they are in the middle of transiting from the low-tech OEM assembling field to ODM to now going totally high tech
China has made some bold high tech investment and have done some very costly mistakes (Lenovo's purchase of Motorola a perfect example) but they are determined to forge ahead
You view of Chinese = Koreans are not totally without base, but for one who has been involved for over a decade, I can sense this time China is in for real. Doing what you said will only mean the Chinese shooting off their own toes
From space science to bio-tech to electronic chip and fab, their plan is, for 2016-2020, to further grow and groom their home grown talents, allowing them to gain more experience, and from 2021-2025, to start competing in the international (mainly 3rd world) market, and from 2026-2030, start going head to head against Korea and Europe and from 2031-2035, to start going head to head against USA / Japan
At least that is according to their plan, and there might be some slip-ups. So it won't be any surprise if the plan slips 1 or 2 stages, meaning, what they want to attain by 2035 might take them 10 more years (2045), but they are throwing a lot of resources on it
Their universities are recruiting very high quality teachers, and their students are very serious in learning. Tsinghua recently made it to the top 20 in the world ranking, and Peking U is not far behind
They churn out researchers and engineers by the hundreds of thosuands every single year and they do not have affirmative action nor any of the 'race based quota' in their university enrollment - meaning, the competition between students are genuine and fierce and their U graduates are super sharp
China has several fabs, and their current to fab can fab 28nm chips
China also has an army of fabless companies, some high end fabless joints such as hilink (from Huawei) are qualifying 10nm tape-outs with TSMC in Taiwan
In other words, China's fab ecosystem is very robust and healthy
Qualcomm has agreements with both Chinese fabless operation and the Chinese fabs because they want to establish and strengthen their beach front in China
Intel also wanted to get into China but they came into China too little too late - they only offer the Chinese their useless Atom chip (for mobile) - and their effort flopped
Right now the China market is being supplied, in low end, 30% by their home grown talents, 40% by the Taiwanese, and 30% by USA / Europe; in middle, 20% by home talents, 60% by the Taiwanese, and 20% by USA / Europe, and in the high end, less than 5% from home talents, 70% by the Taiwanese and the rest, USA / Europe
Qualcomm is determined to change that ratio
What you say about their education system may well be true. But if they're churning out an order of magnitude more grads than you, then among them there'll be a fair few that are very good and some that are excellent.
P.S. You probably meant wary, not weary.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."