Why just twice as fast? Once you know that something is doable, it works and the rough direction things can get done really really fast. The Bannister effect is a real thing that can be observed in so many areas.
Chinese leaped ahead once the US banned exports to certain Chinese companies, Turks have become top players in the military drone business after the West didn't sell them the drones.
I mean, obviously there's lots of work to be done but I think people who believe that others can’t do things they can do are very misguided. Laws of physics is the same everywhere and scientific research is quite open, engineers are everywhere and it only takes someone to invest resources to do something.
When you look at what it takes to successfully manufacture chips at these feature sizes you start to believe in the anthropic principle, or maybe I should call it semiconductoric. Veterans in the field can hardly believe its at all possible.
> Why just twice as fast? Once you know that something is doable, it works and the rough direction things can get done really really fast.
I agree on the first part. The second part is full of details. The mirrors have to be just right. The lasers have to be just right. The timings have to be just right. There's a million other things that have to be just right and the path to get there may not be very parallelizable.
Sure its still hard but unlike those who did it first, those coming after don't have to guess as much and spend resources on dead ends.
This is not Taliban getting into semiconductors, this is Japan who is already into semiconductors but lost its edge in this particular field but its leading in some other fields. Therefore they already have a considerable know how on mirrors and laser that they will have to improve on. IMHO the catch up will be much quicker and much cheaper than what the Europeans and Americans spent on to explore the path leading to what we have today.
OTOH you have Intel which never stopped R&D and they still have lots of trouble catching up; arguably they've been trying for almost a decade now, five years if you're being generous. (And they buy tools from ASML! Which other posters explain will also be the case here.)
IMHO Intel's case is more nuanced, they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC. They are also a giant corporation who has to re-organise and restructure, therefore can't move as fast as a newcomer. Intel's case is a business case, more than an engineering case. Just as Nokia.
The point still stands: they have the infrastructure, the experience, the logistics and the supply chain all secured and they're still at least a couple years behind if not more. It's extremely optimistic to say that it's going to be easier to start from scratch.
Intel was receiving continuous beatings from AMD (Ryzen/Epyc) a few years before Apple came up with M1. 2016/2017 vs 2020. I don't think Apple and Intel are in much competition: Intel doesn't make laptops and lacked Apple's moat when they did, and Apple doesn't sell (amd64) server CPUs.
> they were milking their position until Apple did something extraordinary with TSMC
I mean, that's true from a business perspective.
But they were trying very hard to make the next process node work. They went from a process upgrade every other design generation (the famous "tick-tock") to just tock-ing at 10nm because they couldn't get the next process generation working.
>Sure its still hard but unlike those who did it first, those coming after don't have to guess as much and spend resources on dead ends.
In many domains they do. Once the original creators are retiring or not involved, there are tons of tacit knowledge at every step of the way, from the high level abstract design to specific quirks of some manufacturing equipment, that's very hard to build back.
> Turks have become top players in the military drone business after the West didn't sell them the drones.
Everything is cheaper in Turkey.
They can produce a lower quality drone for 1/10th the price. Bayraktar = $5M, Reaper = $32M.
Of course there's a market!
I doubt the US could produce a drone the quality of Bayraktar for $5M domestically. It's just too expensive here.
The Turks aren't succeeding because they're building better drones. They're succeeding because the market for drones is disposable, and so the quality doesn't need to be as high - in many cases it's better to have a lower price.
China didn't succeed because they can make better T-shirts than the US. They succeeded because they made cheaper T-shirts.
It's not a fair comparison. They're very different classes of devices.
I do think the US could produce a Bayraktar-quality drone for under $5M. The major upside of the Bayraktar is that non-NATO countries can buy it.
Heck, I think many readers of HN could do the same (which obviously wouldn't help with sanctions). Stick a control system on a basic Cessna 152, and you've pretty much got the same capability. That's well south of $1M even.
You don't hear much about Bayraktar TB-2 (specifically) anymore since it's also not very useful anymore. It worked well before Russia was prepared. Now, we're generations ahead. Sky is full of drones, anti-drone warfare, and largely ones the ones used are a fraction of the cost of the Bayraktar TB-2 so it doesn't matter if they're shot down. The other end of the scale is ones less easy to shoot down.
edit: Corrected to write about the specific famed drone useful at the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine, versus Turkish drones in general.
Turkey has a range of drones, the cheapo Bayraktar one is just the most well known.
Some of the Turkish drones are better off not to be well known though, as there are accusation of launching AI controlled attacks and the machines were in charge of picking the humans they killed in Libya - which is a no-no but probably developed by all the leading states.
So no, Turkey isn't in the business of making cheap low quality drones, the range is quite extensive with some models at the cutting edge. All thanks to being in need of drones but not being able to purchase even if they have the resources.
> China didn't succeed because they can make better T-shirts than the US. They succeeded because they made cheaper T-shirts.
Can China make the same quality T-shirts as the US, but at a cheaper price? Then it could be considered better. For most things involving ordinary people, what matters is not what the highest possible quality thing is given no price constraints; what matters is what is economically feasible.
>> Chinese leaped ahead once the US banned exports to certain Chinese companies, <<
hate to nitpick, but this was actually well underway before the US sanction kicked in. SMIC's 7/5nm was already completed by former head of R&D at TSMC in 2020, which was more or less a replica of TSMC's 7nm. It certainly didn't help that the US dept of Commerce allowed over $100+B worth of export licenses to China, 1/3 of them to "blacklisted" entities, in 2022. The Dutch gov't export restriction likewise didn't really start until few months ago, which also allowed latest DUVs capable of 5/7nm.
Chinese leaped ahead once the US banned exports to certain Chinese companies, Turks have become top players in the military drone business after the West didn't sell them the drones.
I mean, obviously there's lots of work to be done but I think people who believe that others can’t do things they can do are very misguided. Laws of physics is the same everywhere and scientific research is quite open, engineers are everywhere and it only takes someone to invest resources to do something.