Arm stopped selling licenses to Chinese companies for advanced processor architectures

Chinese processor developers are making serious bets on Arm and RISC architectures, since access to them has so far not been restricted by political opponents.
But now Arm has refused to export Neoverse V architecture licenses to China and this could become a nasty precedent, limiting the pace of development of China's national semiconductor industry.Image source: AlibabaBritish Arm holding, as the Financial Times reports, has determined that Chinese customers cannot buy licenses to use Neoverse V processor architectures because they allow processors to be built at performance levels that exceed the values allowed by US export rules.
The Neoverse V architecture includes elements developed in the United States, so British Arm has to negotiate the nuances of exporting the relevant technology with overseas officials.
As expected, the Chinese giant Alibaba as a result of such restrictions may face the inability to use the Neoverse V1 or V2 architecture in its processors.
In this case, the Chinese partners of Arm will be available architecture series Neoverse N2, which has a lower speed.This situation resonates with the restrictions, which have already faced NVIDIA, which lost the right to supply after the fall of next year, gas pedals generation calculations Ampere and Hopper with a certain level of performance.
The supplier was quick to react and started offering Chinese customers special A800 gas pedals, whose performance avoided the sanctions restrictions by a margin.
Arm's Chinese customers found themselves in a similar situation.
The same company, Alibaba, expected to buy a license from Arm to use the Neoverse V1 architecture to develop processors used in cloud systems.
Competitor Amazon Web Services in the U.S.
already uses the architecture of this series to create specialized processors used in its own infrastructure.
Alibaba representatives, on condition of anonymity, expressed dissatisfaction with Arm's behavior, stating its reluctance to sell technology to China even if such deals are adequately funded.

NVIDIA completely withdrew from Russia - $16 million spent to close the office

Back in spring NVIDIA announced the cessation of direct product supplies to Russia, and the company's local office has been operating in a state of uncertainty ever since.
In the quarterly report on Form 10-Q published this week, information about NVIDIA terminating its operations in Russia is stated directly.Source image: NVIDIA In July, the renewal of licenses for proprietary software for Russian customers was terminated.
By early October, rumors emerged about NVIDIA's readiness to reduce its Russian staff or offer relocation to those wishing to do so.
In the latter case, the specialists could move to another country and continue working outside of Russia.
It was reported that employees who refused to change their place of residence at the NVIDIA representative office in Russia were offered to terminate the contract with payment of the severance pay.In the text of the quarterly report on Form 10-Q risks associated with Russia for NVIDIA activities were highlighted in a separate paragraph.
The company reminded that it did not sell almost anything directly to Russia, in any case direct sales in the last fiscal year ended January 30 this year were \"insignificant\".
Basically, the company made money in Russia on graphics processors sold as part of graphics cards of its partners.
And because gaming cards are still supplied to Russia through parallel imports, NVIDIA's withdrawal from Russia should have almost no impact on gaming revenue.The company notes that the Russian market in the last fiscal year formed no more than 2% of its total revenue, and the share in the gaming segment was 4%.
Thus, in the last fiscal year Russia brought NVIDIA about $500 million in the gaming segment.
The amount seems to be decent, but on the background of total revenue of $12.5 billion the potential loss of Russian gaming market will not be a tragedy for NVIDIA.
In reality, there will be no reduction in the gaming segment as supplies of video cards from NVIDIA's partners continue to be shipped to Russia.
Perhaps only a minimal reduction in total revenue due to the cessation of supply of professional cards and gas pedals.
As highlighted in the quarterly report published this week, in the third quarter of this fiscal year NVIDIA phased out all of its activities in Russia.
In the company's calendar the corresponding reporting period ended on October 30, so the rumors about closing the Russian office, which appeared at the beginning of the same month, fit into that period.
In the comments of NVIDIA CFO on the results of the third quarter even indicated the amount of losses related to business restructuring in Russia and closing the local office - it reached $16 million.
Recall that as of the beginning of this year NVIDIA had over 300 employees in Russia, and it was previously reported that they were offered relocation.

Chip imports to China fell markedly in 2022 amid US sanctions, especially in October

Chip imports to China fell by more than 13% from January to October, according to Chinese customs, as the world's largest semiconductor market is affected by the growing trade standoff between the US and the Middle Kingdom as well as a general economic slowdown.
Source image: TSMSZThe first 10 months of the year, China imported 458 billion integrated circuits, which is 13.2% less than the 527.9 billion chips imported into the country in the same period last year.
In October the decline in imports markedly accelerated - during the first 9 months of decline was an average of only 12.8%.Decrease in supply volumes is also due to the fact that in 2021 the import of integrated circuits took off - during the first 10 months of growth then was 21.2% year-on-year, so it is difficult to keep up with these figures now.
But despite the decline in the volume of imports, higher prices for chips led to an increase in the value of supplies during this period by 1.3%, leaving $351.2 billion.
In general, chips have long been a major item of imports to China, at one time by the value of purchases such imports overtook crude oil and consumer goods.
Nevertheless, it began to decline at the beginning of this year, the first year-on-year decline since 2020.
The drop in imports in October was 13.7% (to 41.1 billion) compared to October 2021.
By comparison, 47.6 billion chips were imported in September.
The accelerated decline in purchases comes amid Washington's strengthening of export controls and coincides with a global decline in demand for semiconductors as a whole.Source image: TSMC7 October, the Bureau of Industry and Security - a unit of the U.S.
Department of Commerce announced a series of measures to control technology exports to China aimed at weakening the Chinese high-performance semiconductor sector - not only exports to the Middle Kingdom chips themselves, but also equipment for their manufacture, special permits for the production of semiconductors, and a number of other measures.
At the same time, the value of sold year-on-year increased by 6.2%.
The problem may be partly related to the outbreak of coronavirus in the country - due to sanitary restrictions, the ability to fulfill orders was also affected.

TSMC Suspends Production of Chinese Biren Technology 7nm Accelerators Due to US Sanctions

A day ago, Bloomberg confidently reported that the computing capabilities of the Chinese company's Biren BR100 gas pedals are slightly worse than NVIDIA A100, and therefore the US sanctions will not prevent their further production.
Today, the source sharply changed the rhetoric, saying that TSMC decided to suspend the shipment of these 7nm gas pedals to Chinese customers.Image source: Biren TechnologyIn summer, Biren Technology was not shy about stating that its BR100 gas pedal could challenge the NVIDIA A100.
Features of Chinese product were really impressive: 77 billion transistors, 7nm process technology and spatial layout of 2.5D CoWoS, 64 GB of memory, support for PCI Express 5.0 and CXL interfaces.
However, when speaking about a new wave of anti-Chinese sanctions, Biren representatives preferred to remain anonymous and claimed that their chip does not meet NVIDIA A100 level and therefore would not fall under new export tunnels.
Today Bloomberg reports that TSMC refused to take risks and stopped production of Biren Technology 7nm chip gas pedals.
The Taiwanese contractor still hasn't come to a final conclusion about the belonging of Biren products to the banned category of products, but the shipments will be stopped \"just in case\".
Biren gas pedals are designed to work in machine vision systems, processing of natural speech and its synthesis using artificial intelligence.
Representatives of the Chinese company have not yet commented on the news, according to Bloomberg.

Russian Aquarius will produce processors on RISC-V architecture

Sanctions limiting the access of domestic companies to technology are forcing Russian business to look for new solutions.
According to Kommersant, citing high-ranking industry sources, Aquarius, widely known in the domestic IT market, is organizing the production of microelectronics on the RISC-V architecture and expects to receive subsidies from the Ministry of Industry and Trade for this.
Other Russian business also shows increased attention to the open architecture.Image source: AquariusAccording to the publication's sources, last year \"Aquarius\" was in talks with Russian suppliers of IP-blocks for RISC-V and was recruiting a team of developers.
Direct production may be organized at Zelenograd-based Mikron, which recently announced its intention to expand chip production.
Although there are rumors that Aquarius may receive a subsidy from the Ministry of Industry and Trade for this project, the Ministry itself has not yet commented on the information.Because RISC-V is an open processor architecture and the technology is freely available to everyone, companies around the world are showing increasing interest in it.
Although its performance is inferior to the popular x86 and Arm, the experts do not exclude the possibility that in the future the RISC-V processors will be able to compete with these solutions.
It is known that Chinese companies, which are also experiencing sanctions pressure from a number of countries, are showing great interest in the technology.According to Kommersant, Akvarius has confirmed work on two projects related to the development of service chips on RISC-V.
As for cooperation with \"Mikron\", \"Aquarius\" believes that it will be possible to work with the plant when it becomes ready \"to cooperate on the production of products on 90 nm technology\".
It is known that the Russian Yadro which is a part of the \"IKS Holding\" also announced its plans to develop RISC-V processors, and in September 2021 the \"Varton Investment Company\" (controls Baikal Electronics) bought a 34% stake in the Russian developer of IP-blocks for RISC-V processors CloudBear.
According to \"Kommersant\", the development and production of microcontrollers on the corresponding architecture is already engaged in the electronics manufacturer Milandr.Image source: AquariusIn late September an association headed by Anna Serebryanikova, who is already president of the Big Data Association, is reportedly established, the prospects of the technology are being studied by a division of Marvel Distribution - F+ tech, which produces phones.
Moreover, Open Mobile Platform (OMP), the developer of Aurora OS controlled by Rostelecom, has also indicated its readiness to participate in relevant projects.According to experts, the possibility of free use of RISC-V makes the platform most promising for Russian chipmakers, because cooperation with companies that own technologies for other types of architectures is virtually impossible today, while there are even ready-made solutions on RISC-V, for example - developed and distributed by Chinese Alibaba.

Taiwan is ready to assist in the implementation of U.S.sanctions against China

The specifics of U.S.
export control requirements are such that authorities may prohibit third countries to cooperate with undesirable counterparties, and in the case of new sanctions against China, U.S.
partners may once again drag Taiwan into the orbit of their interests.
The island's authorities have already expressed their willingness to help in every way possible to comply with the new U.S.
requirements.Source image: UMCWe remind that the U.S.
lawmakers ended the week by adopting a new package of sanctions against China.
It restricts the supply to China of components for supercomputers of certain performance, equipment for the production of a certain range of chips, as well as components for the creation of such equipment.
The list of contractors with dubious reputation includes 31 Chinese companies that the U.S.
suspects of using U.S.-origin technology and products for the needs of the Chinese defense industry.
Companies have 60 days to pass an audit by U.S.
inspectors, and if the latter are not admitted to the industrial facilities of interest, the company will finally be put on the sanctions list.Some market participants now express concern that the activities of major Chinese civilian sector companies - Alibaba and ByteDance, for example - may fall under restrictions by the supercomputer performance criterion.
The latter is the owner of the globally popular TikTok service, creating server systems that can approach the \"sanctioned\" ones in terms of their parameters.
In fact, the U.S.
authorities want to prevent the appearance in China of supercomputers capable of delivering more than 100 petaflops of computing power with a volume of less than 1178 cubic meters.
On the one hand, many civilian systems that will be created in China in the next couple of years can fall under this criterion.
On the other hand, designers will have an incentive to be flexible in the layout of such systems.
For example, the system could be broken down into several smaller nodes that would be separated geographically, but would communicate through a high-speed optical interface.Expressing solidarity with U.S.
authorities, Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs officials have shown a willingness to follow the legal requirements of those countries where the headquarters of foreign customers working with Taiwanese companies are located.
According to Taiwanese officials, following the law is very important.
The biggest contract manufacturers of semiconductor components in Taiwan are TSMC and UMC.
They are not able to make personal statements on this issue yet as they are preparing to publish their quarterly reports.
However, the example with the U.S.
sanctions against Huawei under President Donald Trump shows that TSMC will not hesitate to limit the access of Chinese customers to its services in accordance with the new U.S.
requirements.
Next week, Taiwan's Minister of Economy Wang Mei-hua will travel to the U.S.
to meet with major customers of Taiwanese companies and discuss, among other things, the impact of geopolitical processes on business.

ASML shares fell due to rumors that the U.S.is trying to cut off its supplies to China - shares of Chinese chipmakers on the contrary jumped

After the recent publication of Bloomberg about the pressure on the lithography equipment manufacturer ASML from the U.S.
authorities in order to cut off supplies to China, the company's shares immediately went down in price.
Paradoxically, the shares of Chinese semiconductor manufacturers after that began to rise in price.Image source: Laura Ockel/unsplash.comThe Dutch ASML, which is the largest supplier of advanced lithography equipment for chip production, some time ago already prohibited to supply its most advanced tools to China.
Nevertheless, Bloomberg reported on a possible complete ban on supplies, including mature process machines.
The source cited \"people familiar with the issue.\" ASML itself refused to comment on the rumors.After the publication Bloomberg share price ASML plummeted by 7.2%.
Valuations fell cheaper and securities of other equipment manufacturers for chip makers - the company Lam Research by 3.6% and Applied Materials by 2.4%.
Refusal to sell to China may be extremely unprofitable for the ASML - in 2021 about 16% of its sales accounted to the Celestial Empire for 2.1 billion euros.
Each sold machine is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the same time, an export license is required to supply such tools.
Since 2019, the Dutch government, under an agreement with the United States, denies ASML export licenses for sales of the most advanced machines for EUV lithography in the Middle Kingdom.
Only less advanced DUV variants have been sold there.That said, most chips are still produced using DUV lithography and limiting sales of the machines in question could have a devastating effect on the Chinese semiconductor industry, with it likely exacerbating the global semiconductor deficit.In 2021, the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, chaired by former Google head Eric Schmidt, recommended that the US State Department and Commerce Department pressure allies with Securities for various Chinese chip makers rose 10 percent or more.China's chip manufacturing industry is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and after the U.S.
imposed sanctions on giants like Huawei and Hikvision, demand for locally made components only increased.
According to Chinese industry representatives, prices are rising on expectations of import substitution by Chinese companies of foreign solutions.The share price in the Chinese segment was also fueled by preliminary, extremely optimistic data on the revenues of local Advanced Micro-Fabrication, which produces equipment for semiconductor production.
In addition, fears that chipmaker revenues would be too low due to pandemic restrictions have not materialized to the extent expected.
Finally, there is still no reliable data on the discontinuation of ASML sales.

Apple and Samsung continued to certify equipment in Russia, despite leaving the country

Despite earlier decisions to suspend operations in Russia, Apple and Samsung continued to apply for product certification.
These certificates allow them to sell equipment throughout the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), but experts believe that the manufacturers are interested in resuming deliveries to Russia.Source image: apple.comSamsung stopped supplying products to Russia in early March, but Kommersant managed to find that Samsung Electronics Rus Company LLC (SERK) applied for certification of phones, monitors, TVs and other household appliances, including not yet announced products until May 19 at least.
In May alone, the SSEC registered 12 certificates and 22 declarations with Rosakkreditatsiya.
Among them are smartphones Galaxy A13 5G (announced, but not officially sold in Russia), as well as Galaxy A04 and A13s (not yet officially introduced) - all three models were tested May 16 in the center № 300 Rostest-Moscow.Earlier it was reported that the model Samsung Galaxy A13 5G, together with a number of other devices in the range were on sale in Russia under the parallel export program - imported from Kazakhstan devices were sold in stores DNS, \"Fusion\" and \"M.
Video\" with a significant markup.Not to suspend certification of goods and the company Apple, which also in early March, announced the termination of its work in Russia: from 10 to March 21 the company made requests, among other things for the Mac Studio desktop, monitor Studio Display and upgraded iPhone SE - the latter was tested at the Russian Research Institute of Radio.
China's Huawei did not make any statements about ceasing operations in Russia, but it also reduced the volume of supplies and continued to certify its products, issuing declarations in April and May for the Huawei P50 smartphone and the MateStation monoblock computer.
Despite the fact that permits for all of these devices are valid throughout the EAEU (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan), one of the experts interviewed by Kommersant believes that it would be easier and cheaper for manufacturers to certify in the countries where they plan to sell.
This could mean that despite the suspension of sales in Russia, companies are doing so with the prospect of resuming operations in the country, as well as \"to support those who will import their products.