Following on December 14's Chips: "New Huawei Laptop Fuels Talk of Sanctions-Beating 5nm Chip".
From The Register, January 5:
Did Huawei's domestic fab partners somehow develop the means to mass produce a 5nm laptop chip in spite of US sanctions designed to prevent just that? No, they most certainly did not.
According to a teardown of Huawei's Qingyun L540 notebook by testers at TechInsights, the mysterious 5nm Kirin 9006C processor it contained was actually manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, not from a Middle Kingdom manufacturer.
When the 14-inch ultralight first appeared in early December, the presence of a 5nm processor spurred furious speculation that China's domestic semiconductor manufacturing capability was far more advanced than previously thought.
This speculation was understandable as just a few months earlier, Huawei had launched the Mate 60 Pro smartphone powered by a 7nm system on chip apparently manufactured by China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC)....
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