alt.hn

8/24/2026 at 3:08:17 PM

Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded

https://twitter.com/lemire/status/2091894299289874926

by tosh

8/24/2026 at 3:55:19 PM

This is still an ARM C1-Ultra. Same one used in Mediatek dimensity 9500, which also got more than 4000 points in GB6 lab test. But actual results inside phone with smartphone cooling and wattage requirement became close to 3300.

But perhaps the most important thing, Xiaomi is now able to make chip similar to Mediatek. They are the third largest Smartphone manufacturer by shipment volume. And they are still growing.

This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.

by ksec

8/25/2026 at 12:00:25 AM

The age old problem of mobile chips have brilliant performance for about 15 seconds until they thermal throttle.

If you are just using apps, 15 seconds is more than enough to launch and setup an app, for anything more it will be down graded a little.

Still dang impressive but the form factor becomes the limiting factor.

by ColdStream

8/25/2026 at 4:30:20 AM

I am pretty sure that's a feature, not a problem. The idea of these chips is to rush to idle on webpage-like workloads, and then otherwise use as little idle power as possible. Games and heavy work are generally not the intended workload.

by pclmulqdq

8/25/2026 at 4:06:41 AM

You said it. It was over 100 F here where I live, and I was on my phone outside trying to get work done while watching my kid, and I couldn't even type because of the thermal throttling triggered just by it being so damn hot outside.

by KPGv2

8/25/2026 at 4:21:40 AM

Solar radiation.

Try working in the shade. The max brightness isn’t helping either.

by vachina

8/25/2026 at 3:48:15 AM

The browser can sometimes idle a lot until there is a touch/scroll event so it can be good for responsiveness during that kind of bursty stuff too.

by cma

8/24/2026 at 3:59:26 PM

> This is bad news for Mediatek and Qualcomm.

And good news for everyone else.

by pelagicAustral

8/24/2026 at 4:21:57 PM

Yes and no. Having more competition in the space is excellent news. However I am sad that the world interdependence is eroding as most other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country.

by yoz-y

8/24/2026 at 5:27:04 PM

Xiaomi's Xring O3 is manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [1]

MediaTek Dimensity 9500 is also manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [2]

There was no world interdependence change (unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries).

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-launches-XRing-O3-claim...

[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaTek-Dimensity-9500-Proces...

by Brybry

8/24/2026 at 7:36:11 PM

> unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries

The fact that the CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan might suggest that the CCP considers that it can make China and Taiwan one country, at a time of the CCP's choosing.

by gnfargbl

8/24/2026 at 8:28:58 PM

I've lived in Taiwan for a large part of my life.

They would lose all of TSMC if they do any military actions. It's not the fact that the CCP thinks that they can make Taiwan and China a country, it's the the fact that most of China does in fact consider them as one country. Taiwan is ready to defend themselves, but are very happy keeping their relationship with China the way it is.

by m00x

8/24/2026 at 8:38:54 PM

"Very happy" is a bit of a stretch, since a significant proportion of Taiwan would prefer to jettison the current pretence of being "One China" and become fully independent.

But I agree that pretty much everybody will happily take the status quo over armed invasion.

by decimalenough

8/24/2026 at 11:22:11 PM

I have a friend in Taiwan and he told me they're pretty happy because they have independence this way. If they go for more international recognition etc they'll gain nothing they don't already have but they'll upset the balance and give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.

And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.

I've only visited Taiwan once and I only have one friend there so perhaps what I'm hearing is not accurate.

by wolvoleo

8/25/2026 at 4:01:55 AM

>sympathetic with the Chinese

and related to, with all that holds in an Eastern mindset. My adoptive grandmother was born in Shanghai in 1927. To my knowledge she never returned to Mainland China, partially because her relatives wen Telswhere when the communists came in.

edit: fixed one errant `t`

by nemosaltat

8/25/2026 at 12:27:35 AM

> give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.

CCP is not threatening taiwan because it might go for independence. it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific. because of that, it is never about what people in Taiwan believe/say/do.

It is only about the military balance of the west Pacific.

> And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.

sympathetic of what?

20 years ago, you might be able to play the "CCP regime repressing the people in China" joke, you can't do it anymore especially in such topic of Taiwan. quality of life is significantly better in literally every aspect in China. Taipei in 2026 is getting more and more like a tier-3 Chinese city in 2016.

by tw1984

8/25/2026 at 2:04:41 AM

> it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific

I think you are underestimating Chinese nationalism here quite dramatically!

Chinese views of sovereignty are quite independent of other concerns. Take for example their actions against Vietnam in the South China Sea, forcing Vietnam closer to the Philippines and even the US: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

by nl

8/25/2026 at 12:38:28 AM

It seems to be about much more than just regional power. To China it's a matter of pride and it's a big factor in the century of humiliation.

Even when a country other than the US does something to benefit Taiwan, Beijing is super offended.

And by sympathetic I mean feeling kinship. And the whole concept of bringing everything down to a matter of wealth is so American.

by wolvoleo

8/25/2026 at 12:56:38 AM

> And the whole concept of bringing everything down to a matter of wealth is so American.

They said "quality of life". Even if they had said wealth that correlates with quality of life so that wouldn't be a very good gotcha by itself, but they didn't say that.

by Dylan16807

8/25/2026 at 1:06:11 AM

> it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific.

Hardly. It is all about Xi having declared that taking Taiwan by... I think it was 2049, but could be misremembering. Anyway, Xi made that a test of the legitimacy of the CCP, in some very public statements.

So, no, it's not about kicking the US out of the west Pacific. It's about Taiwan, and it's because if they don't, the CCP is illegitimate, by Xi's own word.

by AnimalMuppet

8/25/2026 at 4:10:29 AM

Xi will not be in power in 2049 because he will be dead. He'd be 96yo.

by KPGv2

8/24/2026 at 10:53:04 PM

Considering all said so far, and events, it perhaps hardly makes real difference in the diamond era's franchised world.

by larodi

8/24/2026 at 9:21:19 PM

Isn't there some kind of "if you invade us we bomb our strategic factories" strategy? Like "if we can't have them, nobody can"?

by palata

8/24/2026 at 9:49:43 PM

I think the plan is to defend, with allies motivated by the goal of saving TSMC facilities. If you destroy them the moment China declares war, Taiwanese allies might be much less invested

But at the same time everyone understands that the Taiwanese would destroy the facilities before they fall into Chinese hands

by wongarsu

8/25/2026 at 3:10:27 AM

its not official public policy, but there have been people in the US government saying that if there is a war then the US will bomb tsmc facilities in taiwan

by deadfoxygrandpa

8/24/2026 at 10:21:01 PM

If both those are true, then shouldn't we expect China to destroy them as part of first offensive?

by schrectacular

8/25/2026 at 2:20:57 AM

Ideally every side would prefer a complete victory... who wouldn't? Reality rarely offers such clear outcomes.

Effectively the semantics are like a game of chicken and hostage combined. Might as well be a Prisoner's Dilemma.

by mjevans

8/24/2026 at 10:20:28 PM

Why would China care if Taiwan blows up its fabs?

The talent is still there, so they could rebuild, or recruit the talent to work for Chinese mainland fabs instead?

by scarab92

8/25/2026 at 2:56:50 AM

> The talent is still there, so they could rebuild, or recruit the talent to work for Chinese mainland fabs instead?

Would you voluntarily work in a country that invaded and taken over yours?

Would you ask the same about Russia recruiting Ukrainians?

by klausa

8/24/2026 at 10:35:27 PM

wouldn't it be more likely that they'd flee to e.g. the US which would poach them and shower them with money?

maybe easier said than done but still

by r_lee

8/24/2026 at 11:40:43 PM

Can't flee if your island is encircled and shooting down airplanes. China's military drills are executing exactly this.

by mycall

8/24/2026 at 11:47:18 PM

The US could do this TODAY. Just saying.

by golem14

8/25/2026 at 1:02:36 AM

The US cannot offer lots of money to chip fab refugees today, because they are not refugees. Trying to headhunt people at a high quality job is very different.

by Dylan16807

8/25/2026 at 2:22:32 AM

The pay might not be as good but they could also go to Europe. Might depend where they've got family / contacts.

by mjevans

8/24/2026 at 10:17:01 PM

Let's say they execute that plan. What then? Would it win them anything?

by dataflow

8/25/2026 at 1:01:14 AM

The whole point of the plan is to remove some of the incentive for an invasion, thus making it less likely.

by ivewonyoung

8/25/2026 at 1:55:01 AM

What are you gonna do the day they don't need tsmc anymore

by podocarp

8/24/2026 at 9:32:01 PM

As a resident of Taiwan, would you say the average person there is comfortable obeying a strong central government, whoever that currently is?

As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.

by axus

8/24/2026 at 10:07:23 PM

As an American, what are ways in which you can not defer to an authority - in a way that actually matters? Sure, you can choose to go outside dressed in gaudy colors, or not dressed at all if you are in SF. Or choose to flip the Democrat/Republican bit once every 4 years (usually without any effect on domestic or foreign policy, though not lately). But in a regular person's life, what authority do you want to opt out of? The average person can't do a thing about their HOA board, let alone a government representative.

by RussianBot9580

8/24/2026 at 10:47:27 PM

[flagged]

by blackqueeriroh

8/24/2026 at 10:45:23 PM

> As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.

Are schoolchildren in the US still required to recite the pledge of allegiance...?

by danparsonson

8/24/2026 at 10:08:17 PM

Really? Surely it can't be unfamiliar at least. So many GOPs anxiously mentioning Dear Leader every chance they get.

by actionfromafar

8/24/2026 at 8:38:33 PM

My bet would be that invasion wouldn't look like quick war, but slow control of political power either through light force like economic blackmail, or through something similar to what US did with Venezuela.

Now that US has already opened the gate to labelling nation head as drug seller, this just eases things for China.

by YetAnotherNick

8/24/2026 at 8:47:57 PM

Also the US has very publicly shown they don’t have the ability to effectively wage war over any period of time.

by conception

8/24/2026 at 9:41:51 PM

Yes and no. The Iran war is deeply unpopular and won’t even pass congressional approval for money. It’s being fought from pocket change budgets because they know they can’t pass a funding bill for it. Also not the same kind of war.

Any period time? US waged war for 20+ years in Afghanistan. Pretty effectively! To what end? Not an end an army can really achieve so… there you are.

But a war that might actually be popular? To save the world from communist dictators and make sure we have chips for our precious devices? I wouldn’t count out the United States. Or nuclear weapons, which still exist and are a thing.

by sailfast

8/24/2026 at 9:57:01 PM

And it'd be the kind of war the US is best at. Boots on the ground, against conventional military, with a civilian population that is on the side of the US forces

No guerilla warfare, no insurgents, no need for extended beyond-visual-range warfare that depletes missile stockpiles

by wongarsu

8/24/2026 at 10:07:49 PM

> no need for extended beyond-visual-range warfare that depletes missile stockpiles

Was with you until that last one. If you haven't noticed missiles, drones, and interceptors have played a central role in ukraine.

by fc417fc802

8/24/2026 at 11:24:49 PM

How many boots on the ground could you get and how quickly/safely? The supposed opposition here is MUCH closer to the island.

by majormajor

8/25/2026 at 4:16:59 AM

The war over Taiwan wouldn't be done by soldiers on Taiwanese soil. So you wouldn't need many boots on the ground in a literal sense.

But if you mean in a metaphorical sense, how long until the 7th Fleet could get to Taiwan, the answer is 0 days for first response, 3 days for everything located in Japan, and less than a week for the full mobilization of the 7th Fleet (that's 50+ ships and nearly 30K soldiers). The entire Pacific fleet could be there in a week and a half.

(Granted, we're assuming competent US leadership, which is not the current administration.)

by KPGv2

8/24/2026 at 10:38:28 PM

just a gut feeling, but if they had to for some reason, I feel like they'd just go in and bomb as much strategic assets and invade, because in their eyes aside from Taiwan, there isn't much left to "unify" and it'd be historic, not something they'd need to do every decade or even century

I feel like Russia thought the same of Ukraine, even though it is way bigger

by r_lee

8/24/2026 at 11:11:18 PM

Any country that competently adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently. And that's for a continental invasion.

Taiwan? All surface ships are sitting ducks. Troop transport ships would get absolutely decimated, and then the landing troops would get swarmed by drones all over again, and then they have to maintain logistics to the small minority that land (good luck with that). And that's without naval drones.

With naval drones? I have no idea how China gets anything across the strait.

And all the above is true for a competently organized Chinese invasion. Which it won't be.

by AtlasBarfed

8/25/2026 at 1:55:35 AM

> CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan

This whole idea of collapsing everything to some single semi-military geo-political concern is naive and not at all how the world works.

Of course there are people in China who would prefer Xiaomi did all their manufacturing inside China, and there are others who prefer to build stronger economic ties between Taiwan and China to make Taiwan economically dependent on China.

There are others who want Xiaomi to dominate world mobile markets by any means necessary. There are others who want Xiaomi to make the most profit possible, and still others who want Chinese firms to race to match US companies technology on every dimension.

These concerns are all interlinked and play out over years in lots of micro decisions.

by nl

8/25/2026 at 2:38:18 AM

China and Taiwan are considered one country, even according to US https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12503

How do you make one country into one country? It's already one country and is treated as such by even countries that consider China an adversary

by antris

8/25/2026 at 4:22:08 AM

> China and Taiwan are considered one country, even according to US

Your link does not say what you think it does. My guess is you read the first sentence and saw "one-China police" and stopped. But the US's one-China policy is not the same thing as China's one-China principle.

The US's one-China policy is that (continental) China is a single China governed by the PRC. It's silent on Taiwan. But, considering the laws we have on the books declaring our commitment to ensuring the sovereignty of Taiwan, it's a hard row to hoe to get to "the US considers Taiwan to be territory the PRC has a right to control."

The US has an unofficial relationship with Taiwan simply to shut the CCP up. It's like when your partner is complaining about something you did, silence doesn't mean you agree that you messed up. Sometimes it just means you don't want a fight right now.

by KPGv2

8/24/2026 at 7:49:33 PM

They already consider it as one country. The CCP sees Taiwan as a province of China.

by bdhdhduuyd

8/24/2026 at 10:10:53 PM

Or mainland China is occupied west Taiwan.

by manithree

8/24/2026 at 7:40:50 PM

That act could throw us all back into the dark ages, though.

by amelius

8/24/2026 at 8:05:11 PM

They're intentional about economic integration because it will in theory make unification easier without a war.

by pydry

8/24/2026 at 8:28:15 PM

Its the opposite

China isn’t going to invade China until after we get our semiconductors up and running in Arizona for real

(because US won’t have to think about that situation ever again)

removing dependence imperils that island, CCP already has an EUV machine so the inevitable sanctions and export controls on ASML’s in Europe won’t matter either

by yieldcrv

8/24/2026 at 9:12:26 PM

It technically does not matter today. Sure the SOTA fabs only exist in a few places, but it’s not like a 2010/2015/2020 era chip is unusable trash. All of which are more geographically distributed.

by 0cf8612b2e1e

8/24/2026 at 9:50:54 PM

For any critical workload a chip is considered trash after 5-7 years. They still run , of course, but increased incidents on platforms that are supposed to be 99.99 are hard to work with. Now if you mean there’s unused stock of those , that would maybe work, but I am not aware of significant unused stocks.

by cgio

8/24/2026 at 10:58:37 PM

I am talking about making new chips on older nodes. If China can only build 7nm, but TSMC is at 3nm, that’s unfortunate, but they will survive.

by 0cf8612b2e1e

8/25/2026 at 1:01:56 AM

I agree, a move on Taiwan sets semiconductor industry back like 5 years at this point, down from what I’d say was 10 just last year

yeah equity asset values are going to tank but US will get serious about the supply chain immediately (which is already very much in progress), plus all the older nodes to alleviate some pressure off of the active compute demands

by yieldcrv

8/24/2026 at 6:17:26 PM

MediaTek is a Taiwanese company. Xiaomi could put any backdoor that the government tell them to install and TSMC won't be able to catch that.

by szatkus

8/24/2026 at 6:48:59 PM

I'm unaware of any actual hardware backdoors introduced by primary manufacturers in practice, especially those installed in Xiaomi hardware.

There are accounts of interdiction and post-manufacturing compromises, such as those revealed in the Snowden leaks (2013) and most recently by reporting about the Israeli security services' sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and 2-way radios. These projects didn't expose primary manufacturers to the reputational and legal risk of association.

Until there's evidence of backdoors implanted by these companies, it's better to adopt a "trust but verify" approach and use standard layered security practices to detect intrusion. Conventional network intrusion and insider threat campaigns carry less risk of failure and are simpler and cheaper to execute.

by linkregister

8/25/2026 at 3:57:59 AM

What would you consider as good evidence of a backdoor? Apple got plenty of media coverup in Operation Triangulation, and even hardware experts defending it as a fuckup rather than a backdoor, providing it with great plausible deniability. Do you count it as evidence? If not, I can easily see any other company leaving these non-backdoors in their hardware with no damage to their reputation.

by orbital-decay

8/24/2026 at 7:30:26 PM

Intel management engine

by codersfocus

8/24/2026 at 8:02:55 PM

“It’s not a vulnerability, it’s a feature!”

by antonvs

8/24/2026 at 9:27:09 PM

I'm only aware of some software backdoors in Chinese devices, but times when you could've reverse engineered a chip with microscope are long gone. If there are any it would be really difficult to find them.

by szatkus

8/24/2026 at 7:58:12 PM

Everyone relax. This guy on the Internet is unaware of any.

by theteapot

8/24/2026 at 8:10:32 PM

And are you aware of any? If nobody can find evidence then it's probably not a widespread risk.

by Dylan16807

8/25/2026 at 12:46:58 AM

Are you certain I'm a guy? I could be a particularly well-trained dog.

by linkregister

8/24/2026 at 7:03:10 PM

[flagged]

by sundbry

8/24/2026 at 7:29:21 PM

Get off the short bus twin. CPU backdoors do no good unless there is cooperation with network driver code or the CPU itself has full operating system with a full network stack.

Intel's ME comes really close to that, but I don't think Intel's ME has drivers for every possible NIC and bus a NIC can appear on in its little Minix. So, just put a Broadcom NIC in a PCIe slot and leave the Intel onboard NIC empty, or LAN facing only.

Xiaomi may get Chinese 4G/5G baseband chip manufacturers to put in backdoors in Chinese phones, but they're not needed - the Chinese government pretty much already has total control of its Internet. For other countries, how are they going to make Qualcomm provide something undocumented CPU instructions can access.

by RiverCrochet

8/24/2026 at 7:20:11 PM

You can refute their statement without personal attacks.

Not knowing a thing makes someone uninformed, not retarded.

by qmr

8/24/2026 at 7:25:13 PM

My retardation status is unrelated to my statement. You assert there are top secret register values but without any evidence beyond your most recent psilocybin trip.

The existence of undocumented hardware behavior isn't proof of anything.

by linkregister

8/24/2026 at 6:31:29 PM

Do you say the same about Intel, Amd, etc. or is it only big bad China?

by Dah00n

8/24/2026 at 6:44:42 PM

There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things - starting with clipper. Pushback is not always successful - but it's far more transparent then China.

by InTheArena

8/24/2026 at 6:49:46 PM

Are there any documented cases of backdoors being present in Chinese hardware at time of manufacturing?

by linkregister

8/24/2026 at 7:03:29 PM

Probably, but you are asking the wrong question: Is it legal to produce non-backdoored networked devices or services in China?

The answer to that question in the US is within epsilon of “no” thanks to the cloud act.

Europe and China have passed similar laws. However, China has a reputation for passing laws then selectively enforcing them. Maybe if you get on the right side of the right party member, the answer might still be “Yes” there.

Anyway, the next question to ask is: Who would I rather backdoor my device?

I doubt the Chinese government cares much about me, and unless I vacation there it’s an international incident if they, say, hack my car and murder me by aiming it at a tree at 95mph, like the CIA apparently does now:

https://www.motor1.com/news/138679/wikileaks-claim-cia-hack-...

Of course, the US government banned cars from China. Presumably this is because they do not have the mandated remote murder network port open, or, if they do, the US doesn’t have the necessary permissions to access it.

by hedora

8/24/2026 at 7:03:12 PM

Two just this year, CVE-2026-66747 and CVE-2026-11405.

by bryant

8/24/2026 at 7:34:11 PM

Those are both great examples. I think this doesn't obliterate my point, though it weakens it. The manufacturer in CVE-2026-11405 is already out of business, and the one in CVE-2026-66747 is unlikely to continue as a going concern.

Would Xiaomi or the CCP accept the reputational and legal risk of getting caught with a backdoor? Recall the CCP considered the arrest of the Huawei executive in Canada as an offense against itself.

by linkregister

8/24/2026 at 11:11:37 PM

>There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things

A bit of selective memory necessary for that take given good old Crypto AG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

by Barrin92

8/24/2026 at 6:57:34 PM

Too many propoganda leads to expressions like yours. Sorry your story has zero foundation and is fox news quality.

by holoduke

8/24/2026 at 7:08:35 PM

Like a stopped clock, Fox News is right once or twice a day.

For instance election tampering in the US is a well-documented thing: However it almost always favors republicans in districts with electronic voting machines that do not generate paper trails.

As for the person you are replying to, their claims have been documented by most media outlets, places like wikileaks, and their claims are backed by US legal requirements to backdoor stuff (like the US Cloud act).

by hedora

8/24/2026 at 9:31:37 PM

My opinion about Trump is as bad as the next guy's, but we still have better relation with the USA than with China. And it's not like we have much choice.

by szatkus

8/24/2026 at 6:32:38 PM

There are already American backdoors on intel and AMD chips everywhere, we call them ME and PSP. Switching to chinese tech won't make it worse.

Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.

by BiteCode_dev

8/24/2026 at 6:41:53 PM

> Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.

Why would they not do the same? They are very pro-surveillance for a start.

by graemep

8/24/2026 at 7:17:51 PM

Hopefully the same pushback that has so far stopped the worst of chat control would help. But even if not having more western alternatives would be very welcome. If you're in the US it may not resonate with you, but as a Canadian currently reading ongoing rhetoric about being annexed by the US I'd love to have options if things continue to go south with the status quo.

by tensor

8/24/2026 at 9:25:43 PM

It's good to be skeptical about how we implement the idea of a "root of trust" in these machines, but matter-of-factly characterizing ME and PSP as "backdoor" is misleading and not useful.

by eigenform

8/24/2026 at 7:29:09 PM

TSMC doesn't care what you put in your CPUs. Apple could tell them they want to build a CPU where 90% of the transistor footprint is for a new CIA Engine that takes pictures of your feet every three seconds to trace where you've been from the smell and TSMC's response would be "how many wafers do you want?".

by well_ackshually

8/24/2026 at 5:23:26 PM

I don't think it's by choice just ask all those extinct manufacturers

by deadlast2

8/24/2026 at 7:05:54 PM

Maybe new companies can spring up and be competitive with AI assisted design. Im assuming the cost was too high for those old companies to survive right? Small nimble companies could theoretically compete in some segments vs large bloated slobs (even if they have AI as well). This is all just hypothetical thought.

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 7:37:08 PM

It was a choice, western oligarchs handed China the means of production on a silver platter in the pursuit of short term profits.

by RobotToaster

8/24/2026 at 11:24:38 PM

And even that wasn't anything new. They did the same with Japan and then Taiwan. Remember when made in Japan was a joke, then made in Taiwan?

Now Japan is known for quality electronics and options and Taiwan for state of the art semiconductors.

by wolvoleo

8/24/2026 at 5:25:31 PM

I think Western people still call this situation “outsourcing” when in reality what is happening is that China is better at manufacturing than everyone else, and they’re starting to be better than everyone else at design and engineering, too.

When we buy software from Silicon Valley or a nice Mercedes Benz from Germany we don’t use this same language “outsourcing.”

Colloquially, outsourcing implies low quality or cheap price. No, what’s happening here is that China makes the best products in numerous categories and we are choosing to import them, because the best products are the most desirable.

by Grombobulous

8/24/2026 at 8:05:25 PM

The west is interested in funneling most of the money to the top no matter what for the last 60 years that has been the drum beat/cry It can’t be done. It can’t be done.

In America, there is one fast food place that does it differently than everyone in the market they don’t franchise and they don’t lease/rent.

They own everything as they expand (the land and the building), which means it’s a little bit slower when you expand, but they don’t care but they are very profitable.

The owner probably gets a call every other week from large equity companies trying to sell them on doing it like everybody else and their pitch they can make you a worldwide company if you just let them in to f you.

by Danox

8/25/2026 at 1:24:38 AM

The tension is killing me… who is the fast food joint?

by rayoleary

8/25/2026 at 2:08:12 AM

I'm guessing Chick-Fil-A?

by geerlingguy

8/25/2026 at 4:02:37 AM

CFA franchises, but their program is very strict and requires an unusually high amount of upfront capital

by nunez

8/25/2026 at 2:16:55 AM

Can't be them because they franchise. My guess is In-N-Out

by kevvok

8/24/2026 at 11:19:22 PM

Who is the fast food place?

by Mistletoe

8/24/2026 at 5:33:26 PM

Well at this point they are probably the only country in the world that can produce a car end to end starting from the raw iron ore and other elements up to the chips and software that runs on them (I’m sure they will still need to import some small stuff probably like Rhodium or Iridium maybe), who is going to compete with that? Everything done in country, no tariffs at all throughout the entire production cycle.

That said some of these industry especially metallurgical ones will never return to Europe or US as they basically destroy and pollute the environment on a large scale, in China that still seems acceptable but also might change promoting them to outsource to other countries which they already do in some areas I think.

by throwaway63467

8/24/2026 at 8:05:17 PM

I find it quite strange en people take a development that has happened over the last ~50 years, little more than half a lifetime, and confidently state that now "it will always stay like this". Things always change.

Imagine what those kinds of people would have said in China in the 70s, with western industries being vastly more advanced and efficient. "It's over, we will never catch up." they would probably have said. Wrong then, more wrong now.

by geysersam

8/25/2026 at 1:47:27 AM

What are en People?

by rayoleary

8/25/2026 at 2:25:34 AM

Thanks, should've been "when"

by geysersam

8/24/2026 at 7:18:46 PM

> China that still seems acceptable

China has made a tremendous effort to move to a clean(er) industrial system, using a lot of renewables and clean energy and improving environmental standards. At this point production in China is probably the best for the environment compared to most countries, including the US that is deeply invested in oil production.

by coliveira

8/24/2026 at 8:19:02 PM

China evidently is pushing to move to sodium ion batteries. They didn’t have to. They could’ve stuck with lithium. I’ll let you guess what what would’ve happened in the United States they would’ve said we don’t have to this lithium already works. Why do you want to upset the Apple Cart.

They are also moving close to a point where they will bring Thorium Reactors on line they don’t have to. They could just stick with uranium, but they’re not.

Is this part of the fact that they have engineers running a lot of of the things at the top of their government instead of lawyers?

They seem to be building a lot of infrastructure they are in the process of building several dams on the Brahmaputra River.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station

by Danox

8/24/2026 at 8:32:22 PM

It does seem that China is run by engineers who like to build cool stuff.

by UltraSane

8/24/2026 at 8:25:59 PM

United States: 384 gCO2/kWh

China: 525 gCO2/kWh

https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

by UltraSane

8/24/2026 at 8:53:24 PM

But we do have to consider how the speed in which it is dropping. China uses about the same percentage of fossil fuels for energy production as the US right now, but more of it is coal so it is dirtier. However they are aggressively installing and promoting renewables and nuclear power, built themselves, and their pollution standards are rapidly increasing. While in the US renewable and nuclear investment is and has been pretty crappy.

by AngryData

8/24/2026 at 9:53:15 PM

The fact that China is not that far above the US while being the world's factory and having 4x the population is pretty impressive.

And like you said, China is putting a real effort in. I don't see the US trying to reduce domestic short hop flights with electric high speed rail. I don't see the US trying to replace gasoline cars with EVs. I don't see the US curtailing structural incentivization of pickup trucks and SUVs.

The main US policy seems to be "spend trillions on wars for oil" rather than accepting the inevitable decline of oil and planning around it.

by Grombobulous

8/24/2026 at 6:05:20 PM

Fair point. Outsourcing was not the right word to use, China today makes products over all quality ranges and almost always they are cheaper than any other alternative. “Giving away” would be a better word.

by yoz-y

8/24/2026 at 5:59:58 PM

I think it’s a matter of perceptions catching up to reality. 15 years ago China was definitely still ripping off american products down to the english silk screening.

by rayiner

8/24/2026 at 5:49:19 PM

China didn't get that way by magic. They ran the same playbook that allowed Alexander Hamilton to snatch manufacturing from Great Britain to the US, and the US gave up manufacturing for the same reason the UK gave up manufacturing (suppression of labor interests).

It will be interesting to see what China does. They aren't ideologically committed to exclusively serving the interests of the wealthy, but they still have lots of rich people in the (ahem) Communist Party, so who knows.

by smallmancontrov

8/24/2026 at 7:05:47 PM

China and Vietnam are the only countries worldwide which have executed bankers for corruption in recent decades. No ahem necessary.

by xanthor

8/24/2026 at 8:12:27 PM

It's striking that they recently arrested one of the richest men in the country, the Evergrande founder, for fraud. Seems unthinkable in the US/Europe right now.

by geysersam

8/25/2026 at 3:44:02 AM

Communists have been executing bankers since day one so not just recent decades, if anyone finds that impressive.

by handle584

8/24/2026 at 8:35:46 PM

Were they guilty?

by applicative

8/24/2026 at 9:21:55 PM

The people in China that made the decision on that antifreeze in toothpaste, and the 300 pigs in the river or that graffiti tower in Los Angeles across from the Staples Center. I don’t think those people walked.

That is not to say that in time they’ll start to do many of things that happens in the west where those at the 1% or 2% walk away, in time China may drop down to that level, on the other hand, I would like to believe the United States will start to have the same reaction that the country had when Sputnik went around the Earth and change course and I don’t mean sanctions, tariffs, wars, and threatening neighbors to the north and to the south.

by Danox

8/24/2026 at 9:26:50 PM

Do you find that far-fetched?

by xanthor

8/24/2026 at 6:34:03 PM

I can't imagine it going any other way than what we've seen from every other country in your set of examples, honestly.

by peezd

8/24/2026 at 7:09:51 PM

China actually penalizes, imprisons, and even executes its billionaires, so that’s different.

by faitswulff

8/24/2026 at 10:44:27 PM

The right way to read this isn't that all billionaires can face consquenecs, but that the line that makes sure you don't face consequences is quite a bit different than being a billionaire. You can still have a power center, and impunity, as long as you make sure your misbehavior doesn't embarrass the people with the actual power. Those are smart enough to not do the things they shouldn't in a way that can be made public, and therefore cause said embarrassment.

One can prefer a regime where it's very hard for people who abuse their power to avoid punishment if it's all public to one where the powerful are emboldened enough to be able to be shameless. Even worse when the shamelessness is seen as the purest display of power, and thus people compete in their public misbehavior. But still, understand that the real barrier to punishment in the first case is not to avoid doing bad things, but to make sure that the witnesses either don't exist, or are too scared to say anything.

A judicial system that actually has no sacred cows would be better in all cases, but the sacred cows everywhere do their best to make sure this doesn't happen.

by hibikir

8/24/2026 at 10:24:24 PM

Not very...?

In the west, billionaires are often able to get extremely favorable treatment by the law as an expression of the power money gives. This is not the case in China, in which the party stands at the top.

In practice that's just a difference of incentives that I'm not sure at all is beneficial for anything but an authoritarian regime.

by Levitz

8/24/2026 at 8:35:25 PM

The industrialization of USA comes after the civil war, thus long after e.g. Charles Dickens, to say nothing of Hamilton.

by applicative

8/24/2026 at 8:59:27 PM

Hamilton set the strategic agenda. Do you want to argue that US industrialization didn't follow the broad strokes of this plan?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Manufactures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)

Parallel: the industrialization of China for the most part happened after Deng Xiaoping, but are people wrong to credit him for setting the course?

by smallmancontrov

8/24/2026 at 9:50:34 PM

I mean, Deng Xiaoping is/was a huge influence in _our_ lifetimes. It was only the 1970s, just fifty years ago, when he was effectively the head of state. That’s like yesterday. I’m not saying Hamilton doesn’t have the influence you’re describing, but it’s not really an equal comparison given the huge difference in timeframes. Late 1700s is a ways away vs the 70s.

by andelink

8/24/2026 at 10:56:13 PM

You're pivoting. Alexander Hamilton had the influence on America's foreign policy that I said he had.

by smallmancontrov

8/24/2026 at 7:04:35 PM

It's manufactured in Taiwan.

by saati

8/24/2026 at 10:15:37 PM

This would be interdependence expanding. Manufacturing isn't the only kind of economic activity

by sophrosyne42

8/24/2026 at 5:12:37 PM

I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0

by TSiege

8/24/2026 at 8:01:10 PM

As if our EU leaders aren't a complete joke as well. Pushing ChatControl, fascism and gambling everywhere. We're just as much of a joke.

by kroaton

8/24/2026 at 8:16:32 PM

It's not disingenuous. It was obvious this was happening 15 years ago and the US and EU could have done something about it back then.

The tendency to protect corporate profit margins is the western Achilles heel and China knew they could exploit that.

by pydry

8/24/2026 at 5:24:00 PM

yet somehow the outcome for the US has been much better. EU wins on paper though, yay!

by 1234letshaveatw

8/24/2026 at 6:34:59 PM

Sure if you are Bezos or Musk. Otherwise, no.

by Dah00n

8/24/2026 at 7:00:47 PM

Gdp grew much faster in the US than in the EU. I believe the EU is the worst performer of the planet. No joke. And not surprising with the self destructive actions.

by holoduke

8/24/2026 at 7:30:42 PM

This doesn't really refute what Dah00n said.

Sure, GDP in the USA is growing faster than the EU, but the question is who is benefiting from the increased GDP?

The answer is in Dah00n's comment. The rich are getting richer, while the population gets scraps. Meanwhile, people in the EU get guaranteed healthcare, paid time off, maternity leave, better worker's rights, etc.

by Sohcahtoa82

8/24/2026 at 11:27:11 PM

The EU is doing just fine economically. It's a great place to live which matters much more than money. Also, the US has 40 trillion in debt. Every taxpayer owes $280k.

The EU is not perfect and recently they took a turn for the worse with shit like ChatControl and the ppwr killing small businesses.

But economically it's not a problem. It's not a race to be the richest, though America always makes everything a contest. We just need enough to live comfortably.

by wolvoleo

8/24/2026 at 8:23:34 PM

The GDP growing faster while quality of life doesn’t meaningfully improve is a bad, bad sign. It means we’re burning extra money just to stay afloat and break even. That’s worse than if the GDP didn’t grow.

by preg_match

8/24/2026 at 9:53:24 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

8/24/2026 at 7:31:22 PM

Because as everyone knows, GDP is _the_ indicator for well being of its citizens. Nobody in the US is in catastrophic health related debt, because the US's GDP grew so much <3

by well_ackshually

8/24/2026 at 6:01:38 PM

> outcome for the US has been much better

Is this better outcome for the US in the room with us?

by oblio

8/24/2026 at 6:11:24 PM

Compare any measurable economic and investment stat in EU vs US

by nxm

8/24/2026 at 6:29:55 PM

What happens when you compare quality of life? Or workers rights? Pretty sure that your average person cares more about those two data points…

by makingstuffs

8/24/2026 at 7:08:53 PM

That might be a mirage temporarily made reality by outsourcing defense to the US, manufacturing to China and the work required for GDP growth to refugees.

All three will be going away sooner or later.

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 9:09:10 PM

How is locally producing military equipment versus buying extremely expensive US uberl33t overkill hardware suppose to hurt the EU? It not like the US was just giving Europe free armaments.

Yeah sure they won't be producing any F35s or million dollar per shot missiles, but was that a good idea to start with? Are they worth the money when once again lots of inexpensive arms are shown to be more useful in modern wars than a few handfuls of expensive ones? Both Iran and Ukraine have shown that one side being a few steps ahead in military technology and willing to dump money on equipment still has limited returns. There is no "I win" technology apart from indiscriminately killing most of the entire population, which just makes you an existential enemy to the rest of the planet and erases 95% of the value in taking that territory.

by AngryData

8/24/2026 at 9:48:36 PM

Its really not that obvious to you? Because not having US bases on site and technology sharing and agreements takes money away from entitlements. France tried to cut entitlements by a tiny bit and the yellow vest movement was born. In the long run the Yellow Vests might end up losing everything as a result.

Regardless of the tech stack the work still needs to be done and now the EU has to do it. The Eu does not have infinite money, in fact they have less than the US so there will be cuts elsewhere.

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 9:13:33 PM

Pretty sure almost every European would celebrate any of these things

by anon48293

8/24/2026 at 9:49:57 PM

If they did, they would have done it already. Instead when there was an attempt, some protested wearing yellow vests. There will be more. Whether or not the governments force the issue or they lose to the voters does not matter: Either way quality of life will suffer.

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 9:21:57 PM

Before outsourcing defense to the US... sorry, but have you ever read a history book? Europe was "exporting defense" around the world before the US got involved in the world wars :-))

Before outsourcing manufacturing to China Europe was making a third of all industrial things on this planet, so Europe will be just fine.

> the work required for GDP growth to refugees

I don't get this one. Do you think the European economy is propped up by refugees? I think there are 5 million of them in total in Europe, most of them Ukrainians and it's likely Ukraine will become a EU member at some point in the future...

by oblio

8/24/2026 at 9:55:34 PM

>Before outsourcing defense to the US... sorry, but have you ever read a history book? Europe was "exporting defense" around the world before the US got involved in the world wars :-))

And they will continue to do so. Just at a higher cost with no US to maintain bases and do technology cost sharing. That extra money has to come out from somewhere...it will be entitlements. Combine that with terrible demographics and that remaining manufacturing base will be built on a bed of sand. :)

>Before outsourcing manufacturing to China Europe was making a third of all industrial things on this planet, so Europe will be just fine.

Europe can insource everything that China makes. They are not stupid people. You mistake the benefit westerners got from outsourcing. It held back inflation in products because the value came from the living standards difference between chinese and EU people. Remove that disparity by bringing back everything and EU will be living with a lower quality of life because all those products will be significantly more expensive with no alternatives.

>I don't get this one. Do you think the European economy is propped up by refugees? I think there are 5 million of them in total in Europe, most of them Ukrainians and it's likely Ukraine will become a EU member at some point in the future...

Same point I have been making. The consequences of demographic collapse can be hidden away by having young tax paying peoples do the shit jobs that run the economy at low wages. Same thing the US does with illegal migrants. Remove that and the hidden costs are now dumped onto the population. Result: Lower living standards for those who remain.

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 8:37:55 PM

This is what was sold to – and often forced on – countries by the US and their allies via the IMF and World Bank. Global free trade meant that you only produced what you had an advantage in and bought what others could produce at lower cost.

by markdown

8/24/2026 at 8:23:53 PM

So same as before?

by csomar

8/24/2026 at 4:23:59 PM

Except this trend is actually reversing now, with fabs being built outside of Taiwan?

by cromka

8/24/2026 at 4:53:27 PM

It's not reversing, it's continuing the trend of more and more manufacturing moving to Chinese companies. It already happened to TVs and it's currently happening with RAM.

by cubefox

8/24/2026 at 5:00:27 PM

By Chinese company, do you mean Taiwan is Chinese in the same way China is Chinese?

by etse

8/24/2026 at 5:49:19 PM

Xiaomi may manufacture their chips in Taiwan (by tsmc) but Xiaomi is still a Chinese hardware company, similar to how Apple or Qualcomm are US American hardware companies.

by cubefox

8/24/2026 at 5:11:41 PM

No. The problem is that TSMCs new capacity is already hogged by AI peddlers for years to come (in fact, AI BS is the reason why these new non-Taiwanese fabs got the massive US and EU subsidies), and so everyone else not flush with cash from the AI hypetrain has no alternative than to go to China - and deliver all their secrets to the CCP.

And eventually, just like the Western solar, battery, pharma and car companies all have learned, the CCP will use that knowledge to surpass and undercut everyone else.

by mschuster91

8/24/2026 at 6:39:17 PM

Do they also deliver all their secrets to US/EU/Taiwan/etc or is it only with China that it goes from ordering some products manufactured to "deliver all their secrets"? Strange how almost everyone points their fingers at the CCP when we know for a fact (hey Snowden etc) that the US does what we say we think China does. I guess China bad > facts.

by Dah00n

8/24/2026 at 6:51:50 PM

Goddamn turbocapitalist commies! How dare they!

by dopa42365

8/24/2026 at 5:14:32 PM

Countries and institutions should always produce things where they are excellent at producing, in forms of specialization and compete in terms of comparative advantages.

by plutomeetsyou

8/24/2026 at 5:45:54 PM

We surely cant be this naive after the recent history of:

- China weaponizing the world's dependence on rare earth

- The US weaponizing the world's dependence on SWIFT

- Russia weaponizing Europe's dependence on natural gas

- Iran weaponizing the the world's dependence of oil supply through strait of Hormuz

by melasadra

8/25/2026 at 4:19:36 AM

Russian are more than happy to sell you NatGas, why do you think they’re weaponising? Watch too much propaganda?

by smallstepforman

8/24/2026 at 5:16:40 PM

This is true until you add a layer of geopolitics to your analysis.

by kridsdale1

8/24/2026 at 6:03:37 PM

Supply chain advantages make the country that produces most of the stuff progressively better at doing everything.

by yoz-y

8/24/2026 at 7:10:21 PM

Only if you have the people to do it. China has some of the worst birth rate in the world. In ~20 years that manufacturing capacity either goes to robots or goes away. Then what?

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 7:38:20 PM

One of the (many) areas in which China is doing great is industrial robotics. Not the fancy dancing dogs, but robots that replace workers in factories.

by don_esteban

8/24/2026 at 9:45:18 PM

That why I said it either goes to robots or it goes away. Can the current robots replace something like this? I don't think right now but maybe they figure it out.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 10:41:46 PM

That factory looked like it employed a lot of easily replaceable manual work.

You don't have to replace 100% of workforce, replace just the ones whose work is the easiest to do by a robot.

Replacing 50% of workforce buys you enough time that by the time your available worker pool has shrunk 50%, robotics and AI will be much better and you will be able to replace another big chunk.

Production-wise, shrinking demographics are not such a big deal (they still have a lot of youth unemployment).

Shrinking demographics is a problem due to a) the ratio of workers vs seniors, b) shrinking overall demand pool -> shrinking economy c) smaller overall talent pool -> less diversity, less 'geniuses', i.e. the real drivers of innovation, and less capability to mobilize for great projects

by don_esteban

8/24/2026 at 7:15:48 PM

how is that different from the rest of the world?

by Yiin

8/24/2026 at 9:43:24 PM

Rest of the world does not rely on manufacturing as a large chunk of its economy. Yes it will be painful for all, entire classes of products might just go away if they dont make sense in the new inflationary environment but countries will still likely suffer less than China overall.

by saturn8601

8/24/2026 at 10:00:59 PM

While I agree in passing. I think saying you'll export all your work to places with worse labor laws is short-term thinking. Chinese companies are successful yes but they also don't necessarily compete fairly. We still can export large portfolios of goods to China. So to just say they are best because they have a government protected market, plus subsidies so we should abandon local is a bad optimization in the long term

by xphos

8/24/2026 at 8:15:26 PM

Those thing are not static! Changing them can be a political decision. It was a political decision in China to become excellent at manufacturing.

by geysersam

8/24/2026 at 5:16:13 PM

That depends on if everybody gets along and is willing to trade

by dymk

8/24/2026 at 5:18:46 PM

This attitude, if followed without qualifications, is dangerously naive and shortsighted, as the last few years of geopolitical events have shown.

by adwn

8/24/2026 at 5:41:11 PM

Yes, and no. Yes because you are vulnerable to supply chain disruption by illwilled countries. But illwilled countries that disrupt supply chains greatly incentivise others to diversify supply away from them.

China could have the monopoly of rare earth production and refinery for all of eternity. But because of their reaction towards all the us allies when the us increased tariffs, I don't expect them to be relevant enough to disrupt markets with rare earths sanctions in 10-20 years.

by PowerElectronix

8/24/2026 at 5:48:04 PM

> But illwilled countries that disrupt supply chains greatly incentivise others to diversify supply away from them.

... Except when they can't in any meaningful span of time.

by kstenerud

8/24/2026 at 7:03:57 PM

Families should always eat at the restaurants that produce the most excellent cuisine. /s

by goodluckchuck

8/24/2026 at 10:07:49 PM

If the Linux drivers aren't up upstreamed and the chips aren't sold to anyone else, meh.

by speed_spread

8/24/2026 at 5:52:25 PM

Lol, no.

This is so stupid. China itself uses the "dominate and corral" model for their industries, and had severe tariffs to grow their various industrial bases, such as automotive.

by catigula

8/24/2026 at 7:11:32 PM

Same is true of US, Germany, Britain, etc

by xanthor

8/24/2026 at 7:22:33 PM

The US had open markets and low tariffs for a long time; China's automotive tariffs were amongst the strongest in the entire world.

by catigula

8/24/2026 at 9:26:01 PM

And in the 19th century when US industry was developing?

by xanthor

8/24/2026 at 7:02:30 PM

From the outside, it is still competition.

If they go too far to impose their system, we stop buying :)

by germandiago

8/24/2026 at 7:23:22 PM

Except they've now ground your native industry under their boot and have total monopoly control because you've given up your critical infrastructure. You can no longer stop buying. That isn't an option.

This is geopolitics 101; your fantasy version is decades out of date.

by catigula

8/24/2026 at 5:09:18 PM

No. Chinese dumpers undercutting everyone else and destroying the competition is never good.

by mschuster91

8/24/2026 at 6:41:46 PM

Was it bad when it was the US doing it against the UK? Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad? People said the same thing about the Japanese (they steal designs, they copy, it is bad quality, they are stealing our jobs, and so on).

by Dah00n

8/24/2026 at 10:27:55 PM

>Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad?

It's definitely different when the player doesn't even have to play by the market. Comparing US companies and Chinese companies is not apples to apples.

by Levitz

8/24/2026 at 6:55:06 PM

> Was it bad when it was the US doing it against the UK? Or is it only when the people doing it eat more rice than us that it is bad?

dumping is always bad.

by chasd00

8/24/2026 at 9:12:13 PM

I will agree that dumping is probably just bad overall. But the US, and much of the rest of the world, allows it to happen both within and outside of their countries, sometimes even financially supporting it with government programs. So I really don't see why I should care that someone in China is doing it. We can't hold others to standards significantly higher than we hold for ourselves.

by AngryData

8/24/2026 at 4:22:46 PM

Now imagine if they actually provided a good support for Windows and Linux for those chips and started selling it to OEMs for Desktop/Laptop use.

by cromka

8/24/2026 at 5:03:30 PM

I wouldn't be surprised if Xiaomi intend to use this for their laptops with Windows 11 once the software ecosystem matures. Which both ARM and Qualcomm are working on. But I still believe in terms of PC usage it is all going to be Nvidia.

by ksec

8/24/2026 at 4:33:51 PM

Or allowed you to run Linux on their phone. We can only dream.

by esperent

8/24/2026 at 4:49:12 PM

They do allow to unlock their bootloaders, which is rather rare, which in turn allows to run Linux. Seeing as Chins just migrates their entire administration to Linux, it's not far fetched to assume they'll support Linux on their laptops very soon.

by cromka

8/24/2026 at 6:08:56 PM

> They do allow to unlock their bootloaders

Kafka himself would be proud if their unlocking process[0], but technically sure, they allow it

> Press "Apply for unlocking" at exactly 12:00 AM GMT+8 (pressing it too late will cause the "application quota limit reached" error. Use this website to check the time) "Account Error" might show up. If that happens, retry after 10 days

[0] https://github.com/realdtn2/xiaomi-unlocking-rooting-guide

by 05

8/25/2026 at 2:16:52 AM

I'm not experience here, but are there any obstacle to move from "unlocking bootloader" to "running full blow linux on phone" ? I imagine it can't be that simple(mostly driver issue).

by mrheosuper

8/25/2026 at 3:53:33 AM

Lots of obstacles. The biggest obstacle is having access to the kernel sources. Even if you've got access to the kernel source, driver blobs are a big issue, because if you move to a newer kernel the old drivers may not work.

Take a look at the PostmarketOS Device Wiki[1], you'll see that even phones released 10+ years ago (like Xiaomi Redmi 4) still do not have 100% functionality.

In saying that, in this era of LLMs and reverse-engineering, it may not be long before some of these blockers are reverse-engineered and we might end up with a fully functional Linux distro on older phones like this.

by d3Xt3r

8/24/2026 at 5:08:57 PM

Caveat on the unlocking of bootloader.

It is very much harder to do now. There is a lot of friction introduced now to it.

by rootsudo

8/24/2026 at 7:39:53 PM

This is probably the plan for xiaomi along with servers and gpus down the road.

by throwawayffffas

8/25/2026 at 2:09:42 AM

This video compares the Mediatek Dimensity to the Xring 03 (at the given timestamp 329s in) and finds significant differences in physical layout and performance: https://youtu.be/BCCJuOopLK8?t=329

by faitswulff

8/24/2026 at 10:06:27 PM

Is it really this fast or just this fast on benchmarks?

by HumblyTossed

8/24/2026 at 5:10:19 PM

[flagged]

by shuwix

8/24/2026 at 6:43:19 PM

So by that logic Apple's CPU are fast because they paid Geekbench?

by Dah00n

8/24/2026 at 5:11:41 PM

[dead]

by select1

8/24/2026 at 5:43:49 PM

[flagged]

by shuwix

8/24/2026 at 6:08:09 PM

No, no, the best part of the internet is complaining about downvotes in a “I’m totally not mad about it” tone.

by afavour

8/24/2026 at 8:06:27 PM

I sense a US blacklisting coming

by camillomiller

8/24/2026 at 4:09:27 PM

Missing the most important metric: processing power per watt.

I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs. But putting them in a compact, densely packed, sealed box (aka a phone) would result in a fireball and almost no battery life.

by strictnein

8/24/2026 at 5:20:10 PM

> I have some server CPUs laying around that can also beat Apple CPUs

In multicore, sure. In most single threaded workloads as well? That'd be interesting enough on its own, regardless of wattage (though that'd make it even more interesting), as my A19 device gives my overclocked 9800X3D a run for its money (and some losses) in single threaded workloads. Considering that's the only thing the 9800X3D is really targeting, it's impressive beyond just whether or not it does so with less power.

by zamadatix

8/24/2026 at 8:17:30 PM

O3 is supposed to draw 25% less than O1, which according to reviews of their tablets did not throttle.

Their next Fold phone (TBA September) will use O3. I guess we will find out very soon.

by throwa356262

8/24/2026 at 6:41:46 PM

No I don’t think you can find a single CPU that can beat Apple CPUs in a single-threaded workload.

by kccqzy

8/24/2026 at 4:45:52 PM

some chinese youtubers have posted their test results, seems pretty good, but the devices have been provided to them in advance fwiw

by cyp0633

8/24/2026 at 8:27:02 PM

Did their test results include power draw?

by mort96

8/24/2026 at 5:14:46 PM

I'm sure it benchmarks well, but does it actually have good battery life?

by StilesCrisis

8/24/2026 at 5:24:05 PM

Even aside from battery life, high TDP means thermal throttling under sustained load. Which most of these benchmarks don't really test, or if they did, the ambient temperature affects the results.

by frollogaston

8/24/2026 at 7:43:12 PM

[flagged]

by well_ackshually

8/24/2026 at 8:05:18 PM

The goalposts have been at "performance-per-watt" for a very, very long time. That was why Apple pivoted from PowerPC to Intel, believe it or not. PowerPC laptops couldn't match the battery life of Intel, so Apple pivoted. How times change!

by StilesCrisis

8/24/2026 at 10:52:45 PM

I mean, they're in a thread on my comment whose point is "let's see power per watt".

The goalposts started there. A comment responded to me by saying some Chinese youtubers found it to be good. The person responded saying "but what about battery life" which was the original topic.

The person you're responding to also has never said anything about any other metric.

by strictnein

8/24/2026 at 8:08:19 PM

top comment right now on this very page: "But actual results inside phone with smartphone cooling and wattage requirement became close to 3300"

by KerrAvon

8/24/2026 at 9:11:04 PM

No lmao, top comment is saying MediaTek's variant of an ARM C1 Ultra dropped to 3300, attempting to link it to this CPU through vibes and magic

by well_ackshually

8/25/2026 at 12:27:28 AM

New CPU is 100% ARM design and nothing by Xiaomi other than "Chinese menu" configuration (i.e. how many blocks of this or that type,..). Apple CPU is a full custom design that just complies with ARM. Xiaomi Xring O3 CPU is designed by ARM and Xiaomi (as well as Mediatek) did not do any CPU design, other than custom bus interconnects, physical implementation on TSMC 3nm, an in-house NPU, and adopting next-generation LPDDR6 memory support.

by nomendos

8/25/2026 at 2:21:10 AM

Everyone has to start somewhere, they achieve better performance than Tensor CPU on Pixel, to me that's an achievement.

by mrheosuper

8/25/2026 at 4:02:30 AM

There’s a big gap between spec’ing an SoC by configuration code, and designing one from the ground up.

That difference amounts to who, if anyone, gets the credit for being competitive with Apple.

by dcrazy

8/25/2026 at 2:09:07 AM

yeap, it's xiaomi's thing. it dont have the ability.

by yanhangyhy

8/24/2026 at 4:03:10 PM

"matches" could've also been written as "this year's product falls short of the competitor's last year one".

And multithreaded is 10 cores vs 6 cores.

I appreciate Apple being kept on their feet, but they're not dethroned yet.

by trvz

8/24/2026 at 3:37:08 PM

M5 (iPad) AnTuTu: 3.5 million

XRing O3 AnTuTu: 5.5 million

---

M5 iPad Geekbench Single-Core: 3,556

M5 Max Geekbench Single-Core: 4,300

XRing O3 Geekbench Single-Core: 3,945

---

M5 iPad Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,285

M5 Max Geekbench Multi-Core: 29,200

XRing O3 Geekbench Multi-Core: 15,221

by nerdsniper

8/24/2026 at 4:11:36 PM

I dont think Geekbench is a good cross-platform benchmark, given what it measures

by throwa356262

8/24/2026 at 5:33:42 PM

I don’t either, but these are the only benchmarks Xiaomi provided!

by nerdsniper

8/24/2026 at 5:45:17 PM

Geekbench is the only consumer usable cross-platform benchmark. It matches SPEC differences between platforms

by TiredOfLife

8/24/2026 at 7:41:57 PM

Does it test hardware, or hardware plus software that can be different on different platforms?

by throwa356262

8/24/2026 at 10:17:15 PM

What degree of OS-indepedence do you think is reasonable to expect from a consumer-facing benchmark suite like Geekbench?

by wtallis

8/24/2026 at 10:23:00 PM

AFAIK it's mostly self-contained outside of basics like malloc. If you have any evidence to the contrary, post it.

by wmf

8/24/2026 at 4:14:01 PM

This is nothing. China is about to start doing their own 5nm. When they roll out their own silicon at scale, I don't think there's catching up, nobody can match their manufacturing capabilities. Not even close.

by comboy

8/24/2026 at 5:04:21 PM

They are already doing 5nm with multi-patterning DUV. But that's not the same as EUV machines. It is not nearly the same scale of production (with yields as low as 20%). They are still a few years away from indigenous EUV. Though I have to admit the shenzhen breakthrough was pretty impressive

by culi

8/24/2026 at 8:33:05 PM

Is DUV inherently 5nm a 20% yield class or it's matter of process improvement that China is struggling compared to taiwan or Intel ?

by rshm

8/24/2026 at 9:47:16 PM

For multi-patterning DUV, each patterning/etching step accumulates defect risk. Actually now that I'm reading about it, 20% is the better end of the spectrum. I don't think technology could possibly improve it much beyond that.

I believe the theoretical maximum yield for multi-patterning DUV at 5nm and 7nm is 30-40%

It's not economically sustainable/viable long term. China is only doing it because they've been forced to by the trade war Trump started against them in his first term (Biden didn't really back down either and now Trump 2 tried to ramp it up even higher). China is okay with such low yields because its supposed to be a temporary solution until they achieve domestic EUV tech.

by culi

8/25/2026 at 1:13:13 AM

Yea I dont think they show ant signs of slowing down. With how massively slow the West are, they are gonna get swallowed up.

by kajaktum

8/24/2026 at 5:28:41 PM

[flagged]

by 48484848

8/24/2026 at 5:10:01 PM

Suspiciously ignored is power consumption. That’s the biggest and most useful metric often ignored because it’s less flashy than speed.

by LPisGood

8/24/2026 at 5:52:39 PM

I'm also interested in the security features of this new CPU. Where doesn't it sit compared to Apple and ARM (Qualcomm, Titan)?

Modern processor without memory tagging for example is a little..... dated, given how much the new AIs accelerated the vulnerability discovery in all the apps and system components.

by subscribed

8/24/2026 at 6:35:30 PM

I have heard it said that security is the new power when it comes to microarchitecture. I feel like that’s something security enjoyers tell themselves to be happy.

by LPisGood

8/24/2026 at 9:03:27 PM

I don't understand your comment - did you want to say that hardware security is overrated or that security and microarchitecture don't mix?

Or maybe that security doesn't have a practical application?

by subscribed

8/24/2026 at 9:17:46 PM

Or maybe just a joke, that most of the world does not care so much about security, unlike security minded people would like to?

by lukan

8/24/2026 at 5:59:04 PM

Good question.

I’m sure Apple’s chips could do better in single core if they were willing to push the power envelope way higher too.

Multi-core is easy to beat, just add more cores until you win. There were already chips that beat the M series just by having way more threads/cores.

by MBCook

8/25/2026 at 3:02:43 AM

Apple’s devices generally have no or very underpowered thermal solutions; but it also partly regulates battery life.

(Seriously, they rely on air cooling for Neo and MBA — these chips hit 105deg easily and throttle, intentionally)

Adding a thermal pad to a Neo or MacBook Air gives significant boosts peak and sustained performance; whether in benchmarks or real world video renders; but it also reduces your battery life by a little, as there’s less thermal throttling forcing wattage down.

And no, the battery is not connected to the chassis (heatsink), it doesn’t have increased temps.

by dannyw

8/24/2026 at 7:23:42 PM

IMO bot that important practically - SiC batteries, active cooling, bypass charging etc - if one really cares about sustained performance (gaming etc), PRC has phones segments big on mitigating thermal throttling. Exclude benchmark drama, golden samples, retail units still vastly outperform passively cooled phones with "better" silicon on long sessions. Otherwise there aren't many usage case where power consumption matters between that can't be trivially made up by slightly better or larger battery and/or passive cooling.

by maxglute

8/24/2026 at 4:08:26 PM

I love this, really, competition on a global scale is good for us, bad for greedy US corporations.

For example, I consider Meta as bigger threat to society, than Xiaomi, DeepSeek, z.ai and other top Chinese companies (haven't used Chinese social media, so can't comment about its content)

by throwaw12

8/24/2026 at 5:54:11 PM

When you say "greedy US corporations" do you mean that these US corporations are uniquely greedy, or that all corporations are greedy, and this is bad for the ones in the US? Do you think that corporations in China, which in many cases are subsidized by the government, are also greedy?

by apparent

8/24/2026 at 6:56:17 PM

all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns or break the law and eventually make sure law is changed to fit your business (e.g. first taxi medallions adjusted the law for themselves, and then Uber)

Same is very difficult to do in China (look what happened to Jack Ma) or in Europe, because you have to follow some regulations

by throwaw12

8/24/2026 at 10:26:59 PM

Speaking of "us" it seems that Samsung/Mediatek/Xiaomi/Huawei SoCs are not available in the US.

by wmf

8/24/2026 at 5:34:40 PM

Do you still believe this considering those companies live and die by the CCP? Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?

I'm right there with you questioning Meta's value for society, but I do believe it has less opportunity for abuse/manipulation

by ford

8/24/2026 at 6:20:18 PM

Considering Meta lives and dies by the White House, where abuse and manipulation have become SOP, I'm not sure the CCP stacks up as the boogeyman anymore.

by creaturemachine

8/24/2026 at 6:15:37 PM

It would be quite a demonstration of supremacy for any Chinese firm to to equal or exceed the damage done (and ongoing) to western society by meta.

by aaroninsf

8/24/2026 at 6:13:43 PM

> those companies live and die by the CCP

I don't care about internal politics of a state, as long as they are not killing people deliberately on a daily basis or invading other countries and killing their people.

How government is structured is up to Chinese people to decide

> Would you feel differently if scale was reversed and Meta was the upstart trying to compete with Xiaomi/etc?

It's not only about scale and upstart, it's also about how much are they harming society.

by throwaw12

8/24/2026 at 7:52:54 PM

[flagged]

by well_ackshually

8/24/2026 at 4:24:45 PM

Xiaomi also make amazing cars.

"WSJ

I Test Drove a Chinese EV. Now I Don't Want to Buy American Cars Anymore.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/chinese-ev-test-drive...

"

by Alien1Being

8/24/2026 at 6:51:58 PM

My last car and my current one, both are from china (BYD, Xiaomi). these chinese brands really went very far compared to the rest of the world

by ilyassanida

8/25/2026 at 12:06:56 AM

China is hungry in a way others aren't. It is driving them to push far harder and faster because of this. Don't know it will be sustainable long term but it looks good now.

by ColdStream

8/24/2026 at 8:43:09 PM

Tech/feature wise it's not even close between Chinese cars and the rest of the world.

No idea about reliability or anything else but just as pure tech demos they seem incredible.

by alasano

8/25/2026 at 12:08:31 AM

The one thing I have heard form mechanics is that cars from BYD seem to has better than expected manufacturing and engineering. They haven't cut corners were you would expect for the price. Not sure how the electrics will hold a decade into the future but but they have good bones.

by ColdStream

8/24/2026 at 6:33:32 PM

There was a lot of hype about the SU7. They killed it with pre-orders. But their target for the year at 550K isn't gonna happen as they're sold about a 180k so far this year.

by thefourthchime

8/24/2026 at 7:09:36 PM

I don't want buy American cars either. European, Korean or Japanese are the way to go.

by weezing

8/24/2026 at 8:41:26 PM

Odd to list things in reverse order.

by markdown

8/24/2026 at 5:25:07 PM

The CEO of Ford directly said if Chinese EVs are allowed into the US it will be the end of US auto manufacturing.

They know they are inferior, and choose not to compete, just lobby for more regulations to keep competitors out. Free market, haha.

by testing22321

8/24/2026 at 6:01:56 PM

China is nowhere near “free market”. Their EV sector received more government subsidies in the last 15 years than the entire U.S. automobile market since inception. The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.

250 billion in EV subsidies from China. 10 billion by the U.S.

by dirck-norman

8/24/2026 at 6:39:25 PM

> The total subsidies make up half of the market cap of their entire EV industry.

Didn't Tesla essentially stay afloat for years via government subsidies (e.g. government-mandated carbon credits)?

Didn't the US only recently end its direct subsidies for EV buyers?

Don't US taxpayers provide an enormous ongoing subsidy to ICE vehicles by underwriting the security of the oilfields in the Gulf?

Don't US taxpayers in effect subsidize US automakers by ensuring they do not have to compete in the market with the best available vehicles?

More to the point: American free-marketeerism was never about the other side, it was about the US living its own professed values at home. We didn't shackle our press in discussions about the USSR because the USSR chose to shackle its own press. Our lockout of Chinese EVs rankles in part because it's a deviation, at home, from our own professed values.

by runako

8/24/2026 at 8:49:50 PM

Carbon credits where open to any companies, so it wasn't a unfair subsidy.

EV incentives where also not limited to us companies.

by bpfrh

8/24/2026 at 8:52:28 PM

Every country distorts its markets in different ways. It's still silly to pretend the US is free of these kinds of distortions.

by runako

8/24/2026 at 9:51:35 PM

That's just whataboutism that ignores the order of magnitude scale differences of the subsidies that were provided in China in the original comment.

by gpt5

8/24/2026 at 10:25:03 PM

It's really not. No serious analysis reduces the complexity of markets to a single number in a single sector. In particular, it takes willful blindness to look at subsidies in the EV market and ignore other energy markets.

You're also ignoring the most important point, my last point about values. The comment is still up, feel free to re-read it.

by runako

8/24/2026 at 8:09:08 PM

This is a false equivalence.

Adding carbon credits the U.S. is close to 20 billion in EV subsidies.

The ENTIRE EU spent 125 billion.

China supplied 250 billion to a 400 billion dollar industry and is facing overproduction. It’s dishonest to say it’s the same.

Free market capitalism isn’t binary. If that’s what you think, you’re gravely misinformed.

by dirck-norman

8/24/2026 at 8:32:25 PM

Just to be clear, that 250 billion is for 15 years and 400 billion is the current per-year number.

The subsidies were around 25% of sales in 2018 and have dropped down to about 10%.

And of that 250 billion, half is a sales tax exemption and a quarter is purchase rebates. That bulk of the money doesn't lead to unfair competition.

https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil...

by Dylan16807

8/24/2026 at 8:51:58 PM

This is false equivalence.

Direct producer subsidies for PRC EV was <100B, less than US injected into US auto, not much more than Euro auto. The latter just poorly, i.e. pork barrel / jobs programs that does not raise baseline competitiveness.

Most of CSIS muh PRC 200b-400b includes rebates/taxes AND subsidies to upstream, i.e. battery industry which used more than cars. AKA they bundled energy sector to skew PRC numbers.

For comparable you'd have to include all historic US/EU auto subsidies, AND ASSOCIATED upstream subsidies like MOST OF fossil industry, related diesel/fuel discounts... etc etc in which case US/EU have been rebating to the tune of trillions.

Strict auto-auto sector equivalence = PRC subsidized less to commoditize their car industry in fraction of time, which is not remotely "overproduction", they still barely exports 20%... they'd have to export 50/75%+ to reach shares of EU/JP/SKR etc and even then those absurd export%s not treated as overproduction. PRC would need to be exporting ~20m more cars then they do now to even qualify.

Auto+energy sector equivalence (the 200-400b figure), PRC not even on the axis in equivalence scenario.

E:cleaner language

by maxglute

8/24/2026 at 8:50:39 PM

> dishonest to say it’s the same.

I literally didn't say that it was?

In any case, the point is that the US also subsidizes markets, including the auto markets. China is far from unique in this. As you say, free market capitalism isn't binary, and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.

by runako

8/24/2026 at 9:09:05 PM

> I literally didn’t say that it was?

> and in this case all parties are subsidizing to some degree.

Textbook false equivalence.

by dirck-norman

8/25/2026 at 2:59:26 AM

Isn’t this just good strategy? Shouldn’t government subsidize the things it wants more of?

by twobitshifter

8/24/2026 at 6:16:52 PM

The US auto industry is also subsidized by all aspects of American life requiring a car outside of NYC and a few big cities.

by oblio

8/24/2026 at 6:30:20 PM

Also just directly by the USG, see "Cash for Clunkers".

by fedpost

8/24/2026 at 6:57:36 PM

No, it's actually 200 000 trillion for both countries.

Source: same as yours

by 7734128

8/24/2026 at 9:26:30 PM

The only serious EV maker in the US has received more US subsidizing than any single Chinese maker.

by asadotzler

8/24/2026 at 6:34:02 PM

Yep, it's pretty much just illegal dumping.

by thefourthchime

8/24/2026 at 8:25:08 PM

The vast majority of that money went to car purchasing assistance. It helps build the industry up but it doesn't change the actual price.

by Dylan16807

8/24/2026 at 6:15:11 PM

You’re forgetting the 9.3$ billion given to us automakers to bail them out that was never recovered.

by testing22321

8/24/2026 at 6:55:28 PM

Even without the subsidies, at this point, they’re arguably making better cars.

by cpursley

8/24/2026 at 7:20:23 PM

[flagged]

by nerdsniper

8/24/2026 at 7:45:02 PM

[flagged]

by dirck-norman

8/24/2026 at 7:46:43 PM

> You got emotional and

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. Your comment would be fine without that bit

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by dang

8/24/2026 at 7:46:20 PM

> Where the fuck are you getting these numbers from?

Hey, can you please not break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by dang

8/24/2026 at 8:40:29 PM

Heard and fixed. Thanks Dan.

by nerdsniper

8/25/2026 at 12:57:15 AM

Well, what do you expect him to say? Consider the audience.

by slashdave

8/24/2026 at 5:15:05 PM

That journalist may not want to buy American cars, but thanks to our enlightened government, they must buy American cars, since everything else is taxed significantly or banned altogether. Free market for all! /s

by warkdarrior

8/24/2026 at 4:46:27 PM

“…of course, Apple may soon announce their next processor”

I’m pretty sure they will, as they have, like clockwork, in the same month, for over a decade.

by tambourine_man

8/24/2026 at 4:52:10 PM

And reportedly early next year they have another coming out of band.

by Schiendelman

8/24/2026 at 5:48:44 PM

Specifically, the M7 is supposedly coming out in the Spring. The M6 band is going to be so small because the M7 will have a lot of AI-focused upgrades and Apple doesn't want to waste manufacturing on M6 Pro/Max/Ultra chips when they can start building the M7 sooner.

by smith7018

8/24/2026 at 3:36:30 PM

I'm curious as to the performance per watt. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

by otterley

8/24/2026 at 3:41:11 PM

no free lunch for a given process node I guess. It's using TSMC’s 3nm N3P.

by diabllicseagull

8/24/2026 at 6:24:07 PM

The GPU performance is insane too, approaches M5 results at ~20W.

Of course it will be in Android phones so it will be throttle hard past 4W and will have terrible drivers.

I wish phones moved to HPB packaging and active cooling so we could have sustained 10W and use them as light workstations.

by simjnd

8/24/2026 at 6:26:00 PM

That exist, kinda. Android gaming handhelds have mobile SoC and also active cooling. See Ayn and Retroid devices. Their (almost) throttle free is a very nice experience.

by snowram

8/24/2026 at 6:46:07 PM

Yeah I have an Ayn Thor with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, it's great being able to play fairly demanding Windows games on this tiny device.

It's still PoP with the RAM stacked on top in a plastic casing so you need a pretty big fan to cool it since you have to go through insulating plastic, then the RAM to get to the CPU.

With a HPB packaging you can cool the CPU directly and could theoretically get the same amount of cooling power with a much smaller fan that could be integrated into a thing smartphone (à la RedMagic).

by simjnd

8/25/2026 at 12:58:28 AM

Just get a laptop?

by jayd16

8/24/2026 at 8:03:47 PM

Xiaomi smartphones were extremely well made at least a few years ago. Even the core software was impressive vs Google for example (try echo cancellation on any of your non-Xiaomi devices). Its only real problem is ads.

by lostmsu

8/24/2026 at 8:35:30 PM

Yeah it wasn't a dig a Xiaomi specifically. All Android devices have broken Vulkan drivers. We have to rely on alternative open-source drivers (e.g. Turnip for Snapdragon) for real compatibility and performance.

by simjnd

8/24/2026 at 4:26:23 PM

How is this news worthy? The cores are off the shelf C1-Ultra. Even Google got them in the new pixel.

by yaro330

8/24/2026 at 5:17:54 PM

Apple is the least interesting company to compare against. They are in their own MacOS/iOS software ecosystem, which you want if you want and you don’t if you don’t. Not to be dismissive of either side of that, there are legit reasons to stay in or out of Apple’s ecosystem. But benchmarking points is not a reason anyone would switch operating systems, right?

What OS will these chips run and what is the competition on that platform? He makes a lot of comparisons to AMD and Intel in the post, why not benchmark against them?

by bee_rider

8/25/2026 at 3:16:50 AM

Daniel Lemire specialises in high-performance algorithm implementation. In recent years he has been impressed by specific performance characteristics of Apple's CPUs. For example, their ability to eek out the maximum possible throughput from a given instruction stream's data dependencies. My information may be stale, but when I read Daniel's comments I assume that Apple is being used for compariosn because it is the current leader, and take it as given that AMD and Intel are behind. You can probably find sources where he makes head-to-head comparisons with AMD and Intel. If you're not familiar with his work I can recommend it. The Wookash podcast interview is a gentle introduction, there is open source code and academic papers if that's more your thing.

by RossBencina

8/24/2026 at 6:29:51 PM

Not at all. I specifically bought a MacBook Air M4, first Mac product in my life, for its fantastic performance in a passively cooled notebook. I have zero loyalty to Apple and usually use Windows. If someone else starts beating them perf wise, I'll happily switch again.

by mschuetz

8/25/2026 at 2:30:26 AM

The air m4 is really the best sub-thousand-dollar laptop.

by mrheosuper

8/24/2026 at 6:00:38 PM

They are the kind of single core right now, so they’re the most interesting comparison.

Do you want to compare to Intel/AMD? If these are destined for phones that’s not a useful comparison by your metric.

by MBCook

8/24/2026 at 6:50:03 PM

Linus specifically always buys Apple laptops to run Linux on because they're just that good. Even despite all the paper cuts.

by jorvi

8/24/2026 at 7:38:49 PM

Linus Torvalds has in past used laptops from Apple, Lenovo and Dell and probably many more.

His current laptop is an Intel laptop.

by throwa356262

8/25/2026 at 4:11:14 AM

Can we get a powerful arm CPU yet that is geared purely toward performance and just slap an AIO or water cooler on it ? Don't understand why this doesn't exist

by Melatonic

8/25/2026 at 12:10:14 AM

I would find the news much more interesting if they put the new processor in a laptop with 48 GB DDR5 unified memory or more! Right now, M5 with its neural execution engines and unified memory architecture present a unique local AI computing platform.

by sinuhe69

8/24/2026 at 9:28:13 PM

Anyone can make a fast CPU, but is it also a safe and secure CPU? Or does it have architectural defects as a consequence of the race to be fast?

See eg LoongLeak and the Loongson processor: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26/presentat...

by angry_octet

8/24/2026 at 11:06:50 PM

Xiaomi are implementing ARM cores on an ARM ISA so any architectural defects would also affect other ARM processors.

by Alpha3031

8/24/2026 at 4:00:05 PM

Yay free markets China makes a fast chip Yay national security

by dfedbeef

8/24/2026 at 4:10:22 PM

44mb of cache really highlights the bottleneck of how raw compute is cheap, but the real limit is memory latency.

by waazy

8/24/2026 at 10:31:33 PM

It is pretty amazing the creativity with compute architecture which is afforded by a zillion transistors.

by ChuckMcM

8/24/2026 at 7:33:12 PM

Geekerwan's review is up, with caveat that this is the prototype board, not even packaged into a phone yet, but still shows some amazing results in spec 2026, 3dmark (gpu), perf-per-watt for single core and multi-core https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCCJuOopLK8 (you can turn on YouTube auto-dub)

by cherioo

8/24/2026 at 10:37:30 PM

Impressive silicon progress, but real-world developer experience will hinge on sustained thermal throttling, Linux kernel support, and tooling ecosystem stability.

by pranav_tech26

8/24/2026 at 5:04:14 PM

I think it's great that the Chinese are catching up and can compete directly with the incumbents. The GPU space I find really exciting with several new IPs out there that aren't quite ready for primetime, but still fascinating.

Also, here's to hoping we get some relatively competitive Chinese DRAM flooding the consumer market someday soon.

by nazgulsenpai

8/24/2026 at 7:01:34 PM

PRC going to get have surplus of semi talent and equipment in a few years that food delivery companies Meituan probably going to starting making chips like they do LLMs. Only 60% joking.

by maxglute

8/24/2026 at 5:31:48 PM

Xiaomi still need to improve their UX and also match the UI to western culture, in spite of now being a global "tech giant" they still want to convince everyone else to be Chinese?

by bar000n

8/24/2026 at 8:25:43 PM

"Let's isolate China's semiconductor industry," they said.

"This will all turn out well," they said.

by ezekiel68

8/24/2026 at 8:39:00 PM

There is a nuance: Xiaomi is not Huawei. They were not sanctioned. This chip is made in Taiwan like all the non-Samsung competition.

by trynumber9

8/24/2026 at 9:11:24 PM

Argh -- perfectly read. I was thinking of Huawei.

by ezekiel68

8/25/2026 at 3:09:08 AM

Huawei is launching a mobile soc built with logic folding. They take a single logic ip, like a cpu, and spread it's components across to dies and use hybrid bonding to combine top to bottom. For example the CPU SRAM on top and logic gates directly below. This reduces critical path, increases fmax, reduces power consumption. They claim this method allow them build faster, more power efficient, more function units with duv process than traditional duv. Will be interesting to benchmark after launch later this year

by russli1993

8/24/2026 at 4:30:05 PM

Would be nice to see some independent numbers and benchmarks. Apparently, Xiaomi announced this SoC today, so there's no 3rd party data about it.

by StrLght

8/24/2026 at 10:13:15 PM

Where is this being fabbed TSMC? How advanced a process node CPU maker has access to is usually all you need to predict relative performance.

(as long as you take similar assumptions in die size, advanced packaging and power envelope).

by tpurves

8/24/2026 at 7:01:23 PM

It is the same Xiaomi which announced 300 000 SU7 vehicles sold in a day and 6 months later reported they are struggling to hit their sales targets? Just don’t believe anything a Chinese company say, divide it by at least 2. I have nothing against China, this is a cultural thing which you should be aware reading anything coming from the country.

by kikimora

8/24/2026 at 7:41:18 PM

Xiaomi EVs sales growing ~15% YoY, they just likely to miss their wildly ambitious ~33% YoY target. Or they might get close, they're 80% of target for H1, but PRC sells more cars in H2 (no Q1 new years, Q3+Q4 big sales).

But it's also the same xiaomi and sends gold samples and hacks gaming benchmarks, but IRL an off the shelf model is merely 80% better instead of 100%. It's no different than Samsung, Apple, Nvidia curious powerpoint axis. Whatever advertised, reality is slightly worse, but rarely substantially.

by maxglute

8/24/2026 at 7:02:06 PM

Yeah, well, I'm still waiting for 1 Apple Car ...

by amelius

8/24/2026 at 7:07:44 PM

Why are you waiting for something that was never announced?

by Almondsetat

8/24/2026 at 7:21:35 PM

You never heard of project Titan? It even has a wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project

"around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018."

by amelius

8/24/2026 at 8:41:08 PM

Was it announced?

by Almondsetat

8/24/2026 at 9:45:50 PM

What difference does that make. It's the end result that counts.

by amelius

8/24/2026 at 10:22:02 PM

This is a discussion of whether company announcements are true or not in various circumstances. It makes all the difference.

by Dylan16807

8/24/2026 at 3:55:40 PM

Yeah but they can't use TSMC to make it so they'll have to make due with older or more expensive lithography processes.

That probably explains why there's so few of these CPUs around: the yields of the domestic Chinese lithography processes (non-EUV) are awful.

by hn_submit

8/24/2026 at 4:02:45 PM

Xiaomi has not been sanctioned like Huawei. So it is made by TSMC on N3P. The Huawei chips, made by SMIC, are so far behind they're not competitive at all with even Xiaomi's first generation chip.

by trynumber9

8/24/2026 at 4:20:42 PM

After this news they might suddenly be.

by throwa356262

8/24/2026 at 5:50:38 PM

The U.S. is already making moves to completely halt the export of ASML machines to China, including non-EUV ones. Every semiconductor China produces could be used in weapons and that's agains U.S. law.

by hn_submit

8/24/2026 at 6:29:29 PM

Last I knew, ASML was a Dutch company with a Veldhoven HQ. With the amount of shit that Trump's been pulling in Europe, The EU might be more willing to side with China and ban exports to the US.

by spacedcowboy

8/24/2026 at 6:57:55 PM

Not as long as there's a NATO.

Europe needs to acquire a nuclear arsenal that stands head-to-head with the Russian one quantitatively and independent from the U.S. or any other nation (including the French and British) for nuclear deterrence. This means many more European nations need to acquire a nuclear arsenal.

The frustrating part is that the U.S. doesn't want to give assurances whether it will come to Europe's aid if it were attacked, but at the same time doesn't want European nations to develop an independent nuclear capability. Many European nations (Poland, Finland, Sweden, Germany) are currently contemplating going nuclear. The U.S. is actively discouraging them to do so.

by hn_submit

8/24/2026 at 8:37:43 PM

I would argue that NATO under Trump is a paper tiger. There is a reason no-one wants to buy US weapons any more, though the intricacies of where they are, having assumed the US would be a reliable ally, mean the current flood of US weaponry to European countries will slow down gradually, not all at once.

Reputation is a fickle thing, so difficult to build, and so easy to lose.

by spacedcowboy

8/24/2026 at 4:08:30 PM

Xiaomi can and does use TSMC.

by blackoil

8/24/2026 at 3:46:40 PM

RIP Mediatek, RIP Qualcomm

by bip-bop-robot

8/24/2026 at 3:55:30 PM

Nice. Let's see if they perform well in the real world.

by celsoazevedo

8/24/2026 at 4:30:59 PM

Interesting how quickly they seem to have caught up.

by AM1010101

8/24/2026 at 7:01:17 PM

ok but power consumption??

by ErrorNoBrain

8/24/2026 at 6:10:45 PM

If Moore's law is truly ending as is generally believed, then it seems logically inevitable that the entire industry will flatten out and equalize. Or, I am oversimplifying something.

by calf

8/25/2026 at 2:32:32 AM

It's already flattening out. The rate of progress is much faster in 90-00s then now.

by mrheosuper

8/24/2026 at 7:02:19 PM

In this case it's more that multiple companies (Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek and now Xiaomi) have used the same process (N3P) to produce multiple chips with similar performance. Regardless of Moore's Law death that isn't surprising.

by trynumber9

8/24/2026 at 8:04:46 PM

That's just punting the meta which is why are companies converging on similar processes? Plausible explanation being that Moore's law exponential is going away.

by calf

8/24/2026 at 4:44:18 PM

Good. Competition is great for consumers.

by romanovcode

8/24/2026 at 4:45:23 PM

If China has technological superiority to the US in every facet of science and engineering, is that really good for us though?

by brcmthrowaway

8/24/2026 at 4:51:42 PM

Not good for us if it gets banned domestically because the US can't compete in a free market.

by wds

8/24/2026 at 5:16:57 PM

That's fine, US can export movies and alfalfa.

by warkdarrior

8/24/2026 at 5:02:10 PM

Who is "us"?

by romanovcode

8/24/2026 at 5:39:18 PM

US consumer

by brcmthrowaway

8/24/2026 at 5:59:48 PM

Yeah I am not from US so this does not concern me.

by romanovcode

8/24/2026 at 4:52:03 PM

> If China has technological superiority to the US in every facet of science and engineering, is that really good for us though?

I'm too stupid or too mad a Trump to care.

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 7:22:06 PM

I think constraint creates the best innovation, the US is shooting itself in the foot by forcing China to innovate.

by bizstrategy10

8/24/2026 at 3:32:48 PM

LPDDR6... that's not enough for speedy inference

by khalic

8/24/2026 at 3:44:47 PM

Oh thank heavens, computing hardware that the AI companies will not buy all of the supply of.

by hoherd

8/24/2026 at 3:43:40 PM

It depends on the number of channels. The Xring O3 appears to have 4×24-bit channels, so 113.8 GB/s. The iPhone 17 Pro's memory bandwidth is ~76.8 GB/s. Seems fine?

by CharlesW

8/24/2026 at 7:43:38 PM

According to Mark Gurman, the base M6 is bumped up to 200 GB/s of memory bandwidth with a single core performance bump of 15%.

by GeekyBear

8/24/2026 at 3:48:43 PM

If I recall correctly, Strix Halo gets about 450G/s. The M series processors get between 400 and 800G/s, and an actual NVIDIA card is like 5.5T/s. 113G/s is pretty slow for inference.

by rpdillon

8/24/2026 at 4:00:20 PM

Strix Halo is 256 GB/s.

by trvz

8/24/2026 at 4:20:16 PM

The CPU is for mobile phones. An Nvidia H200 has 4.8TB/s. An RTX 5090 has 1.8TB/s. Both use ~700W - not comparable with a phone.

by dust42

8/24/2026 at 3:40:29 PM

Not every computing platform is expected to do fast inference.

by simlevesque

8/24/2026 at 3:38:06 PM

Maybe,but memory bandwidth is much better than on the DGX Spark at least.

by rjzzleep

8/25/2026 at 4:08:18 AM

No. its has a 96 bit bus.

by kcb

8/24/2026 at 3:39:19 PM

I hate this RAMpocalypse so much

by khalic

8/24/2026 at 3:43:51 PM

On the other hand, this year's RAMpocalypse could be 2028's RAMbundance ;P

by fauigerzigerk

8/24/2026 at 4:51:14 PM

RAMvana was right there!!

by khalic

8/24/2026 at 6:11:00 PM

Thank you OP for using xcancel.

by aaroninsf

8/24/2026 at 5:51:04 PM

No mention I can see of power consumption multiple compared to apple's chips at matching perf. My guess is 2x-5x

by dmitrygr

8/24/2026 at 3:41:54 PM

This smells somewhat legitimate and somewhat BS. The architecture itself looks impressive — TSMC 3nm, a 4+ GHz prime core, tons of cache, and a very wide execution engine. And the claimed Geekbench numbers — around *3,945 single-core and 15,221 multi-core* — are especially impressive, if not a little suspicious.

But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can. Do they show sustained performance over ten minutes? What’s the power draw when it’s doing 15K? What happens when you put it in an actual phone?

This was done in a cold room. It seems more like a proof of concept for what they could do than something that could actually ship in a phone and sustain those numbers.

by thefourthchime

8/24/2026 at 3:48:02 PM

Were I to guess

> The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).

This is where the magic is happening (I believe). They have these ultra cores with additional extensions which they are pinning the benchmarks to.

Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.

by cogman10

8/24/2026 at 4:04:16 PM

> Realistically, that sort of thing isn't useful as non-homogeneous architectures really suck for an application or OS to deal with.

I agree that if each core doesn't "support" the full ISA it's a huge pain (the one generation of Intel AVX-512-but-not parts were incredible), but that hasn't been common in years. Usually (and in this case, according to my reading) the small cores get a horrible slow/decoder-emulated implementation of every instruction, so that if you schedule on the "wrong" core you don't trap but just run really slowly instead.

Otherwise, heterogeneous architectures are the present and future of mobile and consumer desktops and have been for years. Desktop OSes are getting better and mobile OSes are just fine at scheduling across different core families (the higher level of abstraction everyone complains about in mobile apps actually helps a lot here).

by bri3d

8/24/2026 at 6:17:18 PM

didn't intel discontinue heterogeneous (laptop?) chips recently

by tensegrist

8/24/2026 at 6:35:15 PM

Only server, as far as I know. Server is now either high-density E core (Sierra Forest) or low-density P core (Granite Rapids), but desktop and laptop are heterogeneous still; laptops are getting even more heterogeneous because they have P-Cores, E-cores, and Low Power Island cores.

by bri3d

8/24/2026 at 3:59:51 PM

All 10 cores support the same extensions. It’s silly to implement an SoC any other way, and it’s been a decade since someone has last made that mistake.

by brigade

8/24/2026 at 3:51:44 PM

Doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Look at the top comment thread: just politics and no discussion of the tech.

by thesmtsolver2

8/24/2026 at 3:58:48 PM

It will be interesting to find out the details. From the block diagram, the core only issues 10 instructions per cycle, so not especially wide. Maybe the performance will be worse once in a real phone in real thermal conditions, but if that's true, it could make for a very interesting laptop or desktop chip. Time will tell.

by alain94040

8/24/2026 at 4:09:10 PM

The C1-ultra has a decode of 10 instructions but can issue up to 23 uop per cycle, that’s a good bit wider than any other CPU. In particular, I believe it’s the first CPU to have a 4th load pipeline.

by brigade

8/24/2026 at 3:59:49 PM

It is just the same as MediaTek Dimensity 9500. They managed 4000+ point in lab, but real world it was much closer to 3300.

It is still not a bad results though. And we are about to see MediaTek Dimensity 9600 based on ARM C2-Ultra.

by ksec

8/24/2026 at 3:48:56 PM

> But it’s sorta like, let’s throw everything against the wall and get the biggest number we can.

From what I recall reading, the impressive performance of Apple mobile CPUs is partly attributable to throwing more silicon area at the problem while not being as cost sensitive (no need to share margin with SoC vendor)

by RicoElectrico

8/24/2026 at 4:29:57 PM

US Government - China is a security risk & they will steal our data. We should ban xiaomi for national security risk. We found the phone collecting telemetry..... just like google and apple.

by cute_boi

8/24/2026 at 3:51:32 PM

Is raw perf considered Apple's moat? I think it's their software. I would buy a MacOS laptop even if the performance is ghastly ... in fact, I did: the MacBook Neo.

by jeffbee

8/24/2026 at 4:33:26 PM

I don't like Apple as a company or how they act around locking people out of the devices they buy.

I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.

It doesn't exist. MacBook's simply have the best hardware, but terrible software/philosophy of software.

So I'd say their moat is hardware in general. Performance, yes to an extent, but it's performance vs heat vs energy vs battery life and all their peripherals.

by turblety

8/24/2026 at 8:30:01 PM

> I'm willing to pay double the cost of a MacBook Pro for anything that can run Linux, similar performance to M5, have a decent battery, good touchpad, be silent, have a good display, be light and portable.

This is Zenbook A16 right now, with recent patches posted to Linux ARM mailing list that support it in full.

by cromka

8/24/2026 at 7:59:49 PM

Any thoughts on the "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"?

by da02

8/25/2026 at 1:07:19 AM

Doesn't meet the same silent or single core perf requirements. probably the closest out there though.

by adgjlsfhk1

8/24/2026 at 4:07:58 PM

Yes it is. I've bought a MacBook air despite despising MacOS (with the hope that Asahi support will come eventually) because the processor currently has no competition.

by Thomashuet

8/24/2026 at 4:40:50 PM

That's sort of weird though because unless the operating system supports your applications, the performance of the processor cannot be appreciated.

by jeffbee

8/24/2026 at 6:45:48 PM

My applications are generally open-source and volunteers have already compiled them to any and all operating systems whose tool chain is available.

by kccqzy

8/24/2026 at 4:10:49 PM

The general workload performance (browsing, text editing) is comparable for neo and m* MacBooks afaict.

Ghastly was macOS on an Intel MacBook Air.

by mceachen

8/24/2026 at 4:39:00 PM

Why would we compare it to an 8-year-old design? For browsing, the current MBP smokes the MBN, by margins of roughly one-third. It is a significant and noticeable regression. For sustained workloads like software development or even running the MacOS updates, it is a huge and glaring regression. But it's still good kit.

by jeffbee

8/24/2026 at 6:47:03 PM

Yes it is. And it has been that way for more than a decade for typical consumer-oriented single-threaded workloads like running JavaScript on a webpage.

by kccqzy

8/24/2026 at 4:58:13 PM

the MacBook neo has faster single core perf than any x86 laptop (for the first 0.5 sec which is what matters for ui responsiveness).

by adgjlsfhk1

8/24/2026 at 3:38:00 PM

Insane if true. Does Xiaomi sell laptops?

by brcmthrowaway

8/24/2026 at 3:43:58 PM

Yeah, but they're just normal Intel stuff.

by t-3

8/24/2026 at 3:45:30 PM

I have Mi Notebook Pro. Not that bad actually.

But they have stopped making premium laptop since then.

by npn

8/24/2026 at 10:05:23 PM

Good, get this qualcomm garbage out of here

by micromacrofoot

8/24/2026 at 4:08:18 PM

"Arm-designed CPU core matches Apple-designed CPU core from a year ago"

by gok

8/24/2026 at 5:48:01 PM

good. competition is good. we, the consumers, win.

the a20pro and what not will match or beat it and the cycle will continue.

if this chip turns into a decent desktop chip then arm linux laptops might be very nice.

by gigatexal

8/24/2026 at 5:37:20 PM

Great, now they can put much more Ads in my notes app...

by malkosta

8/24/2026 at 6:46:11 PM

can't wait to see Xiaomi enter the GPUs market and beats Nvidia

by ilyassanida

8/24/2026 at 4:16:17 PM

2020's US geopolitical doctrine:

1) Pick a historically extremely innovative and disciplined culture which also happens to have massive human capital

2) Please arbitrary artificial ill-thought-out economic constraints on them

3) wait a while

4) get a bunch of magnificent spanking in return (AI, chips, etc...)

by ur-whale

8/24/2026 at 4:26:29 PM

This worked just as well in the 1980s when they wanted to protect their auto industry...

by cromka

8/24/2026 at 3:29:35 PM

I can feel the scores of messages being sent to the federal government from lobbyists saying what a threat Chinese hardware is to national security.

by fishfasell

8/24/2026 at 3:51:12 PM

It's an ARM-designed CPU core, made in Taiwan. Very little difference from say MediaTek's upcoming Dimensity SoC just announced earlier because it is made on TSMC N3P instead of N2.

I don't think they have any angle with that.

by trynumber9

8/24/2026 at 4:20:03 PM

you say that like American lobbyists and Congress people are at-all technically minded and not just hyperbolic princes seeking influence at any cost

by paimapi

8/24/2026 at 4:41:24 PM

To be fair, describing the internet as a series of tubes is rather technical to some extent.

by pandemic_region

8/24/2026 at 4:46:58 PM

If they said "pipes" network admins probably would have given it a pass.

by sekh60

8/24/2026 at 11:05:56 PM

we had one chance to elect that technocrat who could have set us on the path that the PRC is on now. instead, we decided it was more important to feel like we could have a beer with the President and so ended up invading Iraq and Afghanistan instead

by paimapi

8/24/2026 at 4:23:36 PM

This thread is the perfect example of useful idiots with astroturfing. This is a CPU core designed by UK company (and owned by Japanese) made in Taiwan on equipment made in EU (with non trivial USA components). Xiaomi here is the easiest to replace in this chain (and the Chinese have very much tried to replace any of the others, failing for now). Yet they are angling for a huge PR win.

by jinzo

8/24/2026 at 4:26:16 PM

ARM is merely an IP portfolio licensing company. They don't really design or build anything. And everyone uses TSMC (who uses ASML). The primary design is still being done by Xiaomi, that's the most unique part of this build.

Stop downplaying how big of an achievement this is.

by booi

8/24/2026 at 5:16:40 PM

They license the IP that they design. They design complete chips you can buy and go right to tape out with no changes if you want.

by burnte

8/24/2026 at 4:46:51 PM

And how did that IP portfolio come into existence? Did it suddenly materialize out of thin air or… did ARM engineers design it?

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt: in your mothertongue, the meaning of “design” is not as broad as in English?

by tverbeure

8/24/2026 at 5:49:55 PM

How about Apple M series ARM chip designs? From what I have seen only resemblance with ARM is the ISA.

by menaerus

8/24/2026 at 7:23:44 PM

What about it? Apple has an architectural license which allows them to design their own CPUs with ARM ISA. Most companies that use ARM CPUs don’t.

by tverbeure

8/24/2026 at 4:29:46 PM

Really?! Did you read the announcement? C1 ultra cores are designed by ARM.

>The biggest cores on the the Xring O3 are the C1-Ultra. C1-Ultra really powerful cores. They support SME2 (Scalable Matrix Extension 2) for matrix/AI acceleration, SVE2 for data parallelism (SIMD).

>https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra

by free652

8/24/2026 at 4:34:27 PM

ARM does the design. What are u talking about?

by f1shy

8/24/2026 at 5:02:41 PM

Below is some additional detail about the processor. Like the parent comment notes, ARM licenses IP of an ISA or core designs (see ARM C1-Ultra cores [0]), licensees like Qualcomm then make specific SoC for different use-cases.

  Xiaomi has made the XRING 03 boast a larger die size than the XRING 01, 
  measuring 133mm² compared to its predecessor’s 109mm² dimensions This change 
  was deemed necessary as the flagship SoC features 16MB of SLC cache, not to 
  mention a new “6 + 4” CPU cluster that comprises two ARM C1-Ultra cores 
  running at 4.35GHz, four C1-Premium cores operating at 3.68GHz and lastly, 
  four C1-Pro cores running at 3.15GHz. [1]
0. https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/c1-ultra

1. https://wccftech.com/xiaomi-xring-03-official-tsmc-3nm-n3p-l...

by adolph

8/24/2026 at 4:40:43 PM

You are misunderstanding, and, they are not downplaying.

A revision or other reply would benefit from explaining how their value chain x location correspondence is wrong - perhaps missing a step?

Though, in anticipation of a revision, I wonder if its simple as you thought the cores were custom-designed by Xiaomi instead of standard ARM.

by refulgentis

8/24/2026 at 4:27:14 PM

Did they license an actual chip design from ARM or just the ISA?

by seanmcdirmid

8/24/2026 at 11:44:29 PM

They licensed several ARM IP blocks.

by monocasa

8/24/2026 at 4:16:15 PM

I'm not one to cry "foreign bots!" but this thread seems astroturfed after realizing this.

by doublepg23

8/24/2026 at 3:38:06 PM

> I can feel the scores of messages being sent to the federal government from lobbyists saying what a threat Chinese hardware is to national security.

The motivation for such messages may be greedy, but it doesn't mean the facts aren't wrong:

1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.

2. Free market incentives work counter to national security all the time, in many ways (e.g. causing domestic capabilities to wither and die).

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 3:42:43 PM

Can we audit American corporations?

by paxys

8/24/2026 at 3:47:14 PM

Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.

If "China" decides it doesn't like me, my life really isn't going to change much. If my electric company decides it doesn't like me, I'm in big trouble.

by ryandrake

8/24/2026 at 3:52:34 PM

Yeah, I don't want China as an adversary. It appears to me that it is a country full of fun, smart and interesting people. And their manufacturing prowess is incredible.

I'm into funny electric vehicles and China makes some beauties!

by mring33621

8/24/2026 at 8:09:57 PM

[dead]

by fleroviumna

8/24/2026 at 3:50:36 PM

What about Russia and Ukraine?

by thesmtsolver2

8/24/2026 at 4:27:19 PM

The answer varies depending on the day.

by lostlogin

8/24/2026 at 6:07:10 PM

"Two bald men fighting for a comb", both in demographic collapse and set afire for the usual reasons.

by B1FF_PSUVM

8/24/2026 at 4:07:47 PM

You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9], bribe your politicians [10], censor your media [11], universities [12,13,14], advertising and corporations in general [15,16], and even books [17].

While they plan 50 years ahead, we are stuck re-litigating the most basic "united we stand, divided we fall" logic, even while the consequences are all around us. But congratulations on your enlightened individualism.

[1] Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758673

[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/7275588/inside-the-chinese-milita...

[4] https://www.dw.com/en/from-solar-to-evs-how-china-is-overpro...

[5] EU: Anti-dumping probe into China solar panels - https://apnews.com/general-news-e16007adf4bd468d9acf849734d2...

[6] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...

[8] FIPA agreement with China: What's really in it for Canada? - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...

[9] Posters depicting Hong Kong protests removed by Massey University within 12 hours - https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/116723925/posters-depicting...

[10] Businesses with Chinese connections gave Australia's major parties more than $5.5 million between 2013 and 2015, making them easily the largest source of foreign-linked donations. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-21/australian-groups-str...

[11] Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/apple-ch...

[12] Chinese students in Australia fear reprisals at home if they speak out, inquiry hears - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/12/chine...

[13] Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, says that [..] American scholars practice self-censorship about China and adopt the official narrative of the Chinese regime when talking about sensitive issues. “We don’t talk about ‘Taiwan independence.’ We talk about ‘the cross-Strait relations.’ We don’t talk about ‘the occupation of Tibet.’ We don’t call the June 4th Massacre ‘massacre.’ - https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-the-american-academy-misle...

[14] China pressured Concordia University to cancel event with Uighur activist - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/chinese-officials-co...

[15] Leica Camera has sought to distance itself from a promotional video depicting photographers covering the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown three decades ago, after it landed the German company in hot water in China. - https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3006817/lei...

[16] Mercedes-Benz apologizes to Chinese for quoting Dalai Lama - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mercedes-benz-china-gaffe...

[17] China gets German children's book about COVID withdrawn - https://www.dw.com/en/china-gets-german-childrens-book-about...

Edit as reply ("posting too fast", thanks HN) to all the "but the US also does bad things" "counterarguments":

> Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.

I'm European, and not stupid enough to believe that because the US is acting poorly or even in some cases hostile to Europe (to say nothing of the Middle East or South America), that we should roll over and allow China to subjugate us instead. Neither should the US. This is "you are not pure and innocent enough for self-defense" logic. Please don't drag the rest of us down in some deluded attempt at atonement.

by like_any_other

8/24/2026 at 4:24:54 PM

> You don't consider them your adversary, while they strong-arm your corporations to invest in China [1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].

All of South America already feels that way about the USA. Add the EU if we include the duopoly of Visa and MasterCard.

Sadly Colombia just elected a US citizen as the new president. The "subordinate receivers of orders" status has been achieved.

by Shorel

8/24/2026 at 5:06:39 PM

This is what will happen when a hegemon realizes their power and elects someone scrupulous. That's why it's important to be the hegemon.

Meanwhile look at the southchina sea shenanigans and the behavior of Chinese fishing fleets all over the world.

by ajmurmann

8/24/2026 at 4:15:39 PM

>[1] instead of your own country (this becomes "we have to manufacture in China, we don't have the capability here!"), destroy your corporations through espionage [2,3], or through subsidy-enabled dumping prices and preferential treatment [4,5], extract groveling apologies from your firms [6], operate literal police stations on your soil [7], and turn your countries into subordinate receivers of orders [8,9].

As a Canadian, I am going to be honest and say that I thought at first you were describing the United States of 2026.

I mean, we have a much better opinion of China. As does almost the entire world. For extremely good reason.

There is one country bombing endless nations, stealing resources, engaging in sea piracy, undermining democracies, trying to destroy the West, and so on, and it is the United States of America under a juvenile halfwit self-dealing shitbag pedophile, working on behalf of an utterly deranged group of kleptocrats.

Seriously, Americans can do this chickenshit nonsense, but you are the worldwide problem.

by llm_nerd

8/24/2026 at 4:17:03 PM

Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity. I do not see anything wrong with that.

Secret police in Canada and stuff like this - yes go ahead nail them and kick those out of the country. Has nothing to do with the trade.

by FpUser

8/24/2026 at 4:31:48 PM

> Sounds like a loser diatribe. Nobody asked your country to do anything with China. Was your government's and corporations choice and yes they had to pay for the privilege of cheap labor and later for advanced manufacturing capacity.

No, the GP's comment is an attempt to correct the mistake you were so kind to outline. There's no reason we must stick with the approach set by a previous set of leaders who turned out to be short-signed and naive, and course corrections start with outlining the problems and contradictions of the present course.

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 7:30:15 PM

What's short-sighted and naive is believing that globalism can be reversed, that economic efficiency can be overcome by political will, and that knowledge can be contained to one country. More and deeper international economic and political entaglements are inevitable. How can an adversarial relationship with one of the most advanced countries with abundant production and labor capacity help anything? Economic nationalism and high tech are incompatible.

by t-3

8/24/2026 at 7:50:05 PM

> economic efficiency can be overcome by political will

It was political will that created that economic efficiency, that you're now trying to convince us is just a fact of nature.

> Economic nationalism and high tech are incompatible.

China is economically (and traditionally) nationalist - that's why they subsidize and protect their important industries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421633

by like_any_other

8/24/2026 at 3:54:32 PM

> I don't personally consider "China" my adversary

They're not an adversary in the same way that a guy demanding your wallet at knifepoint is, or a company able to cut off your electricity is.

China is an adversary in the sense that they're a totalitarian government, who, by the nature of that system, cannot brook any sort of opposition to their ideology, plans, or desires. All within the state, none without. That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time because doing so will suggest that the powers-that-be in China might not have all of the answers to the human condition. Either you fall in line, or you have to be eliminated.

If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.

by lenerdenator

8/24/2026 at 4:08:05 PM

Instead of railing about ideology, try comparing the actions of the U.S. and China over the past 20 years. The U.S. has been far more interventionist and aggressive; China appears to be maturing and the U.S. is regressing.

by koverstreet

8/24/2026 at 6:24:32 PM

Tell that to the fishermen on the shores of the South China Sea, Hong Kong, people in India along the border, and of course, Taiwan.

I'll agree that the US is regressing, but it's becoming more like China. You have an elite that are putting themselves beyond any sort of accountability. You need more and more connection to them in order to get anywhere in society. How long before you see them enshrine themselves in the constitution and create a cadre system?

by lenerdenator

8/24/2026 at 4:52:53 PM

[dead]

by _zachs

8/24/2026 at 4:23:12 PM

An "adversary" can also just be a country we're in competition with. Both America and China are in competition for the global leader. Adversary could be akin to friendly competition if we all wanted to operate this way.

by godelski

8/24/2026 at 5:02:18 PM

> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time

When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.

This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.

by isityettime

8/24/2026 at 8:19:39 PM

> When you mark the scoresheet according to actual number of invasions, our capitalist liberal democracy has performed much worse than their mixed-economy authoritarian technocracy.

And how many of those invasions have been of other countries with democratic-republican forms of government in the last 30 years?

> This is a lot of needlessly "ideology vibes"-based judgment on a matter where plenty of actual evidence (history, geopolitical incentives, culture) is readily available.

Then let's take a look at more of that evidence. How's Tibet doing these days? Did the CCP decide that they, too, need to follow international law and withdraw all forces and government infrastructure from the region after invading it in 1950? How about the agreement with Hong Kong? Have they stopped ramming fishing boats in the "disputed" parts of the South China Sea? I quote that because according to international law, there is no dispute; China is just enforcing piracy.

I'd also like to say, they're not an authoritarian technocracy. They're totalitarian. China's political, military, economic, and cultural institutions are all fundamentally guided by the cadre system, which is a version of the party vanguard system suggested by Lenin. A person is paid to be a professional revolutionary of sorts. That person's influence and prospects within the cadre system are not judged solely by merit; they're judged by adherence to a dogma, which is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in this case. This isn't just "ideology vibes", it's a description of the system as it is as a practical matter.

Imagine having a person who is professionally Trumpist at your company constantly making sure that what you do is in line with what the GOP under Trump wants. For a practical example, let's think about tariffs. Does your business suffer because of the tariffs ordered by Trump? Well, no it does not, because that's not what the Trumpist cadre member would say. You wouldn't be filing lawsuits to try and lift those tariffs.

Furthermore, now imagine that the GOP in this case is the only party allowed to have majority control of the government, not just as a de facto matter, but as a de jure matter as well since it'd be a part of the constitution.

There will, sooner or later, be a Chinese Trump. It'll be very difficult to gauge from the outside, because of the restricted flow of information in and out of the country, but it will eventually happen. When that happens, there will be no putting the brakes on anything.

by lenerdenator

8/24/2026 at 4:10:02 PM

> That sort of system cannot exist in harmony with other systems for any extended length of time

How in the world is the USA existing with other systems then? By taking it all over with force and subterfuge? It is obvious to those with eyes that China, despite being "totalitarian" has been the better actor (compared to the USA) on the world stage for decades now.

> If you're an American used to calling other Americans antagonistic, that's not going to work out well for you over the long run.

Yea, because Americans are fucking violent jerks and can only get what they want through threats and intimidation.

by ok_dad

8/24/2026 at 5:55:14 PM

If you were able to determine in 5 seconds whether or not a person was a violent jerk, it would take you ~28 years of around-the-clock meetings to assess >= 50% of the current U.S. population, thereby rendering this comment meaningful and true. If you needed a whopping 30 seconds, it would take ~166 years. Better get cracking!

by aj_hackman

8/24/2026 at 6:39:14 PM

If I lacked the wit to understand sampling, that would be true.

by onraglanroad

8/24/2026 at 5:44:01 PM

But as a Brit. America, our supposed ally is slapping tarriffs on us, and threatening our actual allies. China not so much. So which are our adversaries?

by benj111

8/24/2026 at 6:30:50 PM

> slapping tariffs

Countries change trade policy often as is deemed advantageous. For example, the UK decided to leave the customs union of the EU and start treating trade with the continent as it does everywhere else, and did so by no less than a direct popular vote, not a contrived set of executive orders facing court challenge. Does the EU crow on about how the UK is now an enemy? They would certainly have more long-term evidence for it than they would over changes in trade policy with the United States.

> threatening our actual allies

American military leadership was asked to consider plans for an attack on Greenland. American military leadership refused. [0]

I wonder how Chinese military leadership would do if ordered to invade Taiwan.

[0] https://www.firstpost.com/world/trump-asked-us-special-force...

by lenerdenator

8/24/2026 at 4:04:35 PM

I mean, China's seems to be doing an okay job at coexisting with other countries.

Especially when you compare it to the US, where our democracy and capitalism have led us to numerous wars and war-crimes.

Like, just this year, we've committed far more breaches of international law than china https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_the_2026_Iran_war#...

In recent history, we performed dozens of violent coups and destroyed countries in the name of overthrowing communist regimes.

China has a totalitarian government, but it's existing more in harmony with the world than the US government has for all of my life, so I don't think you can say that the Chinese government will conflict with other countries while in the same breath implying the US government is better.

by TheDong

8/24/2026 at 6:41:35 PM

You're going to find China's history as wanting as the US's in that regard. Plenty of Chinese arms found their way to theaters of war in all corners of the globe during the latter half of the 20th century, and continue to do so in the Donbas today.

Or maybe you can look into what happens to nations in China's immediate neighborhood that resist Beijing's designs.

North Korea, a prison camp masquerading as a country, exists solely because of China. Had Mao not intervened on behalf of the Kim family, UN forces would have asserted control up to the Yalu. To this day, the Chinese have been breaking international law by helping Pyongyang dodge sanctions over the DPRK's nuclear weapons program. Same with Russia, actually, despite them both sitting on the UNSC, which passed the sanctions.

China also illegally occupies Tibet and has for over 75 years.

All of this points to a country very much not existing in harmony with the world.

As far as the US government being better, it's not about any given government being better. It's about whether or not totalitarianism can continue on peacefully. It cannot. This is evident on its face.

by lenerdenator

8/24/2026 at 5:21:09 PM

Kind of an okay job, but they could do better. I might feel differently if I lived in Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjian, Myanmar, etc.

by stirfish

8/24/2026 at 5:47:24 PM

[dead]

by zquzra

8/24/2026 at 3:56:37 PM

> Also, who decides which entities are adversaries? I don't personally consider "China" my adversary. As an American who has to deal with US companies, many of them are far more antagonistic to me than a foreign country 10K km away.

I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.

Myopically individualistic perspectives, focused on your individual wants and day-to-day experiences, miss a lot of stuff.

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 4:08:43 PM

> I could see a dude in Ukraine having exactly the same perspective vis-a-vis Russia in 2013, and look how that turned out.

Nobody in Ukraine who wasn't already explicitly pro-Russian thought that in 2013, did they? Russia-aligned individuals poisoned the third president of Ukraine during his presidential campaign, very likely with direct assistance. You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 4:10:59 PM

> You'd probably have to go back to Leonid Kuchma's term to find average Ukrainians not profoundly concerned about Russia, and that was a relative high point.

You're being too literal. I'm sure Ukrainians weren't actually so stupid as many Americans can be.

My point is you could transplant that logic (elevate individual, myopic interests and gripes; lose sight of the community you're part of), into a situation that we've already seen play out (Ukraine v. Russia).

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 4:12:34 PM

I am observing that it is a bad analogy.

China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.

China isn't even a threat to the the daily life of individual Americans in the way that Russia was (and arguably is)

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 4:29:53 PM

> China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans in the way Russia has always presented a threat to Ukrainians.

My whole point is that looking at it from the perspective of the "daily life of individual Americans" is the wrong one.

Also, while no two situations are going to be exactly the same, I think it's false to say "China is not a threat to the daily life of individual Americans." It'd be happy to turn the US into a weak, low-tech country whose only exports are agriculture and natural resources. I can't find it right now, but I've read a quote from some high-level Chinese official to that effect.

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 5:13:19 PM

If you are an American company US backdoors are annoying but hard to avoid given the government will find ways to compell access anyway. Adding potential avoidable foreign back doors does not improve your security.

I wouldn't tell a Chinese company to buy from Cisco. I wouldn't tell an American one to buy from Huawei.

by int0x29

8/24/2026 at 3:50:28 PM

Exactly. This is not a question of whether you get spied on, it is a question of who gets the monopoly for spying on you. Between extortion groups, cybercrime syndicates, foreign governments and last but not least my own government, there's not much room for real privacy online these days.

by sigmoid10

8/24/2026 at 4:43:34 PM

>> 1. As a practical matter, no one can audit systems so thoroughly to determine a system built by an adversary won't act adversarially.

> Can we audit American corporations?

What's your point? Did you even read what I wrote? The five words of your comment seem to be pretty sloppy:

1. If you're taking about their products, which is probably what you meant: if you think they're your adversary, then the answer is no, it's pointless.

2. But your comment as written reads as if you're talking about auditing the corporations themselves, which does in fact happen (for tax and financial reporting purposes).

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 4:56:07 PM

This is essentially asking every country in the world to be subservient to US tech in perpetuity. They didn't sign up for that.

by nixuserb58

8/24/2026 at 4:07:02 PM

To make conversation productive, please define "national security" in this case.

For example, if China can't install its hardware in Pentagon, why is it a threat to national security.

On the other hand, if you say, Intel will be in trouble because of these chips, then I would say, so what? Wasn't this a dream of MBAs, educated by the top US schools, to outsource everything in business to cheaper service providers (e.g. manufacturing to China, software development to India and etc,.)

Where is the threat and what is the threat?

by throwaw12

8/24/2026 at 4:14:14 PM

"To make conversation productive, please explain how outsourcing your strategic industry and know-how to geopolitical rivals and enemies is a threat."

You have a funny definition of "productive".

by like_any_other

8/24/2026 at 6:40:26 PM

In the 1980s, when Japanese firms were 7 of top-10 in world market cap, the trade magazines were screaming about Japanese fifth gen computers, silicon prowess, etc. and cyberpunk SF mandatorily had Japanese locales thrown in ...

by B1FF_PSUVM

8/24/2026 at 3:57:36 PM

3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources to show this is not a sudden new development:

Back in 2014, the central government set up the China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund. - https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/2145422/how-ch...

Over the next decade, China plans to invest up to RMB 1 trillion (US$161 billion) into its domestic semiconductor industry as it seeks to become a global power in the sector. In recent years, Beijing has repeatedly stated that developing its own integrated circuit (IC) industry is of integral national strategic concern. - https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chips-all-in-investing-i...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Integrated_Circuit_Indus...

by like_any_other

8/24/2026 at 4:08:41 PM

> 3. China was not stupid enough to rely solely on the free market to develop strategic industries. A few deliberately old sources:

Yeah, I agree. The US and its allies took the wrong lessons from the economic aspect of the cold war. They saw Western capitalism out-perform Soviet central planning, then let capitalist ideologues run amok.

China has the advantage: since it's not run by capitalist ideologues it better able to correct the deficiencies of capitalism AND it can exploit predictable capitalist behavior for strategic advantage.

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 4:42:42 PM

> Over the next decade

That was a 2016 article.

We're at the other end of that investment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZSvDYDfd78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBhQrz9EJ40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KrdcTsScKk

It did not quite turn out like china wanted.

This isn't to be dismissive of what they ARE delivering - china has the potential to be very big in RAM, and Storage in the comming decades. But I'm not sure that they met their industrial and geopolitical goals with these efforts.

by zer00eyz

8/24/2026 at 3:56:43 PM

[dead]

by sleepgummies

8/24/2026 at 3:40:40 PM

OH, BUT we have fable! We have AI! of course we can answer these questions? can't we? which is true: America's AI is a super powerful defense against our enemies or America's AI is too stupid to defend against such a threat, and only sactions and import controls will suffice.

Just seems like you're inventing things to be scared of.

by cyanydeez

8/24/2026 at 3:44:40 PM

it's a hardware problem, you run into engineering, materials, and physics issues. we're not talking about reverse engineering software

by NoidFonsense

8/24/2026 at 4:10:18 PM

Xiaomi doesn't do business in the US anyway.

by EQFitzgerald

8/24/2026 at 4:42:42 PM

The angle is to pressure other countries to ban them as well.

by tokioyoyo

8/24/2026 at 4:07:49 PM

same playbook than Huawei

by ex1fm3ta

8/24/2026 at 3:50:16 PM

I wonder if the Trump T2 phone will get this chip.

by SigmundA

8/24/2026 at 4:06:30 PM

Man I forgot about that nonsense. I can’t imagine any self respecting person picking one up.

by Forgeties79

8/24/2026 at 4:13:47 PM

It's a U24 Pro - somebody compared them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1ytw85Npt8

by billfor

8/24/2026 at 5:00:34 PM

So it’s an overpriced middle of the road phone to signal ones devotion to Trump and doesn’t actually deliver on several of its core promises (like made in USA).

by Forgeties79

8/24/2026 at 6:48:12 PM

Just to be accurate, they don't say that it's made in the USA. They only say its assembled in the USA. Perhaps in the past they made some statement that it would have been, but the current box and marketing don't.

by billfor

8/24/2026 at 7:49:11 PM

Yeah they updated it way late in the game when they couldn’t hide it anymore, well after money had exchanged hands. That certainly qualifies as a broken promise.

by Forgeties79

8/24/2026 at 4:10:15 PM

Still a massive market looks like.

by mlnj

8/24/2026 at 4:12:12 PM

Last i read most of the money came from people not reading the fine print on their $100 deposit and only a few thousand have actually been distributed.

Looking now I see maybe tens of thousands of open orders still

by Forgeties79

8/24/2026 at 4:38:56 PM

"Looking now"? Is this something they publicize for some unknowable reason?

by jdiff

8/24/2026 at 4:57:28 PM

I don’t want to get bogged down in a source dispute - this is very easy to search and/but I only spent about 60s on it. I am hardly an expert. Feel free to look it up as well and tell me how I am entirely wrong. This was a combination of AI responses + thumbing through the sources linked to make sure it wasn’t invented whole cloth.

I do not think they are selling well. That seems to be the consensus here.

by Forgeties79

8/24/2026 at 5:04:48 PM

I don't think they are selling well, either. I was wondering at your source since it would be very atypical for any company to give any numbers at all, let alone a company that's so outwardly sketchy, let alone numbers like "This is the number of orders we have standing open despite being actively in production." This is the exact kind of thing I would not expect to be easy to search, and it'd be ripe for AI hallucination.

The only numbers I can find in a quick search of my own are the leaked numbers stating 30,000 orders placed from 10,000 customers, with nothing said about shipped orders.

by jdiff

8/24/2026 at 3:49:34 PM

I mean, yeah?

It's generally a bad idea to use information-handling hardware from your main geopolitical rival.

by lenerdenator

8/24/2026 at 4:24:04 PM

It can be confusing to follow who the rivals are. Russia and North Korea are friends and Canada is the enemy. China seems more liked than Canada.

by lostlogin

8/24/2026 at 7:48:03 PM

It's only confusing if you take a buffoon's attitude at face value, which is rather hard to do in a country where half of the people actively work to thwart what he does.

Which brings me back to my point about totalitarianism.

by lenerdenator

8/24/2026 at 3:57:51 PM

And everybody forgets the true power of Apple: scale. Can that supposed miracle chip be readily found in million of phones within 6 months? Or will Xiaomi keep selling 90% of their phones with 2 year old chips, reserving these chips to their 2000$ foldables?

This post serves Xiaomi because it implies competitiveness when the reality on the ground will remain unremarkable, and it helps fearmongers because they can latch on to Xiaomi's attempt to appear competitive.

by philistine

8/24/2026 at 4:09:56 PM

Their power of scale applies to less and less regions. Xiaomi, in particular, delivers that to China where Apple previously slapped and now is becoming a niche player. It's the same as with German car makers. The trend have now reversed, with Chinese manufacturers starting to dominate on foreign markets and it's also something that was unfathomable just a few years back.

They have proven countless of times by now that they are not to be ignored.

by cromka

8/24/2026 at 4:09:19 PM

When I buy my phones I do not give a flying fuck about "scale". All I care is what do I get for my pesos from various offerings.

by FpUser

8/24/2026 at 4:14:51 PM

What you get for the money IS scale.

by boxed

8/24/2026 at 4:20:35 PM

Sounds like BS. I got me a nice phone and it is not from Apple

by FpUser

8/24/2026 at 4:24:00 PM

Are you really cheerleading right now for massive, monopolistic, post-capitalism corporations? The thing you have decided to focus on is not only irrelevant to the topic at hand, but irrelevant in the minds of most consumers.

Current Apple hardware has a number of selling points for me, but the number of iPhones they've carelessly pumped into the world is not one of them. If anything, contemplating the amount of slave labor which Apple has contributed to leads to the opposite effect.

Additionally, in China, Apple maintains around a quarter market share vs Android's three-quarters share. The argument you are making is not even coherent.

I myself would be on a Xiaomi phone if GrapheneOS were able to support one.

by soulofmischief

8/24/2026 at 3:27:47 PM

https://xcancel.com/lemire/status/2091894299289874926

by jackb4040

8/24/2026 at 3:38:56 PM

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xcancel/

by diabllicseagull

8/24/2026 at 3:49:22 PM

And on iOS?

(Also I'd recommend https://libredirect.manerakai.com/)

by HelloUsername

8/24/2026 at 4:02:28 PM

I can install Firefox (and Chrome) extensions with the Orion Browser. It‘s developed by Kagi https://orionbrowser.com/ I also installed uBlock Origin on Orion, which works quite well on iOS

by Overrun4468

8/24/2026 at 4:25:03 PM

Ublock Origin or wBlock or AdGuard solid on Safari iOS too.

by Barbing

8/24/2026 at 4:15:15 PM

I have no luck with most of the extensions installed to Orion.

by weezing

8/24/2026 at 3:59:58 PM

it works on orion

by freehorse

8/24/2026 at 5:16:08 PM

Thanks!

by bee_rider

8/24/2026 at 5:11:09 PM

[dead]

by select1

8/25/2026 at 12:30:01 AM

[dead]

by i23942ok

8/24/2026 at 4:08:58 PM

[flagged]

by lowbloodsugar

8/24/2026 at 6:35:02 PM

Is AI helping to improve chip design?

by formvoltron

8/24/2026 at 6:17:27 PM

I think describing what's happening "other countries seem to sit on their hands and happily outsource every bit of manufacturing to a single country" is disingenuous. It's been dubbed China Shock 2.0 and it's being taken very seriously by the EU. The US admin is a joke and too busy shooting itself in both feet to have coherent policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Shock_2.0

by Preston67

8/24/2026 at 3:54:02 PM

Sad thing is that it'll still be running the damn Android and so JVM not C or Swift on the machine.

by pmkary

8/24/2026 at 7:14:26 PM

What a weird, unhinged take. Android is mostly written in C, Android apps are AOT/JIT compiled when written in Java, and the NDK lets you write/port from whatever native you have, which is how you get Chrome to run on it to begin with.

by ezst

8/24/2026 at 3:58:33 PM

What's the point of the complaint? Is there anything better that is commercially viable?

Your Linux based dream phone is not going to sell more than 10 units.

by fg137

8/24/2026 at 4:03:16 PM

I think they might be saying that there's still no supported way to build a native-code app on the Android OS. It could be construed as a plea to make that happen in order to unlock greater performance, not necessarily a desire to have a DIY Linux-based OS option.

by otterley

8/24/2026 at 4:45:00 PM

There's NDK which seems supported. It's been some years since I messed with mobile stuff but https://developer.android.com/ndk

by spogbiper

8/24/2026 at 4:16:56 PM

Ignoring the native vs java runtime interface application difference between Android and iOS, which the top poster was was referencing.

Your Linux phone statement is a fallacy.

Ask FuriLabs how many of their phones they have sold.[0] High confident it is more than 10.

FuriLabs moved their batman, battery monitoring application, from Python to C and it really improved performance. Native applications really do keep resource usage low and is beneficial.

[0] https://furilabs.com/

by yndoendo

8/24/2026 at 4:20:32 PM

They don't publish sales numbers, but I've never seen one. So probably somewhere between 10 units and significant market share.

by frollogaston

8/24/2026 at 4:12:56 PM

I believe the comparison is with iOS not Linux. Android is Linux after all. It’s just that most programs don’t get to run a that level of abstraction, and instead run on top of a jvm. At least in iOS the code does seem to be able to be more efficient due to to higher usage of natively compiled code, which is what I think the op was complaining about.

by MobiusHorizons

8/24/2026 at 5:39:13 PM

There's no JVM in Android. Most important parts of an Android app are compiled ahead of time into CPU machine code, rarely used parts are compiled into machine code in runtime using JIT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Runtime

by ZenDroid

8/24/2026 at 5:12:47 PM

There's no JVM in Android. Never has been.

by ZenDroid

8/24/2026 at 9:20:55 PM

As usual with claims from China based companies. It's pure lies until we have an independent test with free access.

Two rather rare words in China

by kjeldsendk

8/24/2026 at 3:51:26 PM

Apple's *Last Year* CPUs. We're literally about to get a new chip in 2-3 weeks from them.

by ajaimk

8/24/2026 at 3:59:03 PM

Still better than what Qualcomm is offering?

by fg137

8/24/2026 at 4:01:24 PM

I'm not sure that it matters. You can't put a Qualcomm chip in an iPhone and you can't put Apple Silicon in any other device. So there's no really straightforward way to compare them other than specs on paper, which we all know are theoretical until they get integrated.

by otterley

8/24/2026 at 6:58:21 PM

Why "better than Qualcomm" doesn't matter? You don't have to compare everything with Apple products.

by fg137

8/24/2026 at 8:14:55 PM

I didn’t make that comparison; you did.

by otterley

8/24/2026 at 3:55:04 PM

The real concern is supply chains. The US can design but not manufacture, whereas it appears China can do both.

by juiceland

8/24/2026 at 4:03:52 PM

> whereas it appears China can do both

Not these. They seem to be using ARM-designed cores that others already use and TSMC fabs in Taiwan.

by celsoazevedo

8/24/2026 at 4:18:21 PM

In this case, a Chinese company is using a Taiwanese manufacturer (TSMC), so they're not doing both.

by strictnein

8/24/2026 at 5:10:01 PM

This site is just crazy pro-china now. Guess that happens when non-westerners dominate online, sadly.

by Lagoon3384_SWE

8/24/2026 at 5:13:02 PM

I don't see any editorializing, mostly just reports that China is actually competing well.

Whether you're for or against China, seeing that they're outperforming or performing close to American-owned chipmakers seems like very relevant information.

by gameman144

8/24/2026 at 5:12:27 PM

Have you considered that china has been working on these things for the past decade and they're finally getting results out of that?

And yes, it is known that they do steal tech as samsung discovered in their tech preview phone bust in korea.

by himata4113

8/24/2026 at 11:22:20 PM

That's a profoundly strange take. I've never in my life seen a more anti-China technology forum than HN. Whatever the headline is, say "CO2 levels have been falling for 21 months", if it has "China" in it, it will be ignored. If it has "US", it will make the front page for days. Try Algolia and see for yourself.

by lbrito