Is ‘Make In India’ working? India to get leftovers as China challenges electronics manufacturing gia

[EndangeredSpecies]

Ajey Mehta, head of India operations at HMD Global, had told ET earlier that the company was working with its partners to manufacture more components in India. “SMT is definitely on the card for us,” he said. SMT, or surface mounting technology, lines are used for assembling PCBs.

Foxxconn has established that in India.

 

[R0H1T]

There is quite some space! Take ARM and Intel for example. Their processor designs rule the entire length and breadth of IT. China might want to see their own processor design in that position. Designed in China and Made in China. Used all over the world.

ARM isn't comparable to Intel, they sell their designs to any of their licensees, including Intel. Intel in comparison, is a virtual monopoly in desktops , servers, HPC et al. Where do you think China can start - MIPS, Open Power or Zhaoxin? None of them are comparable to highly complex designs like Skylake, Ryzen or even Apple's Ax based on ARMv8. Not to mention - the patents.

Or OS for example. Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS and Linux. This covers about 99% of whole of OS arena.
Or communication tech. Qualcomm and TI rule the current generation of Mobile data standard. There is a reason why China wanted to buy parts of Qualcomm. Also, why China is yelling and telling everyone that they have made first '5G call'.
There is quite a hell lot of head space available.

That's the mobile space where China will continue to compete thanks to their economies of scale, 5G is interesting but we're still at least half a decade away from that in major parts of the world. In the meantime, Apple & Qualcomm still lead the mobile world, wrt performance, with Samsung following closely behind.

Nope! In India we have been designing chips for quite sometime. Intel has a major presence in B'lore and entire chipset for motherboard has been and still is designed in India along with pre-silicon validation using FPGAs. And taped out for manufacturing in places like Israel etc. It takes a hell lot of steps from designing to manufacturing chip. Fabrication, obviously the hardest step, Packaging, another specialized technology are just to name two. We are not doing either of them locally at scale. There are few small clean-rooms doing small production for application like defence and research.

I don't believe we've ever gotten close to matching Haifa or their fabled Conroe team. Chipsets & FPGA are a lot easier than designing something like a modern CISC or even RISC chip. In that, I'd argue designing a modern processor is certainly a harder step than fabrication & everything else that follows. Chip Fabrication itself is highly capital intensive & there's only 4 major foundries around the globe that can make complex chips on 2x nm & below. Packaging doesn't add much value, tape out is handled usually by the designated foundry partners, or in house in case of Intel & Samsung.

Oh they are trying everything!
RAM, NAND flash, 5G communication and processor too!
They made that massive supercomputer for a reason. To prove that they have mastered designing and manufacturing processors at scale.

Lesser, but higher paying jobs.

Again covered by massive patents, the only comparable industry titans they have are in Huawei & ZTE but limited to telecom.

Sorry I thought Tainhe2 was powered by Intel Xeon, did that change anytime recently? Talking about Sunway TaihuLight I see, not much info about their ShenWei processor so I can't comment on that, nonetheless it's impressive given what it's achieved.

 

[ohmrlobalobayeh]

my take is India will perpetually be restricted to producing gems and spices- she just does'nt have the human resource to do anything else.

Lapidary is the only 'high-end' product category that India is well-known for.




In singapore's Little India district's train station.

 

[Nilu Pule]

Indians are the most gullible fools in the world. No wonder why bollywood is popular in here.

 

[EndangeredSpecies]

ARM isn't comparable to Intel, they sell their designs to any of their licensees, including Intel. Intel in comparison, is a virtual monopoly in desktops , servers, HPC et al. Where do you think China can start - MIPS, Open Power or Zhaoxin? None of them are comparable to highly complex designs like Skylake, Ryzen or even Apple's Ax based on ARMv8. Not to mention - the patents.

I was talking about dominant ISAs. Intel and ARM.

Curiously, China can start by introducing ARM-derivative in server space! Lot of companies have tried that at one point or another and failed. China can do that because it has money to throw at this problem. China can devise a processor based on a derivative of ARM ISA implemented on many many cores, like 1000s and build a tool chain around say LLVM. Then sell it cheap to their own companies like TenCent or Alibaba. They can build cloud offering around it, complete with all JVM/XVM ported and an ecosystem around it. It will take time and a lot of money but it is doable.

This is how multi-trillion dollar industries are built. By reinventing an industry. Microsoft in its time did that. First with a desktop OS, then a graphical desktop OS, then with browsers and hence internet. They were setting standards at one time. They failed in mobile space though. They tried that however. China has deep pockets to keep on discounting hardware for long enough.

You must be know already that x86 or CISCy architecture is a poor choice for present day compilers and software stacks. Simple ISA and massively multi-core is the way to go with the way current software is written. No one is committing to it because it is expensive and long drawn battle.

That's the mobile space where China will continue to compete thanks to their economies of scale, 5G is interesting but we're still at least half a decade away from that in major parts of the world. In the meantime, Apple & Qualcomm still lead the mobile world, wrt performance, with Samsung following closely behind.

Chinese play long games. Long drawn out games.

I don't believe we've ever gotten close to matching Haifa or their fabled Conroe team. Chipsets & FPGA are a lot easier than designing something like a modern CISC or even RISC chip. In that, I'd argue designing a modern processor is certainly a harder step than fabrication & everything else that follows. Chip Fabrication itself is highly capital intensive & there's only 4 major foundries around the globe that can make complex chips on 2x nm & below. Packaging doesn't add much value, tape out is handled usually by the designated foundry partners, or in house in case of Intel & Samsung.

Modern processors are not monolithic designs. They are built block by block. I know teams within Intel India which are designing interfaces for front side bus on processor side.

Also quite sometime back, there was a historical project in Intel India called Project White-field (after an area in B'lore)(https://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/28/intel_whitefield_india/). This was an effort to design a server processor, multicore back in 2005. It failed because of Intel's bone headed policies regarding taxation. My cousin was part of the team and after its head left the entire project fell apart. That said, they had completed the design and validated it on FPGAs in pre-silicon validation.

Again covered by massive patents, the only comparable industry titans they have are in Huawei & ZTE but limited to telecom.

Sorry I thought Tainhe2 was powered by Intel Xeon, did that change anytime recently? Talking about Sunway TaihuLight I see, not much info about their ShenWei processor so I can't comment on that, nonetheless it's impressive given what it's achieved.

Sunway or SW2600 takes its 'inspiration' in ISA from DEC-Alpha AFAIK.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2016/06/20/look-inside-chinas-chart-topping-new-supercomputer/

 

[EndangeredSpecies]

my take is India will perpetually be restricted to producing gems and spices- she just does'nt have the human resource to do anything else.

How do you explain 8 unicorn tech companies started out of India in past 10-12 years then?

Flipkart, Olacabs, Zamato, ShopClues, InMobi, Quikr, PayTM and Snapdeal?

There is a reason for the wisdom 'Never say never'