Maroc - THECEKODOK.COM - A La Une - 16/Jan 23:07

US to Impose New Semiconductor Chip Restrictions on China

The US will soon have a new president, but the trade war with China looks set to continue. Recently, it was reported that the US will begin imposing restrictions on the sale of semiconductor chips manufactured using 14nm and 16nm processes and above that have more than 30 billion transistors.These restrictions are expected to have an impact on companies such as Intel, Global Foundries, Samsung and TSMC that market them in the Chinese market. In fact, with this latest restriction, the US government seems to be imposing similar restrictions on not only China, but several other Asian and Middle Eastern countries.For these semiconductor chips, companies such as Intel, TSMC and others will need to obtain export licenses to the blocked countries before being allowed to market them in those countries.Yes, it is true that most, if not all modern processor chips are built using at least a 10nm process, but it is not impressed by most of them either, because the number of transistors in these components does not reach the 30 billion mark.For example, an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor chip has 17.8 billion transistors, and an Apple M4 processor chip has around 28 billion transistors built in. As for the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, it comes with 92 billion transistors, and it is almost certain that it will not be allowed to be sold in the market, just like the previous NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card.This could be seen as a move to prohibit Chinese companies from purchasing GPU components for artificial intelligence, even if they are older generation models, in order to simultaneously hinder China's progress in developing its own AI sector.