As Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was visiting China earlier this week, a sea-green Chinese smartphone was quietly launched online.
It was no normal gadget. And its launch has sparked hushed concern in Washington that U.S. sanctions have failed to prevent China from making a key technological advance. Such a development would seem to fulfill warnings from U.S. chipmakers that sanctions wouldn’t stop China, but would spur it to redouble efforts to build alternatives to U.S. technology.
The hype is that it’s using a domestic CPU. It’s unclear how good a CPU it is, but apparently it was made with a semiconductor process which is only several years behind cutting edge. That’s not really surprising, though, I doubt there was all that much “hushed concern”.
I imagine there’s also a question of if the Chinese can scale production up at all, or if some precision German machine tool is an impassible bottleneck.