News China's second largest foundry hires former Intel executive to lead advanced node development

[Admin]

Hua Hong, China's second-largest contract chipmaker, hires Intel veteran as it focuses on advanced logic production.

China's second largest foundry hires former Intel executive to lead advanced node development : Read more

 

[8086]

There goes out the window, any Intel trade secrets he may hold in his brain.

 

[hush now]

There goes out the window, any Intel trade secrets he may hold in his brain.

every company steals trade secrets, especially tech companies in the US. this isn't new.

 

[rluker5]

If Hua Hong Semiconductor is looking to make the best DUV nodes in the world, Intel is a good company to poach from. My 13900kf is still DUV.

Edit: I'm not passing judgement on whether this hiring is right or wrong, I'm just making the point that it is pragmatic. China is being restricted from EUV lithography equipment right now and are stuck on the old DUV stuff. If Intel were to put a cache under their most recent DUV CPUs, there plausibly wouldn't be faster EUV consumer CPUs. Intel has really made the most out of DUV and hiring that guy looks like that Chinese company trying to make the best out of the situation they are in if he can help them do some of what Intel has done.

Don't get me wrong, High NA EUV > old EUV > DUV. I'm not arguing that either.

 

[truerock]

every company steals trade secrets, especially tech companies in the US. this isn't new.

Says the Chinese hacker with 2 whole posts on this website.

China is incompetent. The US has nothing to worry about.

And yes - the Chinese economy is built on deceit and thievery. It will implode on its corruption.
When a society says things like "everyone is dishonest" - that society will inevitably crumble.

 

[wwenze1]

Did they get the one that made Intel foundry the best (i.e. over 10 years ago) or the one that thrashed it (i.e. between now to 10 years ago

 

[King_V]

How is this possible? In the US, non-compete agreements are sometimes so egregious, without even necessarily touching on trade secrets, that it might be hard to get another job in your field.

With trade secrets, and for a company in a country that the US has sanctions against? How did that even work?

 

[BFG-9000]

I suppose this makes sense, if they want to make 14nm++++++.

This guy was in charge of Intel's Logic Technology Development through the whole time they were stuck on 14nm from 2015 to 2021, then got demoted for 10nm being so late, and quit a year later. He's already been the CEO of a Chinese wafer company for a year (Rong Semiconductor Ningbo Co., Ltd.), and this larger company poached him from them to be their President.

 

[NinoPino]

How is this possible? In the US, non-compete agreements are sometimes so egregious, without even necessarily touching on trade secrets, that it might be hard to get another job in your field.

With trade secrets, and for a company in a country that the US has sanctions against? How did that even work?

Interesting question.
Maybe the non-competitive was simply ignored, because it transferred in China ?
Or because he will gain a huge salary ?
Or because he is hired in a different role ?
I'm also curious ?

 

[dalek1234]

Based on how Intel foundries have performed over the last decade, this could be planned sabotage attempt by the US gov't.

Best comment this month.

If somebody told me 5 years ago that we will be getting plenty of entertainment making fun of Intel, I'd call that person insane. And here we are now, running out of popcorn.

 

[OldAnalogWorld]

And yes - the Chinese economy is built on deceit and thievery. It will implode on its corruption.

You might think that corruption and theft are not typical for economic entities in the US or Europe? And you might think that there are no problems in the economies of "developed" countries?

Interesting question.
Maybe the non-competitive was simply ignored, because it transferred in China ?
Or because he will gain a huge salary ?
Or because he is hired in a different role ?
I'm also curious ?

All these expats most often have a weak spot. They want to earn money there (regardless of moral or other limiting aspects), but want to keep their family in the US/Europe, preferring the life of their children in freer countries. If there are any NDAs or access to government secrets (and Intel is closely connected with the US military and the government), he would have long been put on the wanted list either by court or by government request. Since there is no such request - in reality Intel or the US government is considered a low-value employee by them, because they ignored his move to China.

 

[BFG-9000]

Perhaps some of you may not have noticed that non-competes are now illegal. Not that it would've applied in this case because he quit years ago, but this should be telling about the mood of the courts on such cases.

American corruption is more transparent, and you can argue it is even kind of meritocratic. After all anyone can become a billionaire and buy access to their own politicians either through direct donation or if that's insufficient, Super PACs--all you need is to be successful first, and then you can get legislation advantageous to you to keep you rich.

I maintain there is nobody more able to squeeze blood out of 14nm rocks than this guy. He can get you 1-2% improvement every year on the same process indefinitely, with good yields.

 

[OldAnalogWorld]

American corruption is more transparent, and you can argue it is even kind of meritocratic. After all anyone can become a billionaire and buy access to their own politicians either through direct donation or if that's insufficient, Super PACs--all you need is to be successful first, and then you can get legislation advantageous to you to keep you rich.

Far from everyone can become a billionaire or even a millionaire. The power of meritocracy in the US has long been gone (as proven by the slogans of the new president, who was supported by more than half of the population), as proven by the visual collapse of the pillar of its IT economy - Intel and not only this company. Nepotism and secret vicious connections reign everywhere. In all countries. Everywhere where we are talking about really big money or line positions, outside of key employees on whom everything rests, but even such key employees are sometimes fired by talentless fools of bosses, in the case of an internal conflict, when it is necessary to save their own ass.

And a child never chooses his parents (and the place of birth - in a totalitarian country or a relatively free one) and the level of environment that will ultimately lead him to success. The environment is chosen, if they can, by his parents and it is they who determine the risks and real limits of the possibilities of development and the future life of the child. In a world where there are only borders and visa restrictions and where you need to prove that you have the right to live and work in the territory that you choose, and not in the one that is imposed on you by those in power from above.

People like, for example, Musk, were just lucky - he had a personal environment, from the cradle, creative enough, wealthy enough to have freedom of choice and get a high-quality education. He should say thank you to many people in his personal environment from early childhood. Like almost all famous people. "Self-made" simply does not happen in real life. This is a story of gradual success of their ancestors from generation to generation.

I maintain there is nobody more able to squeeze blood out of 14nm rocks than this guy. He can get you 1-2% improvement every year on the same process indefinitely, with good yields.

Small consolation for the Chinese government, which has set a goal of catching up with the West in technology. How will this solve the problem of the lack of human capital in a broad base? He is only a leader. So is Musk. But technology is really made by scientists and engineers. The highest level, and there are not as many of them on planet Earth as we would like...

 

[SkyHighest]

Says the Chinese hacker with 2 whole posts on this website.

China is incompetent. The US has nothing to worry about.

And yes - the Chinese economy is built on deceit and thievery. It will implode on its corruption.
When a society says things like "everyone is dishonest" - that society will inevitably crumble.

Claiming someone is a Chinese hacker because of the low amount of posts is just a sign of you being incredibly immature.

Claiming China is incompetent is just white supremacy in action. China's Deepseek released an LLM that can rival OpenAI's o1 "reasoning" model, that requires significantly less energy to train and can be downloaded onto your home computer. You cant do this while being incompetent.

China has over 80% of the worlds high-speed rail. You cant do that while incompetent.

China has seen the fastest rise in quality of life the world has ever seen. You cant do that while incompetent.

China is far from incompetent. They rose to be a world super power in an incredibly short amount of time.

A century ago white people were doing pseudoscience to "prove" Black people were intellectually inferior. They were wrong of course, but its what happens in a white supremacist society. All you are doing is proving that USA is still a white supremacist nation.

All nations are built on deceit and thievery. The American industrial revolution would have been impossible without thievery. The USA passed laws giving protection to anyone coming from Britain with trade secrets.

And lets not forget, all land in USA was stolen violently from the Indigenous people. USA genocided almost an entire continents worth of people to get their land, and it was heavily documented so all you have to do is go and find the old documents, something many people have done. I get that the history books you are going to tell me to read claim differently, but its incredibly hard to argue against what the people doing the genocide were saying back then.

 

[OldAnalogWorld]

China has seen the fastest rise in quality of life the world has ever seen. You cant do that while incompetent.

This is all in the past since 2015-2016 (mass effect from 2020+), as in Russia falling down since 2012-2013. As soon as the outflow of mass capital began and as continuously falling investments in basic capital. Debts exceed 300% of GDP. Look at Japan - there, too, debts exceed 300% of GDP and stagnation (including a fall not only in real wages, but even in nominal ones with a sharply depreciated yen) for many decades. As well as the population is falling. This is a standard "average income" trap, known to all professional economists.

China, thanks to its huge population (which, by the way, is questionable if you evaluate the cities by satellite images - my estimate is 850-900 million at most) - has greater inertia than Japan, but the question of "will there be a social collapse" is no longer on the agenda for experts. The question is when this will happen, given the enormous inertia of this machine with semi-market economy (though there hasn't been a market economy anywhere for a long time). Especially with the powerful artificial external support for such a negative trend...

In reality, a freer and more flexible society will rebuild itself faster and more effectively, because there is a pluralism of opinions and an adequate expert assessment of problems, and not an attempt to sweep everything "under the carpet", because the kleptocrats in power want to rule forever. The question is - what kind of this most progressive society is this in 2025? Is there such a thing on the planet?

Chinese leaders understand this perfectly well, that time is against them...

 

[COLGeek]

Bringing this to a close folks. While the opined history is interesting, it is clearly beyond the original topic.