Intel, the falling down former US heavyweight chipmaker, recently topped by AMD as the leading cutting-edge PC compatible CPU manufacturer, has been also thrown in the dust by the largest Chinese firm SMIC!

What tens of billions of US citizen investor money, blindly thrown onto Intel stock, have not been able to achieve, that is a respectable 10nm CPU, China’s heavily sanctioned main chip manufacturer SMIC has already nailed down. As the company recently announced, it has already being successfully testing a 7nm manufacturing process based mainly on indigenous Intellectual Property (IP) and equipment supplies.

Based on recent announcements from Innosilicon, a company specializing at original chip designs, SMIC has achieved chip tape-out and testing of it's newest FinFET N+1 manufacturing process without any significant international IP or equipment borrowings. All this, comes despite heavy US government sanctions on major Chinese avant garde tech firms, including SMIC, that are also forcefully being imposed by Dutch Philips spin-off ASML, the prominent IP holder on Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) chip technology.

This achievement is considered by many European industry observers as a spectacular event, as the Chinese manufacturer seams to have “jumped” over several shrinking chip making generations to lock down on the latest and greatest 7nm process, competing in the coming months directly with the duopoly of TSMC and Samsung.

The phenomenal recent catch-up of China’s tech companies on their US equivalents, overly emphasizes what some commentators feared the most, that president Trump’s reaction to the soon upcoming (largely inevitable) Chinese high-tech prominence came too late and was indeed very weak. After all, such events, they say, certainly, explain why the American establishment has lately overly abandoned the departing president over a well-known “mild" and undertoned candidate, who will restart negotiations with China from a new, same height, standing position…