Huawei's wild new chip tech: LogicFolding

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Hey, every Friday. Don't be surprised about the different background we're moving offices. This week, Huawei learned to fold a chip over itself.

[00:00:07]China suddenly has a DRM memory chip champion. And a lot of new stuff got announced at Computex. Welcome to the Friday checkout.

[00:00:19]This video was sponsored by E Spectrum.

[00:00:21]Okay, for my first story of the week, Huawei held a big chip conference where they claimed to have successfully done something called logic folding. They claim to essentially be able to fold a chip over itself, like a CPU for example, and that doing so would enable them to make and scale chips without needing advanced chipmaking equipment like EUV machines, for example. Let me explain. Historically, Moore's law has been the well-known idea of shrinking transistors on a chip with each generation, which in turn then makes the chips more dense, more power efficient, etc. To keep shrinking features, you need more and more complex equipment like EUV machines from ASML. But this has gotten more and more expensive and difficult with time. Plus, Huawei has also been banned from importing those high-end machines anyway. So, now they claim to have found a different path altogether. Instead of Moore's law, where you shrink the transistors, they introduced the tow scaling law, which achieves continuous improvements by essentially reducing the distance between the different transistors. The actual video that they published about this is like the driest thing that I've ever seen. So, instead, I'll explain it with this piece of paper. Imagine that this piece of paper is, for example, a CPU core. So, you would normally shrink the transistors on it, right? But instead they decided to just fold the chip into half and the space between the various transistors therefore becomes significantly smaller. Doing so means that you need less power and also less time to move the signal between the various parts of the chip and that then makes the chip faster, more efficient, more dense etc. This is what they call logic folding. And if you know about modern chips, it sounds a little bit like die stacking technologies from other fabs like Intel who has fulos or TSMC who has 3D fabric. And indeed, this is a similar idea, but Huawei actually claims that instead of stacking various chips on top of each other, they take it to a much further extreme by actually folding the chip itself in half. So, it's literally two parts of the same logical unit being over each other.

[00:02:03]Huawei showed data bouncing between the two parts effortlessly. In doing so, would it require some pretty crazy precision bonding techniques? Again, the full presentation is linked below, but I warn you again, this is one of the driest presentations that I've seen in a while. Anyway, they made big claims about improvement like pecore power efficiency being improved by 41%. The first Karen phone chip with this tech should come out later this year. And they also say that they should be able to keep folding stuff over itself to achieve better and better performance.

[00:02:28]And that by 2031, they should be able to achieve the equivalent of a 1.4 nanometer TSMC process. Now, these are manufacturer claims, so we can't fully believe them until they're actually bringing products to market. And also, I wonder if heat would become an issue if you start stacking many, many things over each other. Also, I guess a fab like TSMC might also start folding its chips eventually, and they could also simultaneously still keep shrinking the transistors, so they would get like double benefits, unlike Huawei. But, uh, who knows? Still very interesting stuff.

[00:02:57]Okay, for my second story of the week, we have more chip news from Counterpoint's breakdown of the global DRM memory market. This shows the Chinese company CXMT emerging as the world's fourth big DRAM maker, breaking the long choke hold that the US firm Micron and the two South Korean giants SKH Highix and Samsung have had on the market for a while. The Chinese firm has an 8% global market share now and actually grew by 700% year-over-year because the market itself grew like crazy as well. So that's pretty big.

[00:03:24]CXMP is also filing for an IPO in Shanghai soon and that should also help them raise a lot of money to further expand their production. Also earlier this year, both them and the other Chinese memory maker YMTC were removed from the Pentagon's restricted companies list. And as a result, we learned from a Nickeay report that HP, Dell, Acer, and Asus were all mulling using Chinese memory chips among the supply crunch.

[00:03:46]Now, the big three memory chip makers are still ahead in terms of high-end memory chips for now, like the ones that are used in AI servers, but the Chinese are catching up on some areas at least.

[00:03:55]In other words, your next phone or your next laptop might have RAM from CXMT and an SSD from YMTC. something like that.

[00:04:01]Uh that would shake things up quite a lot. Okay, and for my third story of the week, we got some pretty major Computex announcements. On the one hand, Qualcomm half announced the Snapdragon C platform, which it says will help launch $300 Windows laptops with quote, "Incredible battery life and responsive everyday performance, whatever that means. Still, that's a very aggressive price target." Meanwhile, Intel at Computex announced the G3 and the G3 Extreme, which are essentially Panther Lake processors tweaked slightly for handheld gaming. Here we do know the exact core configurations and we've also seen a couple of teasers for actual devices already. These include the Predator Atlas 8 as well as the OneX Player 3, for example, which also features removable side grips as well as, believe it or not, a stand and the backlit keyboard to turn it into a kind of surface-like laptop if you want. Kind of wild, though. This one is only in beta testing for now, so we'll know more about these devices in a month or two.

[00:04:51]Now, just this week, Valve massively raised the prices of the Steam Deck with the 1 TB OLED version going up by $300, for example. So, I don't know if I'm hopeful for that category, but uh we'll see. Okay, as for our stons segment, I actually decided to remove this because I thought I'd have interesting things to say about stocks once a week, at least in a paragraph. Actually, I don't really. It's just not that much interesting stuff to say. So, we'll just go without it for now. Instead, we're moving on to our release monitor where we got the new Aura Ring 5. This is 40% smaller than its predecessor, and people are also saying that it's noticeably thinner. The company calls it the smallest smart ring ever. It uses titanium, and it costs $399, which is $50 more than its predecessor. Plus, there's also a subscription, so it's not cheap. Next, Samsung has released the Odyssey G8, which it called the world's first 6K gaming monitor. It has an HDR10 plus IPS panel that can do 165 Hz at 6K or 330 Hz at 3K resolution and costs 1,600 bucks which is somehow simultaneously very expensive and still less expensive than I would have expected given the specs. And last in our release monitor, Ferrari has revealed the Luch, their first ever electric car, which was designed in part by Johnny IV. It's a 5-seater with an equivalent of almost 1,000 horsepowers.

[00:06:02]And while its interior looks pretty nice in my opinion, its exterior seems to be the hot new thing to hate on the internet. Moving on to the brief, we start with one of the best and yet also one of the craziest news of the week.

[00:06:13]The Netherlands stopped the takeover of a critical IT service provider.

[00:06:17]Specifically, the Dig ID, which is literally providing digital identity services for Dutch citizens, was supposed to be sold to a US firm, but the government said that that would be an unacceptable risk, which even if you didn't have any political tensions, how on earth could you sell the company that's a service provider for your own identity service for your own citizens to a foreign company? Like, why is this a private company in the first place?

[00:06:38]Moving on, Duck. Gold this week said that its installs are up 30% as users reject being force-fed Google's AI search. People have been reporting on this as some massive exodus, but I'm actually skeptical about that being a really big story. I mean, I agree that probably a lot of people are annoyed by AI, but I don't think this proves that very much. I mean, Duck Go's market share in total in the US is 2%. And this is only not even that going up by 30%, but just new downloads versus last week.

[00:07:03]And I think that's such a small number, it doesn't really prove anything.

[00:07:06]Anyway, in related news, believe it or not, the Pope dropped his thoughts on AI. And let's just say he had quite a few. I've linked the full thing below as I do with all the stories if you want to read them in detail, but essentially he's telling people that this has a good chance to destroy us all, so we should make sure that it doesn't. It's a pretty based take overall and he even quotes Gandalf. Meanwhile, talking of AI, the French company Mistchild just launched Vibe, which means that their AI can now also act as an agent and can do multiple things in parallel and run in the background. So, there's that as an option. At last, in AI news, YouTube this week announced a new discovery experience designed by you. At least that's what they call their new custom feeds, which lets you type into a text box to describe the feed that you actually want. And then the system should just show you relevant videos based on that. So that's kind of like search before they broke search, right?

[00:07:53]Like you just type into text box what you want and the system gives you relevant results. Something like that. I mean, it's a little bit more than that, but pretty close. Anyway, in a rare move, Last FM announced that it has now become an independent company. This happened 19 years after they got acquired by CBS and they apparently plan to keep their current team and to continue the service as normal. My guess is that CBS was going to shut them down because I guess they're just too small of a service to actually make sense to run, but some owner or some manager decided to keep them. It's a complete guess, but yeah. And meanwhile, in some good news for Tesla, the Cyber Cap is apparently the most efficient EV ever.

[00:08:27]It is certified at just 165 W hours per mile. And the next model in line, the Lucid Air Pure, comes in at 28% less efficiency, while the other models are even further behind. Of course, that Cyber Cab only has two seats, a smaller battery, no steering wheel, etc. But that's still pretty interesting. And still with Tesla, they also renamed FSD or full self-driving to Tesla assisted driving in China, which of course actually is a truthful name, unlike full self-driving, which in turn is not. I really feel like they should be forced to do this everywhere. Having something called full self-driving, which is not full self-driving, seems illegal. Now, if like me, reading about really interesting engineering is something that fascinates you, then I have a pretty unconventional pitch for you. I think you will really enjoy ILE E Spectrum. It is the flagship print magazine from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which has stood for real expertise for more than 60 years. And yes, a highquality paper magazine is particularly enticing in our times when media has increasingly become hyperdigital and full of lowquality slop. In each magazine, I find topics that I already know about, like the rise of autonomous attack drones in Ukraine, which I recently made a video about, and I find that they do a great job of breaking those down. But meanwhile, I also always stumble on something that I haven't read about yet at all. Like a smart pill that can sense, sample, and treat you once swallowed. ingestable electronics are not something that were on my radar, but this article explains it super well, and as usual for ILE E, it is well written and illustrated.

[00:09:51]There's something very relaxing about the distraction-free experience of just reading a well-written article without the constant drum beat of sensationalism all around it. I actually find reading these articles really useful for inspiration for upcoming videos, among other things. And if you are curious about the world and want to read about it from a trusted source, I think you will really like it, too. A subscription is even a great idea and the magazines look really good on a coffee table. So join engineers and innovators from places like Apple, Samsung, MIT and NASA in subscribing to it e Spectrum. You can do so using the link and the QR code in the description. If you do so, you also get a 20% discount and also know that I sent you. So links are in the description or scan the QR code and I'll see you next Friday. Bye.