The discovery of 7nm, 5G-enabled chips in Huawei’s latest phone has sparked an investigation by the US Commerce Department into how the country was able to acquire the technology.
www.computerworld.com
Keep in mind this is still made with DUV machines, with a sort of tinkering to reach the limits of what duvs can offer. It's not as efficient as EUV 7nm chips (and the transistor size as the video mentions is most times a marketing gimmick as what Nvidia calls 10nm, intel can call 14nm and what they call 7nm, Nividia calls 5nm as the criteria they use for measurements are different; another crucial point is that transistor size is the most important factor for performance and efficiency of chips but it's not the only factor; manufacturing know-how in limiting power leakage, enhancing switching speeds, interconnect resistance and capacitance all matter. For power consumption there are also techniques independent of transistor size, like DVFS and some other technical stuff that I read about but I forgot. All in all this Huawei chip was not expected by West but it doesn't mean China has closed the gap by that much. They are still about 10 years behind (as the performance and techniques and machines used are more than a decade out of date; but still it shows unexpected speed of development).
