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Huawei AI GPUs Are On Par With NVIDIA A100, Will Compete With GPT-4 LLM In 2024

winjer

Gold Member
I think SMIC has some sort of 7nm process. So could be that plus chiplet design. They probably have a lot of errors and a lot of failure on the node but Chinese government is throwing a lot of money at them so....

That said, have some doubts about performance claims here.

They have. But last time I heard anything about it, yields were very bad.
Little more than enough for concept. And very far from production scale.
 

StereoVsn

Member
They're going to iterate quickly. TBH, I'm rooting for them. The AMD and Nvidia collusion needs to stop. Maybe this could help with that.
You are rooting for totalitarian and authoritarian government that disappears and kills it's citizens, puts millions in re-edication camps, harvests organs from incarcerated, and is currently on the way to prepare for invasion of Taiwan which likely to pull major powers into war.

But yeah, at least AMD and Nvidia duopoly will be broken.
 

StereoVsn

Member
They have. But last time I heard anything about it, yields were very bad.
Little more than enough for concept. And very far from production scale.
Yep, but if money is no object and the government doesn't care about failures...

Mind you these cards are going to go to Chinese government use so especially for the military purposes costs are secondary.
 

winjer

Gold Member
Yep, but if money is no object and the government doesn't care about failures...

Mind you these cards are going to go to Chinese government use so especially for the military purposes costs are secondary.

The thing is EUV took several decades to develop and the effort and investment of several institutions and companies.
This was a very difficult and expensive achievement.
One of the reason it was possible was that part of the profits of developing and selling machines for previous nodes.
But Chinese chip manufacturing doesn't have the same advantage. So it will take billions in investment from the government to develop their own machines.
And with China in a bad economic situation, that might not be possible.
There have also been several high profile cases in the Chinese chip industry of corruption, diverting huge amounts of money from projects.
Also, China has implemented very restrictive laws regarding industrial spying, that have resulted in several false convictions of Chinese nationals and foreigners.
This means few international companies and workers want to risk going to China for work.
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Also, China has implemented very restrictive laws regarding industrial spying, that have resulted in several false convictions of Chinese nationals and foreigners.
This means few international companies and workers want to risk going to China for work.

US has been doing more or less the same thing.





 
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Miyazaki’s Slave

Gold Member
Cutting edge foundaries and the machines inside them are the most advanced technology mankind currently possess, the actual process is literal scifi shit. It would take decades (plural) for someone starting at nothing to make the chips inside your toaster. Even the competing companies that were doing it for decades (Glofo and Intel) can't do it. China most definitely can't just "make their own" on a whim? LOL
Is the assumption that Samsung (or Nvidia, or whomever) made the equipment that they use for their manufacturing process? (singularly self engineered)

While it may not be trivial to replicate their production practices/standards (SOP), if the manufacturing machinery was sourced rather than internally developed I don't think they would need the time to catch up that is being assumed here.
 

StereoVsn

Member
Is the assumption that Samsung (or Nvidia, or whomever) made the equipment that they use for their manufacturing process? (singularly self engineered)

While it may not be trivial to replicate their production practices/standards (SOP), if the manufacturing machinery was sourced rather than internally developed I don't think they would need the time to catch up that is being assumed here.
Nah, they don't make the actual foundry equipment. It would be ASML, couple Japanese companies and a few related US ones.
 

rnlval

Member
This is good news if the USA ban on GPU is making the competition grow faster.

Huawei was the best in the field with their smartphones kirin chipsets, they were years ahead of the competition before getting shut down by the US ban

I'm looking forward to more competition to AMD, NVIDIA and Intel we really need it

AI acceleration is different from scaling hardware-accelerated Z buffer-raster design requirements. A proper gaming GPU is not DSP.
 
Best country in the world:

France Flag GIF by Nike Football
which country is that
 

supernova8

Banned
US has been doing more or less the same thing.





Yep China and US are the only real superpowers now, this stuff is going to happen on both sides for the foreseeable future.

Also China has been stealing tech from the West for decades and will continue to do so. I can understand why the US is cracking down on semiconductor and related exports but in the end it'll probably only delay the inevitable - China more or less catching up.
 

HawarMiran

Banned
Yep China and US are the only real superpowers now, this stuff is going to happen on both sides for the foreseeable future.

Also China has been stealing tech from the West for decades and will continue to do so. I can understand why the US is cracking down on semiconductor and related exports but in the end it'll probably only delay the inevitable - China more or less catching up.
and the US 'poaches' the smartest minds around the world. you have to combat that somehow :messenger_winking_tongue:
 
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Silver Wattle

Gold Member
How's that supposed to work? They're technically incapable of doing that.


Asianometry is a great youtube channel, he recently passed 500k subs and it's well deserved, I love watching his videos since he includes a lot of information about Taiwan, Korea, china etc that I wouldn't hear otherwise.
which country is that
I'm pretty sure that is the Netherlands.
 
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Barakov

Member
This is good news if the USA ban on GPU is making the competition grow faster.

Huawei was the best in the field with their smartphones kirin chipsets, they were years ahead of the competition before getting shut down by the US ban

I'm looking forward to more competition to AMD, NVIDIA and Intel we really need it





meh k pop GIF
 

Kdad

Member
Remember when China was begging the Soviets for Nuclear weapons technology then the Sino Soviet split happened and the Soviets refused? The Chinese managed on their own. It will take time but they have the experience, spies and espionage, institutions and knowledge as well as reverse engineering skills to achieve their goals. They're dumping a shit ton of money in this and the US is scrambling to tighten the noose.




Funny enough it wasn't the Russians that invaded my neck of the woods, but let's not derail.
Fixed
 
Cutting edge foundaries and the machines inside them are the most advanced technology mankind currently possess, the actual process is literal scifi shit. It would take decades (plural) for someone starting at nothing to make the chips inside your toaster. Even the competing companies that were doing it for decades (Glofo and Intel) can't do it. China most definitely can't just "make their own" on a whim? LOL
It would not be starting at nothing since the principle is known, I think I remember some ASML guy saying basically anyone can copy it- and China does not care much about patent laws anyway, if there are some -, you "just" need to make those precise machines. A ban is certainly an incentive to put more pressure behind it, more than just the possibility of profits. If you kinda need it, it's like wartime industry, ramping up the necessary stuff and making usually huge progress.
The timeline is the question. The investment might have been too much for the retired players, but if China needs it and is actually forced to, it might happen sooner than one can expect. Hardly tomorrow, but 5, 10 years are a long ass time to get something up and running, especially when SMIC has already the foot in the door with a worse process.
"Decades plural" seems like equating the cheap garbage plastic toys effort with Chinas actual brightest and what they can do. I mean decades ago, bascically only two countries bothered with space programs, ESA followed, and China, Brazil and India too, even private companies shoot stuff now into orbit, because literal rocket science is not really anymore something that is almost magical, but just very humanly possible today, if tackled properly.
 
What do you mean?

Just because they are "banned" from access to those technologies doesn't mean they can cannot just reproduce the facilities. If they have worked with, or had access to, those technologies in the past a "stern warning" from the US isn't going to stop them from reproducing and improving upon the process.

The machines used to help create chips at lower nodes are specialized in the literal sense and cost tens of millions, even north of a 100 million per machine. Depending on the node we're talking about. Cutting edge? Probably 150 million+ per machine. Located in the Netherlands, ASML specializes in lithography machines and are a part of the crucial, global chip supply chain. The machines themselves are trade secrets and something no one else on the planet has access to, as far as I am aware.
 
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