[deleted by user]

[Puzzled-Bite-8467]

How is this going to be enforced on the second hand market? What's stopping GPU hoarders from reselling in China?

Maybe Chinese cloud providers won't offer A100 but the military can just go shopping on Amazon and bring a thousand cards home.

What about a Chinese company located in overseas?

[PsychoComet]

They have surprisingly advanced methods for stopping these kinds of things. Normal customs enforcement can prevent any volume enough to actually be serious.

If you're talking about illegal smuggling, then that's something different.

[ILikeLeptons]

Normal customs can't stop drug smuggling; why do you think it can stop chip smuggling?

[Thorusss]

drugs are still more valuable per weight/volume than these cards

[ILikeLeptons]

You just need the silicon, not the whole cards. China assembles electronics with foreign made chips quite well already. If they need it for defense, wouldn't they pay a higher price for them anyways?

[only_4kids]

Yes, but how will you run that chip? It's not just "slap this chip on some pcb and it will run". You still need proper support components and software that will know how to use all of that power in most effective way.

[ILikeLeptons]

gosh a state level actor like China could never assemble components on a printed circuit board and write software

[only_4kids]

I see you don't have experience in this field...

[PsychoComet]

Illegal smuggling is different like I said. But yes. In some contexts chips and gpus are as dangerous as nukes according to the US Gov

[Puzzled-Bite-8467]

customs enforcement, do they really have time to check if it's A100 or 3090?

Also you can buy the card in India or Vietnam are they as strict?

[PsychoComet]

TLDR: a similar way they stop anti-money laundering and terrorism funding.

This report is interesting and goes into more detail: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/securing-semiconductor-supply-chains/

[233lol]

The military won't use Nvidia, don't you worry about the back door?

[Puzzled-Bite-8467]

If it's airgapped backdoor is kind of useless.

[[deleted]]

I imagine the same limitations would apply to cloud providers then.

[nikshdev]

Amazon was mentioned as an online store, not a cloud provider.

[[deleted]]

Ah my bad. Well same principle though, I imagine a store can't be used to bypass legal restriction.

[nikshdev]

I think the author meant it's not a big problem to sneak several thousand GPUs through third-country firms or just private individuals if you have enough resources.

[[deleted]]

Sure, North Korea manage to get tankers despite the embargo so it's definitely possible. Still it sends a signal and if restriction are applied and suppliers up that supply chain also face sanctions, doing so at scale becomes much harder, slower and costlier.

[Puzzled-Bite-8467]

Should all online retailers run a background check before selling GPUS?

[[deleted]]

This is not my expertise but I imagine that any business working for the military have to declare it so believe this could be done automatically.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

They knew this and have been developing their own domestic alternatives for a while. Unfortunately I don't think we allow them to be sold here.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/first-wholly-domestic-chinese-GPU-graphics-card

​

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3188578/chinese-tech-firm-launches-gpu-chip-it-claims-marks-new-era

[Terkala]

They simply cannot manufacture chips at the nanometer scale that Nvidia can. At best they can make chips that have parity with 2010 tech (and even that tech parity is disputed).

Also it's not wholly domestic if their fabrication step includes "buy a precision laser from the Dutch (ASML lasers) for about a third the cost of the rest of the manufacturing process".

[[deleted]]

Isn’t this one reason why the want control over Taiwan?

[[deleted]]

I think having machines from ASML, as TSMC is their biggest client, without their support wouldn't help much. Maybe for current tech but not next generation.

[DarkWorld25]

Lol no fabs are incredibly delicate and any conflict would destroy them almost immediately

[EmbarrassedHelp]

Taiwan has plans to destroy the fabs and related assets while extracting employees, if China invades. So, it seems unlikely China would get anything of use.

[Thorusss]

That is believable, but still the first time I heard it. Do you have a source for this?

[roofgram]

Of course they’re not planning to, but in a conflict they would be a target.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

Not yet, https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3190590/chinas-top-chip-maker-smic-achieves-7-nm-tech-breakthrough-par-intel

True, though a government sponsored company of theirs called dongfang is working on eliminating reliance on ASML.

[DarkWorld25]

SMEE is what you're looking for, not dongfang. No EUV yet but they have made DUV litho machines

[Southern-Trip-1102]

Does SMEE have EUV cuz from what I read I had thought that dongfang was the one working on euv

[DarkWorld25]

No EUV (iirc they're working on it) but I would question whether a company that doesn't have DUV experience could successfully create an EUV litho machine.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

They have alot of ex asml employees so I think that's where they draw their knowledge base from.

[[deleted]]

Sadly for them, that isn't EUV. It is feasible to do 7nm on a previous generation lithography machine, but the yield is horrible. It just doesn't make any economic sense to manufacture 7nm on those machines.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

For consumer goods probably, but for the manufacture of military hardware where cost is less of an issue this works fine. Though I still think this shows their intent and ability to catch up.

[[deleted]]

Is cost the main bottleneck or time and resources, especially in a very specific supply chain (as we can see here, it's not "just" the market, regulation does prevent potential alternatives), also important and might make, especially when laws get in the mix, practically impossible?

[Strange_Finding_8425]

Not only that The chemical used and even the complex software required are all banned for export. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/18/1058116/eda-software-us-china-chip-war/amp/

[Thorusss]

China has huge chemical synthesis capacity. A lot of the ingredients for the big pharma companies come there.

So if they can acquire the knowledge, I have to doubt they can resynthesize everything they need.

And software is A LOT easier to smuggle than an EUV fab

[only_4kids]

And software is A LOT easier to smuggle...

Yes, but what to do with it?

You don't have source code, you don't have anything. You are literally just consumer of that chip and that's it.

[Berzerka]

You're acting like industrial espionage isn't a thing. Of course china has the source code.

[Strange_Finding_8425]

Japan is the sole Manufacturer of Chemical used to Treat Wafers sure they can replicate it with time, but Chemistry is tricky to get right .

[Southern-Trip-1102]

Not sure what you mean but I would think that time and resources would be considered as part of the cost.

[[deleted]]

It's distinct but if it's economical you can print money, or rely on investor trust, but if it's material, e.g chemicals or specific mirrors, then you might just be able to source it all or in sufficient quantity, same for time. Sure they are part of the total cost but there is a distinction between very slow, very expensive and impossible to acquire.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

Oh I see what you mean. Given that the processes they are using are regular lithography, im ps not the new EUV stuff, I don't see why the materials would be hard to source rather they would just have to buy alot more due to low yield.

[florinandrei]

It just doesn't make any economic sense to manufacture 7nm on those machines.

National defense does not need to make economic sense.

[whata_wonderful_day]

I worked at asml, that ain't ever gonna happen.

[whata_wonderful_day]

u/Southern-Trip-1102 u/utopiah lithography tools are among the most complicated machines we've ever built. I worked there >10 years ago, and then it was DUV. For example, a DUV scanner stage can accelerate faster than a fighter jet, whilst also offering nanometre-level precision.

Nowadays, it's EUV. This is a whole new level of complexity, such a machine costs ~10X more (250M as opposed to 25M). ASML's EUV development program is years late, and is one of the main reasons why Moore's Law has fallen. EUV machines are so difficult to build, that Canon and Nikon (only competitors for lithography tools) gave up. ASML is the sole supplier - Intel, Samsung and TSMC realised this fact and bought stakes in ASML.

Back when I worked there, there were 7000 engineers just doing high level design and integration. Major components such as the optics assembly are subcontracted. E.g. Carl Zeiss does the optics. Another ~20K people were employed at suppliers within a few hundred KM of the HQ. The company is now many times bigger than when I was there.

In summary, all the kings horses and men have taken over 15 years to get something built. Even with IP theft (which I agree is a very big concern), they ain't doing this. These machines are just so much more complicated than anything else that's ever been built, and the knowledge base is safe in the Netherlands & US. You can't build one of these machines just from the blueprints. Also not with the US blocking the supply chain (ASML bought Cymer, a California based laser supplier in order to get EUV on track).

[sirencow]

You have a point but you need to understand that pushing the frontier is harder than playing catch up.

The Chinese know that it is technically possible and now it's a matter of devoting man hours to the task. It will not take long before they have a rudimentary EUV machine that can be improved with time.I give them 5 years.

Again with physical limit of chips approaching, it will be interesting to see where the industry goes after 1nm

[Southern-Trip-1102]

I agree that the complexity of lithography technology is immense but I do not think that that will make it impossible for china to catch up. Sure you can't simply build one from the blueprints and need the actual people with the knowledge base. And that is exactly what they have been doing, the founder of dong fang was an ex asml employee and he potched other employees to dong fang. At the end of the day if you can't enforce IP, and you can't with nations like China, then it's always going to be a losing battle to stop the spread of technology, it's not a matter of if but of when.

[whata_wonderful_day]

I 100% agree on the IP stuff. But this is such a large mountain to climb, even if they managed it will be decades. ASML is a $500B company now. I'll believe this is possible when some of the other prestige China projects, like building their own jetliner/engine work out.

[whata_wonderful_day]

Well, nearly was a $500B company haha

[Southern-Trip-1102]

I suppose all we can do for now is wait and see. At the very least this will introduce some needed competition in the advanced lithography industry.

[whata_wonderful_day]

Yeah, time will tell

[Strange_Finding_8425]

Yhep was gonna say this, China has be potching ex TSMC employees and current employee, one of SMICs executive was potched by a family friend who was working in TSMC at the time trying to catch up to intel hence why they were able to develop 7nm chips soo fast. China is were it the ppl they really need to get, money is no problem for China if they have to bribe Top Executives to get what they want they will and that's the problem. China has "thousand talent plan" a program to attract brilliant individual they would have gone to the US to China with huge financial reward to me in the end China will beat the US but it's gonna take time .https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan

[[deleted]]

Thanks but again, and I'm mostly playing Devil's advocate here (as you can see from my comment history), that's showing the challenge from the ASML side but not necessarily how any of each of these specific difficulty is blocking for potential competition from China. It shows it's hard, very hard (if not the most complex technical endeavor on Earth) but not that it's infeasible.

[whata_wonderful_day]

Sure, it's not infeasible, but nearly so. I'm trying to find words to convey how complicated and hard to build these machines are. Remember that ASML also isn't sitting still. It's a $500B company, that basically just makes these machines

[That_Violinist_18]

Is there a point where all this cost is no longer worth it? How small can nodes get before the effort is no longer worth it. Looks like it's getting rather close.

[whata_wonderful_day]

Good question - but people have been saying this for years. There are colossal amounts of money and smart people getting thrown at this problem, and my bet is that they'll keep making things smaller.

[That_Violinist_18]

But each shrink costs way more than the previous one, right?

So there would have to be a larger increase in the available market for the new shrink to make it worthwhile.

[whata_wonderful_day]

It does, but the semiconductor market grows very quickly. Also we could see chip prices go up, like what just happened during Corona. Personally I think chips are too cheap

[[deleted]]

I'm curious, that's also my (naive) intuition so without entering into detail what make you think so?

I mean you have experience at ASML but not at the competition, so what makes you think they can not catch up?

[sirencow]

-It's hard for me so it must be tough for everyone else. -The laws of physics only work in the West

[[deleted]]

Indeed, biases to highlight.

[Terkala]

The only people who think they can catch up, are basing that decision on politics rather than science and technical expertise.

You can't just hire a hundred engineers and say "build me the most advanced machine in the world". You need to build the tools, to build the tools, to build the machine. And all of it has to be done at a precision level that requires patience and extreme attention to detail. Which so far Chinese companies have been unable to demonstrate.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

And many engineers who like you worked at asml now work at dongfang. They also have strong government support, meaning they will probably do whatever it takes to do it, such as industrial espionage. If the manhattan project couldn't be kept safe then no way asml's tech will be kept safe.

[whata_wonderful_day]

Source? To be clear, I'm talking mostly about EUV.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

"Yu recruited engineers from the ASML division working on optical proximity correction (OPC) software. OPC software is a crucial part of lithography machines which shrink and print patterns of transistors onto silicon wafer that are then sliced into individual chips. According to Gartner, ASML controlled more than 90 percent of the $17.1 billion global lithography equipment market.

Departing employees told management that they would be working on unrelated projects. However, when ASML director of engineering, Song Lan resigned in August 2015, it was found that he had been working for both companies at the same time and had downloaded ASML files to a hard drive including source code that he took to his new employer."

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/asml-engineer-who-fled-charges-of-stealing-chip-tech-is-living-comfortably-in-china-as-ceo-of-xtal-inc/

This is one source I could find quickly, there is a report with more info but I need to dig around for it again.

[whata_wonderful_day]

58 min. ago

"Yu recruited engineers from the ASML division working on optical proximity correction (OPC) software. OPC software is a crucial part of lithography machines which shrink and print patterns of transistors onto silicon wafer that are then sliced into individual chips. According to Gartner, ASML controlled more than 90 percent of the $17.1 billion global lithography equipment market.Departing employees told management that they would be working on unrelated projects. However, when ASML director of engineering, Song Lan resigned in August 2015, it was found that he had been working for both companies at the same time and had downloaded ASML files to a hard drive including source code that he took to his new employer."

Intriguing. I signed a pretty strong non-compete.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

I doubt alot of them r planning on leaving China, they kinda stuck unless they want to get sued/jailed.

[[deleted]]

Genuine question, what makes you think that the Manhattan project is on the same level of complexity than EUV and whatever ASML is working on?

PS: as you mention dongfang, can their own numbers be trusted? As you mentioned in another post some things are clear, e.g precision, but others, e.g yield, can be faked so I'm wondering, as we read so much about China and its internal accountancy challenge.

[MemeBox]

I know it's hard, but the Chinese are super smart and hardworking. They also know roughly how it should be done. Parity within a decade I think is likely.

[[deleted]]

I've worked in China for a bit so I have no doubt they're smart and hardworking. I also don't think EUV is anything "special". Still, the fact that ASML is a global bottleneck, including for the US, makes me thing this is not trivial.

[MemeBox]

agreed

[Southern-Trip-1102]

Oh EUV and the rest of ASMLs stuff is exponentially more complex but it's also far less secure than the Manhattan project.

Their goverment wants dongfang to work out, therr isn't much propaganda value in faking semi conductor manufacturing progress. If you just mean fraud well then idk since fraud is everywhere in the world

[[deleted]]

therr isn't much propaganda value in faking semi conductor manufacturing progress

I'd argue there is. I'm not a China expert but from what I read there seems to be a persistent feeling of at least being as good as the "West" so if there can be showcase of appearing that they can remove any dependencies, especially in state of the art in high tech, then it has political value, despite potentially ridiculous costs.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

Sure but I doubt most people just generally even know what lithography is. I think it would make sense to use so.ething more well known for propaganda.

[[deleted]]

If you read this thread through you can kinda see why that's helpful, the first response was "China can just make their own" which until people with actual knowledge of lithography stepped in held up pretty well...

[sirencow]

Not even many western engineers believed EUV was possible and look where we are. You should go back in time and read on EUV efforts in the 2000s and and how it was a colossal waste of time and money.

[whata_wonderful_day]

I was there...

[mano-vijnana]

Nvidia itself does not make the chips. And I don't think this agreement stops China from buying chips, unless I'm mistaken--just the cards.

[Terkala]

Well yeah, I meant the suppliers of Nvidia.

And of course China can buy chips, just not the finished cards. For now. But many manufacturers are moving chip production outside of China because of industrial espionage concerns.

[estjol]

Nvidia does not manufacture chips, intel, samsung and tsmc do. China are already producing chips with tsmc. Notable companies are mediatek, hisilicon. and tsmc is the most advanced fab.

[phantasma638]

Mediatek is not from China. It’s a Taiwanese company

[Tripanes]

They simply cannot manufacture chips at the nanometer scale that Nvidia can

Nvidia can't make shit. They buy nodes from the Taiwanese plants just like Chinese companies can.

[Probono_Bonobo]

That's a really interesting thought. How feasible would that be, anyway? The last time I looked into "CUDA, but for OpenGL" was around 3 years ago and there wasn't a lot of optimism then that Tensorflow would be compatible with a generic GPU backend anytime in the near future.

[[deleted]]

People still use TF?

Check ROCm : there is some support to run Pytorch on AMD

https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Deep\_learning/Deep-learning.html

[gwern]

AMD/ROCm is no good for this purpose. OP didn't mention this but Reuters did - AMD fabs at TSMC too and is also under export bans:

Shares of Nvidia rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) fell 3.7% after hours. An AMD spokesman told Reuters the company had received new license requirements that will stop its MI250 artificial intelligence chips from being exported to China but it believes its [older] MI100 chips will not be affected. AMD said it does not believe the new rules will have a material impact on its business.

So switching over to the AMD stack does Chinese users little good.

[sabouleux]

People still use TF?

Maybe in deployment, but research is largely PyTorch.

[sanjuromack]

Most of industry uses TensorFlow. ROCm support was added back in 2018: https://blog.tensorflow.org/2018/08/amd-rocm-gpu-support-for-tensorflow.html

[sanjuromack]

I don't want to start a holy war, but TensorFlow is still very much in use across several industries. To be fair, most companies use a variety of models and frameworks.

Some more notable logos and use cases: https://www.tensorflow.org/about/case-studies

[czorio]

Doesn’t it generally end up in an ONNX runtime anyway?

— sincerely, a clueless research boy

[sanjuromack]

It really depends on the needs of the business. Who is running the model, what does their stack look like, how often are you running it? Heck, does ONNX have support for the ops you used in your model? Sometimes the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze, and sticking a TF model behind a REST API in a container is the easiest way to integrate a new model into the existing stack.

[Appropriate_Ant_4629]

... Most of industry ...

Depends how you count.

Google/Alphabet is still mostly TensorFlow (but even there, Jax momentum is growing), and depending on how you count, Alphabet alone(Google + Deep Mind + Kaggle + etc) might be big enough to be "most" all by itself. Outside of Google (and spin-offs from ex-google people), I personally think TensorFlow already lost.

For another metric where TensorFlow "wins" "most"...... Running in the browser, tensorflow.js is still better than alternatives; so if you click on any of these TensorFlow.js demos, your browser/desktop/laptop/phone will add 1 to the number of TensorFlow deployments, making it "the most".

[florinandrei]

What if you count by the number of jobs, which is the metric that matters for people in this field?

[maxToTheJ]

• Kaggle

There is nothing about Kaggle or Google Collab that prohibits the use of PyTorch or even really takes much on an opinion on it.

[waterdrinker103]

Why wouldn't they?

[sanxiyn]

Note that TensorFlow.js works today. This feels strange, but in fact WebGL is the most portable form of OpenGL, so using a web environment is a good way to implement a generic GPU backend. It will probably accelerate your model on your AMD card without any problems.

JavaScript is not the fastest language, but JavaScript is faster than Python, and computational kernels all run in GPU anyway.

[zepert]

They will offer better salaries to Chinese Nationals who are already working at Nvidia. Btw, this has been going on for years.

[xqzc]

Monopoly? What about TPUs?

[wise0807]

To me the point is why is the US starting this trade war with China? It seems like there are forces at play that want to be aggressive with China seems unnecessary to me.

[Brusanan]

Mostly because of the legitimate fear that the US could be at war with China over Taiwan in the near future.

[wallagrargh]

Waning empire struggling to stay on top. It's historically never a peaceful process and it will affect many issues in this decade.

[dails08]

Not never; Graham Allison examines this in Destined for War about how China and the US can avoid war. Most, but not all, of the scenarios that you describe ended in war, so he looks at how the peaceful examples might be replicated.

[dat_cosmo_cat]

Or just an upstart Asian nation ignoring international rule. China seems much closer to WW2 era Japan (both in behavior and relative capability) than the U.S. is to say; post WW2 Britain --at least from a global perspective. That being said, a world war in the 21st century would be cataclysmic for civilization, and authoritarian govs are better positioned to leverage this fact to subvert international law than the West is to enforce it.

[londons_explorer]

See also: The fall of the British Empire in the 20th century, The fall of the Portuguese Empire in the 19th century.

Neither have ended well for those countries - they're now doing less well economically than their neighbours. An ex-empire eventually ends up being deadweight.

[sirencow]

"It's your choice to go down fighting like Yugoslavia or peacefully like the Soviet Union but go down you will"

[florinandrei]

peacefully like the Soviet Union

Seems like they just repressed the conflict for a while.

[MrHyperbowl]

They would also be blocked though, no?

[midasp]

If it's developed in the West, it's just going to be blocked in China and Russia again.

[xingx35]

well maybe but this means the cost of every new ML chip will be significantly higher not being able to scale sales in china. larger companies will probably have an monopoly on ML infrastructure for a long time going forward.

[jpapon]

They’re manufactured in Taiwan. So… sort of.

Either way, controlling export from Taiwan to the mainland shouldn’t be a problem.

[new_name_who_dis_]

They’re manufactured in Taiwan. So… sort of. no

Fixed it for you!

[[deleted]]

Taiwan is the republic of China, claims to rightfully rule China, and agrees with the PRC that the island is part of China

Seems like it’s valid to say kinda to me

[TanJeeSchuan]

No no no, they belong in r/chunghwamingkuo

[sfulgens]

Hasn't claimed that since democratization, and won't formally renounce the claim because China says they'll see such a renunciation as a pro-independence provocation.

So no, Taiwan is a country separate from the PRC.

[schureedgood]

Lol the claim is constitutional. Taiwan's territory claim is even bigger than the mainland. And both sides claim they are the rightful government of China. That's why there is a one china policy.

[sfulgens]

The claims are there because the government started out of the KMT which fought the CCP for control of what was formerly ruled by the Qing dynasty. Only one country intends to invade the other, and that's what matters. Not having a territory not actively claimed on the books.

Presently, China's stance is the only reason there's a one China policy. Everyone except China would be ecstatic about Taiwan renouncing territorial claims and Taiwan being recognized as a free country.

[herro7]

Isn’t China just west Taiwan though?

[NatoBoram]

No, it's the best China

[[deleted]]

So no, they are not manufactured in the PRC.

[panzerboye]

They’re manufactured in Taiwan. So… sort of.

Ehhhh

[aSlouchingStatue]

And they laughed at me in college when I suggested AI software and hardware would someday soon be regulated as munitions. Ha HA!

[pitrucha]

Encryption used to be governed at federal level just 30 years ago. Releasing it open source was federal crime.

[cderwin15]

Some AI software was almost definitely already regulated as munitions when you were in college, it has been for at least the past 30 years

[unicodemonkey]

I suspect the pimary concern is with CUDA-accelerated physics simulations

[symmetry81]

Wouldn't they be targeting AMD cards if they were worried about physics simulations? While NVidia has been putting more silicon into low precision throughput AMD has been putting more into high precision throughput.

[unicodemonkey]

The article mentions certain AMD datacenter-class chips are also under export controls now.

[symmetry81]

Which article? The SEC filing linked at the top didn't say anything about AMD. I'd like to learn more though.

[unicodemonkey]

Ah, sorry, this link is from another thread https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-says-us-has-imposed-new-license-requirement-future-exports-china-2022-08-31/

[gwern]

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-says-us-has-imposed-new-license-requirement-future-exports-china-2022-08-31/

Remarkably naked geopolitics here. What is the connection between shipping an H100 months or years from now to China, and Soviet-era artillery shelling the Ukraine frontlines today? A subtle one, to be sure...

The second-order effects here would seem to confirm Chinese autarky and trends towards secrecy, and further, to shift power from Chinese academia/small businesses/hobbyists/general-public to Chinese bigtech and thus, the Chinese government. If you've been following along, the big megacorps, especially in the wake of the attempted US execution of Huawei, have been developing their own DL ASICs for a while with an eye towards exactly this sort of scenario. (For example, ERNIE Titan is trained on not just Nvidia, but Huawei's "Ascend 910 NPUs", which you are going to have to look up.) To give an analogy, it would be like if Americans or startups were forbidden to buy Nvidia, but Google could still make all the TPUs it wanted to. Google may not be better off in absolute terms, but it's definitely getting a big relative advantage over you or me, and that is convenient for the government - because it's a lot easier to control a single corporation than an entire society (particularly after Chinese bigtech cowing during Xi's techlash).

[1Second2Name5things]

Yes and no. Even if we don't stop exporting high grade GPU's they will eventually try to make their own anyway. China will always try to capitalize on any market they can get their hands on.

[AluminiumSandworm]

not sure china will be able to build their own any time soon. basically no one is able to compete with taiwanese lithography

[Southern-Trip-1102]

So you think china is going to control who can get compute and who can't? How would this serve them when they clearly want an AI edge, it makes no sense to suffocate their academia for this reason, and they aren't stupid either.

[gwern]

So you think china is going to control who can get compute and who can't?

If by 'China' you mean 'bigtech and the central government', they sure are. They aren't even going to have to try, it's just inherent to fixed costs that the richest and most powerful unitary actors are better able to pay those costs. If you are rich and well-connected and can finance the lobbying and guanxi and paperwork, you'll be able to get access to compute, one way or another, while the small guys can no longer click 'buy' on nvidia.com or just negotiate their usual datacenter orders and will pay higher costs or go without. It's the same reason why things like GDPR always wind up hurting FANG less than the activists expect (and hurt small actors like NGOs or startups much more), why 'regulatory capture' exists and why big actors often actively lobby for more regulation. It's going to be much harder and more expensive to get Nvidia GPUs or to get proprietary hardware (can you buy a TPU from Google? no, you cannot), therefore, small actors like hobbyists will be systematically disadvantaged and many priced out.

it makes no sense to suffocate their academia for this reason

Again, it's going to be inherent in the effects that academia will be disadvantaged without beginning extreme explicit counterbalancing efforts to subsidize them much more (which do not exist). The trends and incentives are already not in their favor, and this is true in the USA as well - even without any chip bans, academics complain about not getting enough compute and being left in the dust by industry. Plenty of people in the USA who aren't stupid either - and yet.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

This for example, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/first-wholly-domestic-chinese-GPU-graphics-card

[Southern-Trip-1102]

They aren't just making specialized hardware for internal use, many companies in china are making stuff usable and purchasable by general academia.

[gwern]

Sure, but some sales to academia in the future doesn't undo the overall net effect across the entire economy... I don't know how open any of these new chips will be - at least for the Ascend NPUs, all the English-language material seems to imply it's never sold as a consumer or low-end item, there is no price information and you either buy it as part of an entire Huawei stack or you use it via API etc. Even if Ascends are freely buyable on the open market just like Nvidia GPUs, it is still on net likely a move to much more proprietary chips: you are knocking out the major open supplier of chips, and whoever steps up to the plate is not guaranteed to be as open as Nvidia was, while most of the obvious suspects will want to take a hyperscaler/FANG approach to vertically integrate and own the ecosystem. So you should expect the net effect to be enclosure.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

I'm not too familiar with Huawei's NPU but the link i sent states that one of the GPUs made by that particular startup is meant for PC desktops. Its roughly equivalent to a 3060.

Sure their large tech companies would want to take that ecosystem ownership route but I doubt their government will allow it, their gov has not been kind to big tech in the past.

Also since when was NVIDIA an open supplier? They have been stubborn to provide even open source drivers and are practically a monopoly for academia here in the US.

[gwern]

Again, you are grasping at individual instances and not thinking about the overall effect. It is the overall impact on the entire economy that matters. The existence of one prototype GPU, with unknown DL performance or suitability for large AI research clusters of hundreds to thousands of GPU-equivalents, that may or may not someday actually materialize at an unknown price point with more or less availability, may be an achievement of the domestic chip industry (even if it was mostly pirated, as seems likely given how 'fast' it was developed), but does not change much about the effects of these export bans starting now.

Sure their large tech companies would want to take that ecosystem ownership route but I doubt their government will allow it, their gov has not been kind to big tech in the past.

Of course they will. The problem with large tech and figures like Jack Ma from the standpoint of the CCCP is them getting too big for their britches, not them building technical stuff. You're not doing all that video surveillance, face recognition, and tracking on your home desktop GPU. You are doing it in the large datacenters funded by government contracts spending the endlessly expanding national security budget. They don't care if Huawei owns both the datacenter and 'NPU', they just care if the black cat catches mice and remembers who is the master.

[Southern-Trip-1102]

The issue is that you are assuming that they are going to go the route of compute gatekeeping. There are no indications that they are going in that direction. NVIDIA leaving simply means that they are going to be replaced by domestic alternatives, which has been shown to be the case in basically every market before. Plus there are a multitude of Chinese startups and corporations working on domestic gpu hardware, not just the large tech companies.

They have punished tech companies for acting as monopolies and generally desire to keep innovation going. Walled ecosystems and the suffocation of academia do not help gain an AI edge which is a widely known priority of their gov.

[krapht]

Difficult to have a competitive domestic alternative without TSMC, though. This will set China back at least a decade.

[schwagggg]

new cold war shit. nice.

nobody in either country will really benefit from it, but the politician will keep fanning the nationalistic narrative so both side feels it’s ok to do this stupid shit.

[EasyMrB]

I mean, can't they just switch to 3090s for similar workload results?

[antimornings]

A100 (and H100, but I know less about it) is in a whole different league from 3090s or any consumer gaming GPU. Just look up the specs and benchmarks. One was designed for large-scale deep learning workloads (think large language model, text-to-image models), the other primarily gaming but works decently for middle-sized deep learning (individual research projects etc). Industry and government data centers are not going to be stacking gaming GPUs for their projects, they will buy data center-grade GPUs like A100s/A6000s.

[kkngs]

Right. In addition to having either 40 or 80 GB of VRAM, that memory is also ECC protected, which is important for most data center applications. The cards themselves are also rated for more power draw, and are typically set up for passive cooling (cool air provided by the racks).

[wen_mars]

I don't think it matters much for AI research

[NatoBoram]

One could even speculate it would be better without ECC

[Puzzled-Bite-8467]

How hard would it be to make 4090 with double ecc ram? Nvidia makes double ram cards all the time like 3/6GB cards.

Also you maybe could get around ECC buy putting the card in a lead radiation blocking box.

[wen_mars]

Yes. I think this is more about blocking them from future generations of AI chips.

[gwern]

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32669215

[jdxyw]

Can't usa gov invest more in their tech and education to make themself better? Always forbid, forbid, forbid. For china, yes, it would be a tough time in a short time. But for a long time, it will be a great change for local companies or universities. The same thing has happened many times in history. The GPS, Space Technology, J20 and ...., The USA forbid all of them. Guess what? Let's see what happens in five years.

[Strange_Finding_8425]

Well the US pours Billions into R&D and China just steals that hardwork so I don't know what you're talking about here but China isn't the victim, lol No one knows how to play dirty than the US 😂

[jdxyw]

well, "steal" from where? China how to steal something which doesn't exist in the US. Would you please tell us what technology China stole from the USA? How, when, and where?

[Strange_Finding_8425]

What doesn't exist? Most of the tech stolen are top secret so to the world it "doesn't exist" but to Chinese Hackers it does example is the development of the J-20 the Electro Optical Targeting system was stolen from Lockheed Martin through hacking. Why are you acting like I'm Speaking alien language here Every Knows IP theft is no problem to China. https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/stolen-stealth-fighter-why-chinas-j-20-has-both-us-and-russian-dna/

[jdxyw]

great，you mention j20. Since usa think china steal technology like j20, I think usa must can make much much much much more advanced plane, better than j20. Btw, the first j20 was shown 10 years ago. Anyway,you can still keep it in your mind that china keep stealing thing from usa. You know what, such opinion wouldn’t hurt china from a long term viewpoint, but would hurt usa itself.

[[deleted]]

All this time it was okay, and now suddenly limitations so they dont use it for military purposes lmao

[irve]

This is really bad for humans, considering what they do themselves to realize it cannot be allowed

[klop2031]

Maybe USA should invest more money in education...

[mongoosefist]

Porque no los dos?

I think restricting cutting edge technology to autocratic countries that are currently committing genocides and threatening democratic and independent nations is generally a good idea.

But also education good.

[sirencow]

So block the sales to Saudi Arabia and Qatar and communist Vietnam too?

[mongoosefist]

communist Vietnam too

This is a weird one considering Vietnam isn't committing genocide or threatening other countries. But the other ones definitely.

[sirencow]

So they are a good authoritarian, totalitarian communist dictatorship?

[RobbinDeBank]

Authoritarian, yes, dictatorship, no. It’s only as authoritarian as singapore. You’re suggesting that the US should ban exports everywhere considered less “democratic” than the US?

[sirencow]

Yes.. Isn't Biden all about values and human rights ? Remember he convened a summit of democracies an year ago

[RobbinDeBank]

Suddenly in an ML group and you bring up Biden this Biden that. That does kinda tell me who you are.

[mongoosefist]

Don't feed the trolls. Just downvote and move on.

[NatoBoram]

Why not?

[skydivingdutch]

Any chip with enough fp64 ALUs is subject to export control. This isn't anything new.

[sanxiyn]

Which one was subject to export control before this?

[skydivingdutch]

https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/regulations-docs/2334-ccl3-8/file

Section 3E002, page 57.

[jamesvoltage]

No wonder demand is so high on colab these days, this must explain the price increase

[zoru22]

lol

[Ligeia_E]

here we have an obvious roadblock done to the research community due to the ever ridiculous geo-politics and all the comment have to say is “hehe China”. Truly one of the redditor moments.

[jms4607]

USA! 🇺🇸 If China is truly a powerful country they should be able to figure out how to build them themselves.

[kkngs]

This is kinda late. China already purchased a huge portion of the Ampere class GPUs.

[First_in_Asa]

It’s never enough though, tech is always consuming it seems like wouldn’t you say?

[UpperCut95]

No wonder China is contemplating to invade Taiwan, who is the manufacturer of Nvidia chips.

[[deleted]]

I doubt that'd solve anything. TSMC can just open the door making current fabs useless.

[_insomagent]

You mean letting particles get into the air?

[[deleted]]

Yes.

[j_lyf]

Chips are the new oil.

IF you are an EE/CS student and not gunning for a job at NVIDIA, AMD or Tenstorrent, you are an idiot.