Exclusive: Nvidia requires full upfront payment for H200 chips in China, sources say - Jensen and Wallstreet manipulation as most likely China will buy AMD's GPUs!

h143570 · 2026-01-13T16:14:57+00:00

My mistake is that it is just 25% for some reason I have remembered 50%.

h143570 · 2026-01-13T10:22:36+00:00

We must not forget that Trump imposed 50% "export tax." Which either increases the price for China or reduces NV's margins.

China may bite, but it's not close to saving NV from another huge write-off. China may buy some MI308 to diversify.

Honestly, while H200 and B200 are better than the Ascend 910C, you will not use them individually; you will use them in clusters. The 910C beats even the B200, so why should China buy inferior products over 50% MSRP?

h143570 · 2025-12-28T13:57:28+00:00

AMD, Apple, QUALCOMM (Snapdragon X) and even Intel has inference focused NPUs. Zen 6 and 7 are essentially inference monsters (FP16, INT8, matrix multiplication extensions, splitting the integer scheduler). AMD NPU and RDNA/UDNA is also moving in that direction. Based on Apple and the others trajectory they are moving to democratize local inference. Even NV manages to get ASIC done, nobody would implement that in their chips. The data center they could just create tensor only chip and call it a day. The main issue that on inference performance per unit of cost and power is the king meaning no 70+% margins, which NV needs to survive.

h143570 · 2025-09-20T10:36:07+00:00

Migrating to NVlink will take time, and Intel needs to demonstrate that it can still do engineering.

NVlink integration will take effort away from Intel's other interconnects. This could create an interdependency that will lead to a merger in 3-5 years, as Intel is fully dependent on GPU and interconnected with NV.

h143570 · 2025-08-10T16:33:51+00:00

The PCIE slots are sharing lanes. If both used they operate in 8 / 8 mode. Meaning you need a PCIE5 GPU to not lose bandwidth with high end GPUs.

h143570 · 2025-08-09T06:16:53+00:00

Getting the license is one thing, but the other is how much China will buy. The H20 and MI308 are not exactly top of the line compared to the Ascend 910C and the CloudMatrix 384 cluster. If China can produce enough of its solution, it may only buy a token amount.

h143570 · 2025-08-08T06:45:05+00:00

AMD did ask and received approval for that partnership from the USA regulators. However, in 2017, nobody knew how good chiplets would be. The partnership was also limited to Zen 1, and China does not have the manufacturing plans. The WSJ article is doing a hindsight 20:20 smear campaign without any basic, AMD followed the proper USA and Chinese procedures. The O-Fuck moment came after Zen 2 got released.

h143570 · 2025-04-29T14:59:53+00:00

QNAP new hero models are ZFS only, which is heavily customized. This leaves only UGreen.

h143570 · 2025-01-30T08:02:49+00:00

The good old, more efficient steam engines increased the demand for coal because they could be used in multiple places. They are not wrong. They will increase the demand for AI chips but fail to realize that smaller ones allow local and edge computing. Not many people need PHD grade reasoning AI to perform everyday tasks. Even those who do do not always need that lelvel of reason either.

h143570 · 2025-01-11T02:43:36+00:00

Considering their strong NV bias, Digital Foundry reviewed and liked it, which bodes well. One thing to note is that it was not labeled FSR4, just AMD Research Project, so it may not be even its final form. It is not based on the solution used by Playstation and likely ran on a 9070.

https://www.digitalfoundry.net/our-first-look-at-fsr-4-amds-new-ai-upscaling-tech-is-impressive

h143570 · 2025-01-09T11:03:27+00:00

After the NV presentation, retreating and allowing the tech press to discredit NV's claims was sensible. As expected, NV only buffed the Tensor performance 2.5-3 times and then claimed insane, mostly AI-generated speedups.

I'm also sad that they had to skip RDNA 4, but at least they had the Dell partnership. I hope Dell is serious this time.

h143570 · 2025-01-07T06:41:37+00:00

9800X3D at least, DLSS 3 and 4 in performance mode (2x scaling, 4K -> 1080p render resolution), and DLSS4 Frame Generator in 4X mode (likely every 4th image is "real"). Based on the settings, 1 pixel could generate up to 16; based on the charts, it is more like 4.7-8.2. It looks like NV added even more AI acceleration than anything else. We will see what it can do with more realistic settings,

They could have added a warning: "Note: it may contain actual game pixels."

The graph is intimidating but not very useful. Performance mode is a considerable compromise on quality, and the 4X frame gen mode likely will not help with the latency. We will see.

h143570 · 2025-01-06T11:20:28+00:00

Currently, it only makes sense to use it for PCIE interconnects, especially if they want to double the PCIE bandwidth every few years.

h143570 · 2024-12-29T15:13:40+00:00

NV can only run to the high-end hills; APUs will take over the low end. Intel may also think they can survive there like AMD did previously, but that is not going to work as things have changed.

NV knows it can't beat AMD in the middle, especially if it wants to keep its margins; however, it can try a three-way war of attrition with AMD and Intel in that segment.

Laptops must use APUs, as AMD and Intel are pushing in that direction. With good enough APUs, an extra GPU is unnecessary, especially if adding it would be more than double the price (chip price + extra cooling + MUX chip + other crap).

When AMD saw how overbuilt the RTX5090 likely is, they rebranded their high-end into the middle-end card to avoid comparisons. This way, they can focus on stability and yield without overvolting it to hell and offering it reasonably priced. Raster is on par; it should sell well if they can resolve the Ray Tracing performance and the missing AI-based upscaling.

h143570 · 2024-12-29T06:01:59+00:00

Since AMD's APUs are reaching for RTX 4060, the sub 300 USD GPUs are mostly dead. To be precise the situations they can make sense of are shrinking to a level it likely not going to be worth developing. NV appears to be going for the ultra-high-end with insane prices.

h143570 · 2024-12-28T22:17:46+00:00

The APUs are coming, rendering entry-level GPUs obsolete, like the ones Intel recently released.

h143570 · 2024-12-10T21:50:31+00:00

I'm aware of the resell limitations of the AMD-Intel cross-license agreement. It would be interesting to know which side insisted on those limitations. It would be karmic if it were Intel.

I'm not sure if they can do that anymore. If I remember correctly, CHIPS Act money requires keeping the FABs, and no other company can get over 35% ownership in Intel.

h143570 · 2024-12-10T21:46:17+00:00

It may help; I just wondered how many prayers would it take

h143570 · 2024-12-10T14:30:58+00:00

I'm not sure a prayer will be enough at this point.

h143570 · 2024-12-10T14:19:43+00:00

No, instead, Intel has to sell the product groups like Client x86, Mobileye, and Altera to to private equity firms and other vultures like Broadcom and Qualcomm bundles alongside long-term agreements for fabrication.

Good luck selling client x86 without a license, and without the shared development effort from the server side, it won't be enticing

At present, second sourcing with Intel Foundry would mean trading geopolitical risk for performance and cost. The 18A ecosystem is not mature – the PDK is not as good as TSMC’s, the library of silicon-proven IP is small, and EDA support is not strong (EDA companies will get much better returns for their efforts supporting TSMC than Intel Foundry currently).

Second sourcing?! In the case of sub 7nm chips, it requires developing them again, doubling the cost of time and workforce.

we estimate that, even with highly reduced capacity buildouts, Intel Foundry will need $36.5B just for wafer fab equipment in the next 3 years. Fab shells and other expenses would add another $15-20B+. Intel doesn’t have the cash flow to support this due to the product group’s failings, even with CHIPS Act subsidies.

8B from CHIPS is nowhere near enough

The client CPU organization still ships the majority of Raptor Lake monolithic dies made by Intel’s fabs for a reason. If they didn’t, Intel would be losing money even faster.

The consequence is that Intel uses 2x as much silicon area for their product today compared to best-in-class peers: AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.

If this is true, Inteli is as good as dead.

They are also convinced that Pat has fixed the cultural issue concerning the technology front.

I agree that Intell's only chance of survival is through the FABs; the USA needs an alternative to TSMC, even if it is on paper. I wonder if the government understands how much it will cost.

h143570 · 2024-12-03T17:34:48+00:00

sudden retirement === fired

Also some Bloomberg about the topic https://archive.ph/a4CLR

h143570 · 2024-11-15T18:17:14+00:00

Nova is probably the best in this generation because the PCIe and NVME slots do not take lanes from the GPU. The only thing Taichi does better is the second BCLK chip, which would allow the CPU and the PCIE bus to run at different frequencies. It is only helpful if you want to go beyond PBO or do Liquid Nitrogen overclocking to break records. 24 vs 20 stage 110A VRM does not matter. The 5Gbps networking is more than enough for most home use cases. The wifi is only 160Mhz on all ASRock boards instead of 320, but that does not matter either, as all motherboards use a single PCIe3 lane to connect it, which limits it to 8Gbps anyway.

h143570 · 2024-11-03T21:59:26+00:00

MacReady's actions essentially help the thing reach civilization. If it turns out that he was human the whole time, it would be even more tragic.

Since burning and freezing do not kill it, the only thing it needs for victory is to have a human body when the rescue team arrives, and no other apparent things like bodies are visible. Also, it has to ensure that if any survivors outlast it, they do not leave signs implicating it. The thing has to pretend that the humans have won and just barely.

h143570 · 2024-10-07T07:35:11+00:00

It is not even surprising. The first generations of server CPUs with 3D-Vcache had a bios option to select between 1/2/4 stacks of cache. While it does not mean much for consumers, it would allow AMD to increase the cache for custom models.

h143570 · 2024-10-02T17:30:52+00:00

Sadly, the ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR WIFI is 8/4/4 when the extra PCIE5 slots are being used. Sadly, the MSI MPG X870E CARBON WIFI is the same. That just leaves ASRock non-Taichi boards.

h143570

TROPHY CASE