US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia
sec.gov
sec.gov
It's a ceiling on the performance that can be exported. In an exponentially scaling industry, this is the equivalent of an announcement in advance of a complete ban on competitive products 2-3yrs out.
Given that both political parties have placed export limits on tech to China, it seems this is the new normal.
Edit: why disagree?
“Knowing where the chips go is probably a very good thing. You could for example, on every chip put in essentially a public private key pair, which authenticates it and allows it to work”.
hxxps://www.reuters.com/technology/chip-challenge-keeping-western-semiconductors-out-russian-weapons-2022-04-01/
What he won’t tell is that this is already a reality, as I learned after having my air-gapped system and Pixel phone wiped remotely for researching “silent speech interfaces”. There is no security when silicon trojans are in all devices.
intel SGX already involves a per-chip keypair with intel as the root of trust. it just isn't required to use the rest of the chip
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32394353
> Eric Schmidt, the former Google chairman, told Reuters in a recent interview that high-end processors should have kill-switches.
“Knowing where the chips go is probably a very good thing. [...]
I truly believe you're very concerned about all the things you talk about, but if you want to convince people to also believe then there needs to be more from your side.
And no, suggesting that people perform ptychographic x-ray laminography on their chips isn't a practical suggestion.
People with willingness and means can find me anyways.
"It's not technically hard to make a device that complies with the FCC that listens to nonpublic bands but then is quietly waiting for some activation trigger to listen to other bands," said Eduardo Rojas, who leads the radio spectrum lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. "Technically, it's feasible."
To prove a device had clandestine capabilities, Rojas said, would require technical experts to strip down a device "to the semi-conductor level" and "reverse engineer the design." But, he said, it can be done.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/politics/fbi-investigation-hu...
One way it can be done:
Ptychographic X-ray Laminography; No trade secret or hardware trojan can hide! https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-x-ray
Edit: I knew this would get downvoted quickly. Hey, mr or ms judge of truth, how about you check what nvidia services run on your machine before wielding all that power.
"As for Pentium PCs... well, they're harmless."
without that resulting in lawsuits.
Somehow I feel that in our world the majority of corporations don't make direct comparisons to their competitors that often, preferring to use "competing brands" or something of that variety instead.
Hard to see how Intel could sue over a statement like that.
The reason many companies say "competing brands" is because they don't want to mention an alternative, because it increases the mindshare of the other brand.
This is not really new but NVidia was caught by a surprise change in the limits.
Assuming said steel is actually of the quality it's certified as [0]
[0] https://asiatimes.com/2017/10/nuclear-tentacles-kobe-steel/
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII... https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/04/24/06-3647...
You'll probably have to dig quite a bit to find the latest rules and regulations.
These regulations go back to at least the Export Control Act of 1968. Every CPU/GPU maker would have a legal team that understands these rules.
https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/regulations/export-adminis...
For example, high resolution analog to digital converters have restrictions. In the past strong cryptography even had restrictions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
Even travel for US citizens was restricted. I have relatives who were in the semiconductor and aerospace industries during the 1980s. They were advised by the government to not attempt to travel to the Eastern Bloc. Some kinda related reading:
https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/43/1/57/5068654...
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-sardine -RSA-6-line-PERL-fish
'\~. __......--------~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-------....____
\ ~.__---~';($k,$n)=@ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo "[o~~-._
\ ]s!16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]"\E[ ~.
/ ]s!szlXx++p"|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m," .'
/ .-~~--.._" +($w=2*$d-1+length($n||die"$0 [-d] k n\n")&~1)/2);' __..-~
,/.~ ~~~~----........._______________________.......-----~~'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
(Because the opinion was withdrawn, it's "persuasive" but not "binding".)
(What really happened was that the Feds revised the definition of "supercomputer", and suddenly the G5 configuration they were using didn't qualify anymore... it had nothing to do with anything Apple did, except perhaps lobbying for it so they could build computers in China.)
They made a big deal about it in their commercials at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
My favourite conspiracy theory is that this was done deliberately by the US, since Xeon Phi was a large pile of steaming turd, so the Chinese wasted money on a machine with high theoretical FLOPS but crappy real world performance, and also wasted the time of their scientists and programmers who were porting code to a programming paradigm that went nowhere fast.
Other examples can be found here: https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vo...
Yes, in the 70s and 80s, it made sense to say that 5-axis NCs systems that can cut Inconel turboprops for ICBMs should be export controlled; those were multi-million-dollar flagships of the biggest and best manufacturers and were key to the country's military edge. Now you can get one shipped from China for a couple thousand dollars, with servo loop times, encoder and linear scale resolution, memory capacity, processor speed, axis counts, etc. that are better than the originals that cost a thousand times more half a century ago.
Today, it's true that the A100 is a cutting edge, shockingly powerful, uniquely capable processor. You can do machine learning/computer vision projects with it that you can't do with any other technology. Eighty gigabytes! 256 GB/s per package! Almost 20 teraflops of FP32! Compared to the GPU in the desktop you bought 8 years ago, yes, these are huge. But if you plot interconnect bandwidth, memory size, core counts, price, and so on, and extrapolate forward... yeah, your little hobby Kubernetes cluster of 2030-era Raspberry Pi equivalents will probably be at a performance level that's export controlled.
China not civilized?
And before human rights becomes the main talking point: Guantanamo.
Civilized or not is up to your perspective.
Even if we did, how do you measure up acts done in these places against one another? Is making license plates for pennies in the US better or worse than making t-shirts in Xinjiang? Is being wrongfully thrown in prison due to a prejudice judge seeing your only skin color worse than being thrown into prison for being Muslim who refuses to shave their beard?
Let me know when anyone is actually allowed to verify what is happening there, until then comparisons are useless.
FYI: Things like fast food franchise remodels regularly have American forced labour doing a lot of the CAD/CAM work. If you eat at American franchise restaurants, you support American prisoner slave labour. [edit] here is a pretty government website promoting you to use slave labour: https://www.unicor.gov/Category.aspx?iStore=UNI&idCategory=1...
here is the US Constitution 13th Amendment banning slavery:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
You are very generous with your interpretations, I admire your optimism in how civilized comments in Internet are.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Along with this one:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
They are all honestly pretty great: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See, for instance, on this page where Hume speaks of civilized versus uncivilized forms of government: “This chapter examines Hume's conception of government. It considers three forms of government that Hume distinguishes: barbarous monarchy, civilized monarchy, and free government (with its two subdivisions, limited monarchy and republic).” So civilized is contrasted with barbarous. https://academic.oup.com/book/12307/chapter-abstract/1618482...
You'd think with SMIC demonstrating 7nm production ( as detailed in depth in this video by Asianometry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQGnwKBxAKk ) you'd think that the US had gotten the hint that the tech cat is out of the bag – or the tech genie has escaped the lamp or whatever metaphor you prefer … A comparison of SMIC's 7nm process versus the competition: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/smic-7nm-truly-7nm-technol...
My prediction is that SMIC joins TSMC, Intel, Global Foundries, and Samsung at the top tier of semiconductor manufacturing by 2030, along with an ecosystem of Chinese design and manufacturing companies. In doing so the West's stranglehold on other companies like Huawei will be over. If Russia can survive the punitive Western sanctions until then it'll no longer be hampered by lack of access to high-end Western technology.
I don't know what this means. Would you explain?
Parent poster likely worked for a US company that was doing a customer upgrade abroad (i.e. exporting US technology) that would have tipped the cluster compute capacity above the permissible limits, unless some older nodes were decommissioned and destroyed.
Will be interesting to see if Nvidia challenges it.
I wonder if Nvidia can use a similar loophole where the chips are clocked at lower rates for export to meet the law but can be "overclocked" with hardware modifications.
I work in CPU design and I wouldn't risk it.
That’s why an individual contributor should not take part in it. It’s better to get a different job.
This is just the first of many ITAR violation stories that I found when doing a quick search. ITAR violations are regularly enforced.
[0] https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/businessman-sentenced-to-o...
Yet ERA-2SM for example had more gain on 10GHz than the 8GHz where the official spec ended at. :)
You'd probably have a hard time claiming that was "peak performance" for the chip if it's underclocked with "nudge-nudge-wink-wink" overclocking available.
Not to mention, H100 is itself made in China and it seems Nvidia is allowed to keep building it there[2].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/chip-challenge-keeping-we...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/nvidia-says-us-government-al...
they don't have to achieve A100 levels in the first go, even Rpi level chips should be enough to give them experience
If china had the layout, they would just get it made in taiwan.
Though Nvidia has probably already sourced some niche provider at a much higher cost elsewhere in anticipation.
Worked on a three 50U rack recently with quad T4's per 2U and we're not even through 10% of that order yet.
We build servers, test them, and ship them (in the US). No fucks given on the technical superiority of the `A100/H100` than parts that may be a generation older.
So when you're playing nation-state hard-ball, since the architectures are _somewhat_ trivially copied upon being published, that means the best checkpoint goes to the one with the fastest GPU's. If China wasn't behind in deep learning, they will be.
Fabbed at TSMC. (I guess we are about to see if SMIC can do their 7nm at scale.)
https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/08/25/china-launches-the-i...
CHINA LAUNCHES THE INEVITABLE INDIGENOUS GPU
…
Here is how Biren says it stacks up on various machine learning workloads, pitting the BR100 against the Nvidia A100:
…
We presume this is for AI training workloads, not inference. The average speedup over the A100 is around 2.6X. It is not clear if the Nvidia machines were using sparse matrix features, which doubles the throughput, or not. Our guess is they were not.
https://www.servethehome.com/biren-br100-gpu-for-datacenter-...
... or we're governed by morons. Take your pick.
Nice that this comes a month after the Pelosis cleared their NVDA holdings. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
They're still doing it. But in the case they get caught the standard fine is $200 and even that gets waived by House/Senate officials. They don't even bother to keep records on violators.
Even if they do they are far away from fabrication.
>They will not trust us again.
China already massively distrusts the West. America tried the Japanese economic model with China (allow your factories to be exported there, remove trade barriers) and it didn't get them very far.
Where do you think most of the electronics is manufactured?
However, they seem to have been catching up fairly quickly - until very recently SMIC have been stuck around 14nm (state of the art in 2013, SMIC in 2019), but they recently announced they have managed to start producing 7nm chips (state of the art in 2018)
They’ll get there eventually though.
SMIC apparently began fabricating at 7 nm without any fanfare.
Then they can ban their products from the US
From war-mongering, using arbitrary embargoes as political retaliation, to farcical business practices (e.g. the ARM China saga), to a lop-sided approach to intellectual property and using the state to remove competition, both China and Russia have proven to act in bad faith, not respect rules-based order and not be a good business/manufacturing partner.
At some point one needs to stop feeding the trolls.
This description fits USA much better than China. Especially the war mongering - China hasn’t invaded anyone for five decades now.
What meaningful sanctions has China imposed? The US has imposed very harsh sanctions against China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and many other countries. Because of the US dollar's position as the international reserve currency, US sanctions are highly effective. Huawei can barely even do business with other Chinese companies, because they're all afraid of getting hit by secondary sanctions.
The grandparent comment poses this as an issue of confronting a China that is behaving unfairly or erratically. That's not what this is about at all. Chinese policy has been relatively stable. In terms of how it treats foreign firms (for example, on IP protection issues), it's been getting progressively better. China doesn't want to rock the boat, because it is still developing and believes that things will go its way if it just smoothly grows its economy.
The real issue is that the US political class is panicking about being eclipsed as the world's top power. The panic began during the Trump administration, but it has now infected both political parties and is consensus in Washington. We'll see more and more disruptive moves like this until one of two things happens:
1. WW3, which everyone on Earth will lose.
2. The US realizes that being #2 isn't that bad.
So what's stopping an adversary from just buying multiple V100s? Or potentially faster accelerators from countries outside the US [4]?
If you're familiar with GPU strong-scaling, please chime in [5]!
[1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.09161
[2] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.04949
[3] - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring21-s...
One the applications they are hungry for.
Especially since China is incredibly advanced in hardware manufacturing and is not at war with the West.
At best, this is just pushing for escalation so they can restrict exports on their side too.
Even, for them. In one of their speech (in France, on a YouTube channel called Thinkerview for those who know), one of their representative quoted a Chinese proverb saying: "Nothing is more favourable than stability, nothing is more harmful than chaos".
Social stability, free markets and long-term peace are in the interest of both parties.
What I am calling for: closer ties and negotiations and collaborative work.
The first step when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Too late for that now, I have to admit.
You mean that the point of no return is already passed and that there is no reason to try to calm down things using diplomacy and cooperation, that it's purely on a power level that there is the solution ?
That kind of cooperation and diplomacy is called coercion and incitement.
The problem is, China and India have grown up now and they are going to behave like adults. And how do adult role models behave in the century XXI? Afghanistan, Lybia, Iraq, that's how.
Meanwhile, Kuril islands: contested by Japan but 70 years under Russian administration.
> any sign of appeasing would be positive
...yada yada doomed to repeat yada yada...
EDIT: Oh I think I get it, you want more cooperation, peace, among humans/countries etc.
Yeah, most people want it, but in today's world, it is increasingly unlikely.
On one hand, I don't like the fact that Western world emphasizes diversity and multiculturalism too much. We are too different, and forcing everyone to accept everyone is just pipe dream. At one point my values will clash with someone else's. I think fences, borders, are good. Deglobalization is good, slower economy is good. Just make sure we don't invade one another (I know, also pipe dream).
I also quite admire Xi Jinping. He is a dictator, and knows that he serves his country, an ethnic nation. He doesn't pretend to care about other ethnic minorities or other nations. He made China great. Hopefully China doesn't invade other countries, and prefer to be defensive.
In short: fences make good neighbors, let's all slow down on (forced) diversity and multiculturalism, let's all go back to our own fences, and cooperate from within the fences. We can visit our neighbors sometimes, have a good laugh, and after that we go home to our own fences.
Cooperation is overrated. I'd settle with peaceful coexistence. It is heaven on Earth.
I don't seek downvote, but I know I will be downvoted for this opinion, just make sure you squint to read the light colored comments.
I'm maybe too dreamy, but I feel we are all prisoners on Earth, until we reach another planet.
And I believe game theory shows that prisoners are better collaborating ;)
As an entrepreneur, if I'd be running NVidia (or just investor in $NVDA), I'd be extremely annoyed that I am forbidden to sell my products to a large market, just because of political pressure.
Regarding your solutions and analysis, I don't know much about China politics other than gifs or memes that I saw on reddit, so I cannot say :D
China is the only old civilization that still strive today. As a country, they are really big. It takes tremendous amount of leadership to bring China to what it is today.
Yes the memes about China are true, like the Uyghur Muslims treatment, the police state etc. But despite all of these, despite the lack of diversity, despite the lack of Western values, they still made great progress. It shows that a nation doesn't need diversity and multiculturalism to be strong.
I'm fine with diversity and multiculturalism, I just prefer the fenced version of it.
To tell the truth, I am scared of China too (and I am scared of their influence and power over my home country, I currently reside in the US). But I respect their strength.
i doubt that is actually true - the old chinese civilization is long gone. It's like saying that the american indian civilization is still here today.
> they still made great progress
they did - and to obtain that progress, they had to open up to world trade, to become part of the international community, and to cooperate.
It's proof that free market and international trade is not zero sum, and that all parties benefit.
But now that progress has been made, the chinese gov't seems to want to usurp more - both politically as well as economically. They desire the advances that their western trade partners enjoy, but don't desire the political freedom, and self-determination that would also come with such advances.
I think the US is not in a good strategic position to overcome china economically, unfortunately. The fact that the US has resorted to politically motivated bans like that is a clear sign. And china has progressed enough that i dont believe such bans will be effective at all - at most it will slow down the progress by about a couple years.
Native American Indian didn't speak English, got obliterated by European settlers, their culture and their language destroyed. The American Indians have zero continuity today. They are a lost people. The Chinese was and still is the same, the Han. Despite Mongol and Japan's invasion, they still retained their culture, their buildings, their language, and their genetic make up.
> they did - and to obtain that progress, they had to open up to world trade, to become part of the international community, and to cooperate.
> It's proof that free market and international trade is not zero sum, and that all parties benefit.
I agree. Hence why they showed that a nation can become strong without forcing diversity. They just stick to their own self, their own culture, and generally absorb world's technology, research, and information. In today's free flow of information, we don't need diversity and multiculturalism.
Although, I argue that diversity and multiculturalism has zero correlation with why US is a strong nation. US is a strong nation simply because this land is abundant, rich, has a lot of river, geographically advantageous, and largely left alone when the whole world was fighting.
> But now that progress has been made, the chinese gov't seems to want to usurp more - both politically as well as economically. They desire the advances that their western trade partners enjoy, but don't desire the political freedom, and self-determination that would also come with such advances.
Yeah, I can understand why the Chinese govt want that. If I were the Chinese govt, I would think the same too. If I were an average Chinese citizen, I'd want the opposite.
> I think the US is not in a good strategic position to overcome china economically, unfortunately. The fact that the US has resorted to politically motivated bans like that is a clear sign. And china has progressed enough that i dont believe such bans will be effective at all - at most it will slow down the progress by about a couple years.
Yeah, totally agree.
Han Chinese is the biggest Chinese ethnic make up.
That’s not what you said.
> Han Chinese is the biggest Chinese ethnic make up.
Didn’t say they weren’t.
Thank you generous Western nation. I hope my contribution, my taxes, my hard work benefits you.
One day I will go back home. I won’t be part of you anymore.
When that time comes, I hope you’ll leave us alone in our own affairs and don’t invade us or bomb us anymore.
Sincerely, A very hard working immigrant who could outwork most of your citizens, who just want to be left alone and prefer peace.
Enjoy encountering millions of people like me in this world. The silent majority.
Often times I wonder why Westerners never really learn that they shouldn't impose their way of life to the rest of the world.
Then I look at social media, and forum like this. I understand.
They still have their superiority complex, deep down to the bone.
> Sincerely, A very hard working immigrant who could outwork most of your citizens
The irony thickens
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/x332z...
See the evil in your people first before judging others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/x332z...
See the evil in your people first before judging others.
US already has inside chaos (and will get way way, way way, way way worse), don't need to worry about other countries chaos.
You should look at the GDP per capita of the US compared to literally every other country in the last 10 years.
i dont think it's wrong to compare the US to IBM. The GDP per capita is high still because the returns from investments made many decades ago (in fact, almost a century ago!) are bearing fruit. I'm talking about highways, infrastructure and research/development.
But those investments will eventually be completely consumed. So what investments are being made today that would replace it?
IBM was still very profitable when their downfall began.
SMIC 7nm: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-chipmaker-smics-7nm-... (ignore the journalist-speculative headline, but pay attention to the following)
> "This low-volume production product may be the steppingstone for a true 7nm process that incorporates scaled logic and memory bitcells. Since bitcoin miners have limited RAM requirements, they likely do not feature the typical bitcell memory that the true 7nm technology definition requires (both scaled logic and bitcell adoption). This chipset likely demonstrates the logic part but not the bitcell aspect," said TechInsights.
Biren: this looks to be diffused by TSMC.
Biren is designed in China, like A100 & H100 are designed in USA.
As long as TSMC is not forbidden to export to China, forbidding only the export of chips designed in USA can no longer affect China, when they have pretty much identical chip design capabilities with USA.
A major reason the US has had sustained influence in the world without using much force is because it has not weaponized trade. It's the reason for the strength of the dollar, the dominance of US tech and finance, and so on. Throwing that away to merely stagger a country that's destined to catch up eventually doesn't seem wise.
Are you sure? All the economic sanctions which the US heaps on "enemy state"s are nothing but weaponizing trade.
US semiconductor manufacturing has a bright future. The next decade will see an amazing push.
To strengthen its claims in the West Pacific, the PRC has embarked on an unprecedented island building program in the region, and turned those islands into military outposts.
Here's a good breakdown of the history of PRC claims in the West Philippine Sea:
If the image generation market is getting too saturated, maybe OpenAI can sell something to the government. No one has deeper pockets.
Hard to see any particular country having the desire or where for all to undertake such an endeavour.
Also China has desire to resolve the civil war by other means.
Wherewithal?
The cheapest solution out of all the possibilities is to just use a back channel to get them, of course.
I doubt, though, that they will restrict the export of the raw material for creating AI: data.
Except these companies do way more than just serve innocent ads, as the Snowden reveals have showed; They are complicit in way more than that.
[SDI]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
[W]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
The only way to really do this is to geo-fence disable the chips.
Just buy less GPUs and run them for more time. It's not like GPU clusters are running at 100% anyway.
(Also, implying China does not have enough money to buy them like that)
"Just get way better at managing compute resources. You know, that area of research every giant, multi-national cloud provider is pouring tons of money into. Just do that."
High tech is still high tech for a reason. Sure, in the long term China is going to get there eventually. But in the intermediate decade or two, there's plenty of time for trade sanctions to work to shape markets.
AMD and Google have already beat Nvidia at the ML accelerator hardware game in the past. Google TPUs have had the edge over Nvidia cards for a few years, and AMD spent almost a decade with an edge in compute over Nvidia at every level. It's just that Google TPUs aren't commercially available and AMD GPUs lacked the software stack and critical mass.
Actually building a fast ML accelerator is far from a monumental task. It's difficult, but well within the reach of a country which fully designed a Top10 processor by itself. And now has the means to manufacture super high end chips.
It's not a case of intermediate decade or two. The Chinese are pretty much already there. They already have at least one indigenous exascale supercomputer and their own 7nm process. They can make an ML accelerator comparable to the A100 if they want to. Believe it or not, there are only so many ways of doing matrix multiplication in hardware. The hard part is lithography, and they did it.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, but SMIC wanted to keep their 7nm production secret to reduce incentives for the US to force ASML to stop 28nm lithography machines, keeping the impression that banning the sale of EUV machinery was enough to stop their advances. That's why they mix everything under 28nm in their financial reports, to show their very strong profitability without tipping their hand.
This has been discovered by studying with an electron microscope some samples of ASICs made at SMIC for crypto mining.
This story has been reported in a large number of publications and it is possible to buy a detailed report with the result of the investigations about the secret 7 nm process of SMIC.
Because of the similarities with the TSMC process, and because it is known that SMIC has hired former TSMC employees, it is believed that SMIC might have copied various parts of the TSMC process, which could be a reason to not bragg about it.
However such copying is not as simple as non-specialists may believe. I have worked in semiconductor manufacturing, and even if you have all the details about how a technological process is done in another plant, when using other equipment you will not be able to reproduce the results without a lot of tweaking and changes.
Having stolen information about how the competition does it is helpful and it can shorten a lot the development time, but it cannot replace the need for a team of competent engineers, able to develop such a process by themselves, even if in a longer time.
Downvoter: Just literally read the news about Jack Ma and BABA and Tencent etc.
If you look at the SMIC earnings report, you'll notice they added a new category called "28nm or less". That's their way of telling investors they have a money factory without telling the US to sanction them even more! Also, a very large part of SMIC >32% is owned by the Chinese state, and their profits have been skyrocketing in recent years.
That is already in the past. They have already designed a datacenter GPU faster than NVIDIA A100 (made at TSMC):
https://www.servethehome.com/biren-br100-gpu-for-datacenter-...
Alibaba has already the fastest per socket server CPU for non-floating-point workloads, which has 128 Armv9 cores and DDR5 and PCIe5 before the launch of Intel Sapphire Rapids and AMD Genoa.
At this time, China is at least at parity with USA in chip design, so no export bans of US chips can hurt them.
Their only vulnerability is the dependence on the superior manufacturing capability of TSMC, so only banning exports from TSMC to China can hurt them (like Huawei was hurt when they were no longer able to make chips at TSMC).
Replacing CUDA programs will take work, but they have enough people for that and this is an easier task than designing a GPU.
Russia did that? Right...
China on the other hand, has already designed faster GPUs than those that are banned now for export to them, so they will not be affected. NVIDIA will be more affected by the ban than China, as they have already announced that they will have to delay the deployment of H100 until they will succeed to migrate the assembly of cards to locations outside China.
Other comments have already provided links to benchmarks comparing A100 with the Chinese Biren GPU.
For example they could set-up a couple of "mining startups" in Dubai, Egypt, Serbia or India. Then buy 1000s of GPUs under the companies name and then put them in a yacht and ship to Moscow.
[1] https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/CIA-Allegedly-Targets-Tu...
So these chips which are banned from going from the US to China, do already go from China to the US.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-us-one-china-policy-and-w...
The US switched its recognition of who represents China from the ROC to the People's Republic of China. Unless the US has now decided that China's sovereign territory has changed, that implies recognition of Taiwan as part of the PRC. This is also the reason why the US simultaneously dropped official recognition of the ROC when it recognized the PRC, as another commenter has pointed out.
However, for decades, the US has preferred to leave this implication unstated, partly so that it can continue to deal unofficially with the ROC.
The recent moves by the US towards actively denying Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan are much more serious than most Americans realize, and could have major consequences. For Americans, Taiwan is just an island across the ocean that they've heard about on the news. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people in China deeply care about sovereignty over Taiwan. That's a recipe for sleepwalking into a conflict.
They are most certainly not capable of doing this without silicon imports. Chinese manufacturing is hopelessly behind for the next decade at least.
So this GPU export ban has come much too late, exactly when it no longer matters.
Is there some fancy new coin out there that people mine with Tesla GPUs?
0. https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/08/25/china-launches-the-i...
The chances of nothing getting through is zero, but it’s harder to do at scale and much more expensive. Plus the US does go after foreigners that help targeted nations dodge sanctions so can make it very miserable for China’s smugglers further exacerbating the shortage in China.
Can someone who actually knows how this kind of thing works comment on how hard it would be to satisfy such a license requirement? Like, presumably the large share of uses are _not_ military ... but is it prohibitively difficult for e.g. a Chinese company legitimately doing lots of ML for consumer products and services to credibly show that they're going to use them only for that purpose? Or is the presumption that eventually if the ban works, the Chinese government would just seize the GPUs from any company that had them, so no non-military uses can get them either?
This is advantageous to the US, or at least it's not as obviously disadvantageous as national competition centered on, say, manufacturing.
The US is never going to compete seriously with China on bulk/commodity manufacturing. But I think that there is a sense that we might have more of a shot competing in very advanced manufacturing (actual die fabrication; the manufacturing of high-end machinery and tooling for such; etc.) and in microprocessor design. Thus it makes sense to try to deny to China the fruits of those industries.
I would assume that the machinery used in high-end fabrication is probably a logical next step, if it's not export-controlled for one reason or another already. (If it's not, some arm-twisting might be required to get the Europeans to play ball, since I think a lot of that stuff is also made in, or made with significant submodules from, the EU.)
EUV lithography machines used in =< 5nm chips already banned by U.S. There's only 10 companies in the world that make these, and only 1 company, ASML, can make the ones for 5nm/3nm chips right now in 2022.
See articles: https://www.google.com/search?q=euv+lithography+machine+chin...
So much for their talk about the future of glorious globalization.
What's worse is that the US is fully aware this could result in another European war, and they coldly calculate that the US mainland would be entirely spared of damage, and that the US would be the single condition for the rebuilding of Europe with unpresedented control over politics, trade, and economy.
Simple mental exercise: imagine Russia or China working out plans with Cuba to set up an MWD-armed military base there, then try to figure out if the US would invade.
Supposedly Greek ship owners are making a killing transporting the oil stuff and helping it change enough hands so that it can be bought from inside the countries that have formally sanctioned Russia. Physically harder to do that with gas, hence why we have the current crisis.
Good luck preventing bad actors from actually selling such illegal items.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-says-india-hid-ru...
Nvidia has been with 5 fabs so far, with at least three generations of GPUs split between fabs.
ST, TSMC, IBM, UMC, and Samsung.
Smuggling electronics beats smuggling drugs, danger-wise.
So you have noticed a lot of retail demand for those consumer goods, what would you do?
I know nothing about this.
"any company or individual can be investigated, charged and sentenced because of a remote link with US jurisdiction, such as a transaction in US dollars, the existence of a subsidiary onto US territory, or an exchange with a US citizen."
I may be wrong (I'm just guessing) but I suppose that this may be one of the non-technical and legal reason crypto platforms prefer USDC or USDT rather than pure USD.
What you mention is about an individual buying from an e-commerce site or a retail seller. That can happen in the local currency.
An example:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rule...
ZTE, a Chinese company, was blacklisted for years and paid something like a billion dollars for evading US sanctions.
It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. If you really don't want to do business with us, you probably want to bank with banks that have connections with us. If you don't play ball with our legal system, we'll go after your assets at your bank, and if your bank doesn't want to play ball we'll sanction them and completely cut them off from any bank connected to us. There is no foreign bank that is "too big to fail" if they don't comply with our courts, and really there aren't any that are going to stand behind somebody else's fraud.
I'm not sure I understand. AI startups are everywhere. It seems it would be trivial to set up a Kazakhstan AI "startup", buy a bunch, then ship them to Russia/China. Or are you saying that any non-governmental entity that would be interested in these would also be interested in the US market? And, someone friendly to the US would eventually peek in their server room and rat them out?
Like everybody involved has to be fine with being airgapped entirely from the western banking system and any allied country or risk quite a long time in prison.
Who's got tens or hundreds of million dollars and wants to risk it evading export controls for a percentage profit?
Perhaps you don't understand, your Kazakstan bank would freeze your funds for the Americans because they didn't want to lose the ability to transact with any bank attached to the US or any bank attached to any bank attached to the US. The financial reach of US courts is long and not many people with lots of resources want to be blacklisted from ever traveling, spending money, or doing any transactions with the west.
And do you think the CIA isn't watching some random ex-soviet satellite state startup with sketchy funding sources buying enough A100s to build a supercomputer and then producing nothing with them? It's their whole job to look for interesting things, and they find them more than is imagined. If you hear about it, they're doing a bad job.
Everybody's entire phone records and so much more are part of an NSA dragnet. Do you really think large transactions for high potency computer equipment is being ignored?
If Kazakh companies suddenly started buying GPUs to go in their datacenter that probably doesn't exist suspicions would be raised.
It's possible that the US got wind of some military/dual-use supercomputers based on A100/H100 and decided to block them but that's just speculation.
> For example, if SHA-256 is used with RSA and a 2048-bit key, the combination can provide no more than 112 bits of security because a 2048-bit RSA key cannot provide more than 112 bits of security strength - NIST SP 800-57 PART 1, Page 58
Warning, PDF: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...
As far as I can tell, at least for components, it's never gotten less restrictive. Any processor considered fast in the late 1980s is still under EAR despite being inadequate for a modern toaster.
It's truly ridiculous trying to manage the US Government's bureaucratic bullshit sometimes. I mean, really, a toaster.
I understand in times of war or conflict, but this seems like deliberate economic sabotage.
China has already designed datacenter CPUs (Biren) and server CPUs (Alibaba Yitian 710) that are as good as those designed in USA and even better in some respects.
So in chip design, USA and China have very similar capabilities.
However both countries are completely dependent for now on the chip manufacturing made in Taiwan.
The difference is that USA can forbid Taiwan to export products to China, like it was done for Huawei, while China cannot forbid Taiwan to export products to USA (except for a successful invasion).
USA needs to improve its domestic chip manufacturing capabilities if it wants to have a real advantage over China, and the large amount of money allocated through the CHIPS Act should help this, even if there is a large risk that much of the money will not be spent wisely.
Nancy Pelosi knew what was coming.
You literally cant make this stuff up lol
Cutting yourself off the massive Chinese market will cause more expensive tech in the west as there are fewer people to sponsor its development.
The M2 integrates an Apple designed ten-core (or eight-core) graphics processing unit (GPU). Each GPU core is split into 32 execution units, which each contain eight arithmetic logic units (ALUs). In total, the M2 GPU contains up to 320 execution units or 2,560 ALUs, which have a maximum floating point (FP32) performance of 3.6 TFLOPs.Not going to happen.
I didn't mean this to snarky, sorry!
At what power-compute capability is worthy of banning? Especially when we saw billions of cores deployed in mining ops...
Maybe there is a GLOBAL-HEAP (or whatever the original CRAY 'heap' sense was called) capability for billions of M1s...
-
SERIOUS QUESTION:
How much malware is mandated as being installed on any chinese product (irrespective that it may be ostensibly an 'Apple' product?)
How do we know that every iphone doesnt have super secret ccp shit?
I mean we fn arrested the HUWAI CFO for same...??
I dont trust shit.
China's repeat statements about how it vows to bring Taiwan into the fold are like the gif of a truck about to crash from multiple angles that never actually crashes: https://c.tenor.com/cD8WqQ-ZGXcAAAAC/truck-crash.gif
The USA would not merely be defending an ally; it would be defending a part of its supply chain that somehow, somewhere along the line, became essential to pretty much every moving part of the country.
Moving enough fab to the continental United States to make a meaningful difference could be done long-term as a matter of strategic policy, but you can't make a change like that fast enough to address the USA's _present day_ geopolitical concerns. For now, Taiwan is kinda important.
That's like saying North Korea is a democracy because everyone calls it the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Yes the US is very much determined to win such a war. A free and independent Taiwan is the linchpin of American foreign policy in Asia. America is willing to spend great fortunes in treasure and blood to keep it that way.
Let me guess you also oppose aiding Ukrainians?
Completely different scenarios.
When was the last time PLA had a live conflict?
In this case, the US is obviously confident it can win. This one is easy to see in this scenario.
China on the other hand questions the commitment of the US: “really, you’re going to go to war to protect Taiwan? It’s China! What do you care?”, and this could be true if geographic and geopolitical realities were different.
But what the CCP somewhat and I think many Chinese citizens misunderstand is that Taiwan isn’t just some island. Taiwan is a crucial linchpin to all of America’s presence and legitimacy in Asia.
So for China (more so Chinese citizens) it’s just some island that belongs to China anyway. Of course China would win and take over because Americans don’t really want to fight or think they can win right?
There lies the miscalculation that leads to the war. It’s not about Taiwan the island, it’s about existential foreign policy for America. The US is extremely determined to maintain the status quo. China misunderstands this and thinks that an invasion over Taiwan won’t lead to an actual war because they don’t understand what the war is about.
Note: When I say China, I mean people who question whether the U.S. is determined to fight a war over Taiwan. Certainly main Chinese including leadership in the CCP understand what’s at stake, which is why they haven’t undertaken an invasion as of yet.
A real military conflict with China near China's front door is another thing. I doubt anyone with some common sense should call that an easy win.
The US has lost a lot of their soft power, beginning with the Iraq war, but exploding during the 45th Presidency. Their failure to convince Germany to drop North Stream 2 is the best example of that loss - particularly the gang of senators which thought it would be a good idea to threaten a harbor with sanctions [1] was perceived as extremely rude here. And a lot of nominal allies are highly skeptical of how reliable an ally the US themselves are, given the very high likelihood of the Republicans getting obstructionist power again either this November or in two years and the lack of decent candidates on the Democrat side.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-us-senators-threaten-ger...
Though I think your point about obstructionist Republicans is well-founded and accurate and extremely accurate when it comes to domestic policies. With that being said I don't see a significant threat there in terms of US vs Russia or US vs China given that even when their vote was mostly inconsequential (i.e. they could try and virtue signal) most members of Congress, either Republican or Democrat, tended to vote to support US efforts against Russian aggression. The Senate was voting something like 99-1 to support Ukraine (don't quote me on the exact bill or bills) when they didn't really need to and could have tried to stick it to the Democrats as war mongering and followed in Trump's footsteps there.
For now it is, the interesting question is if the US voter class is ready to go to war again after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan - at least from an European POV it looks like wide swaths of the population do not want further overseas engagements and wish to reduce military spending in order to have more money available to fix pressing issues (crumbling infrastructure, healthcare, poverty, high energy prices). Additionally, while Trump himself is a very vocal opponent of China and I think Taiwan will be secured even if the Republicans win either of the next elections, it is nowhere near certain that Trump as a President will apply the same towards Russia or other enemies of the Western sphere - particularly not given strong indications of both himself and his close environment being influenced by Russia, both financially and via "kompromat" rumors (e.g. the "pee tape" allegation).
The main threat to the US is dissolution of the democracy, but I think even in that case there would still be strong (maybe even stronger) support for defense of Taiwan because it's an existential issue for the US. For China to invade Taiwan with impunity would dissolve all American credibility in the Pacific and the ramifications of that are significant. It also would kick the US out in terms of trade in favor of China, which would do damage to the US economy.
There certainly is some concern that China may try to engage in a fast, hard engagement with the US and that could cause the US to withdraw, but given the significance of maintaining economic and military interests it's likely that it would just lead to a swift, hard response and from there we're probably in a pretty destructive war. I don't think even Trump or someone similar could prevent a US response here.
What the US can do however, it make the conquest of Taiwan very expensive. Sort of what they're doing in the Ukraine but probably with a shade more direct involvement. China will experience a abrupt cutoff from the US lead international order in addition to some limited skirmishes with western forces. But they also won't be physically prevented by western forces from occupying Taiwan. Western arms and intel will help fuel the Taiwan government until it's defeated. The goal isn't to win. It's simply to make the invasion very expensive.
Now, what I think western leaders are missing in this calculus is that China will not stop at Taiwan. The expense of exclusion from the western system is already priced in. It'll be paid for with additional expansion. So, after a short rest, China will ramp up with the annexation of additional territory within and around the nine dash-line setting up further conflicts with those countries. Taiwan's violent subjugation will give those countries pause and likely result in some combination of territorial concessions or vassalization; similar to the recent integration of the Solomon Islands into China's new extra-national order.
In parallel, Russia will solidify their holdings in western and southern Ukraine. I think at some point they'll test European and Nato resolve with a handful of attacks / incursions. But don't expect Nato to invade Ukraine or Russia anytime soon, because, you know, nukes. Ultimately, I predict Russia will move to finish their conquest of Georgia or accept their capitulation. Armenia will welcome Russian forces and Russia will begin moving further south into the middle east where they'll support Iran in conflict with some of the wealthy but poorly defended Arab states in the late 2020's or early 2030's.
> But they also won't be physically prevented by western forces from occupying Taiwan. Western arms and intel will help fuel the Taiwan government until it's defeated.
I'm a little perplexed because you seem to understand what's at stake, but you don't think the US would fight? All evidence points to the contrary. I mean not only is the US military present, the actual stakes are existential physical and economic security. If you aren't going to fight for those stakes I don't know what you do.
> In parallel, Russia will solidify their holdings in western and southern Ukraine.
I think this remains to be seen. I'm curious about how well Ukraine will do under current operations. It's bewildering to me that Ukraine can just strike and blow up Russian targets with impunity, including in Belgorod which presumably had some sort of air defense capabilities. I don't think Russia wants a fight with NATO unless the goal is to make defeat easier to swallow, because engagement with NATO necessitates a nuclear response from Russia due to what would clearly appear to be a decisive victory for NATO based on Russian performance in Ukraine and I'm not sure Russia wants to use nuclear weapons either. Engagement with NATO seems to be a lose/lose.
The US is talking the talk but won't walk the walk. There remains virtually no political will to fight other peoples battles. This is why politicians from both major parties have argued for leaving NATO. Americans are tired of endless wars and the prospect of another is unbearable. Moreover, a protracted war with China will bring the sort of economic discomfort to the american populace not experienced since world war 2. American's don't have the will for it.
> I think this remains to be seen. I'm curious about how well Ukraine will do under current operations. It's bewildering to me that Ukraine can just strike and blow up Russian targets with impunity, including in Belgorod which presumably had some sort of air defense capabilities. I don't think Russia wants a fight with NATO unless the goal is to make defeat easier to swallow, because engagement with NATO necessitates a nuclear response from Russia due to what would clearly appear to be a decisive victory for NATO based on Russian performance in Ukraine and I'm not sure Russia wants to use nuclear weapons either. Engagement with NATO seems to be a lose/lose.
Russia's war strategy is very different from the west. Where the west see's troop and equipment loses as a negative, Russia views them as a mixed bag. Sure, it sucks to loose hardware but armed peasants will fight harder with the clarity of what loosing means. It's the pattern that won them world war 2 and brought them success in Chechnya.
Now more strategically think about it this way: Russia has no worries about loosing territory in the current conflict with Ukraine. Even if tomorrow they, say, provoke a Nato member by invading it... Nato will respond only to push Russian forces from their territory. Nato will not use nukes fist. And Nato lacks the political will to invade Russia or impose regime change. Since that's the case, Russia can really do whatever they want. Russia's warning to the west remains. Touch our land and we'll nuke you. And given no credible counter to this threat, Western powers will remain very wary of provoking a 'miss-calculation' that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
The same rational exists in Taiwan. So, if China invades Taiwan, Western forces might have a few exchanges with them, but do you really see American boots-on-the-ground fighting and killing hundreds-of-thousands or millions of Chinese troops? When would American troops arrive even? After China starts the war? Because that's what it will take to 'win' for Taiwan. Okay, maybe you think American would do that. That's just defense. Can you imagine American troops landing in China for the purpose of threat neutralization? It'll never happen. Since the west won't violate China's borders China is also secure.
Territorial security is a partial basis of external belligerence. This is the lesson America has been teaching the world for the last 70 years.
I'm not sure this issue over Taiwan, certainly at the State level, is viewed as other people's battles. I think this issue is viewed squarely as what it is, which is global supremacy. And to your point about both parties arguing for leaving NATO, that tends to occur on both the far right and far left, but you see in practice massive support (99-1 kind of votes in the Senate which are unheard of) to support Ukraine even at the risk of escalation and in spite of the energy issues. Gas in the Great Lakes region was pushing over $5.00/gallon and not a single thing changed w.r.t US support for Ukraine. Europe is far more likely to bow out than the US here. But insomuch as both parties may have people who are arguing to leave NATO (which, no surprise is primarily due to Russian disinformation campaigns), virtually nobody is arguing to leave Taiwan to China. You can see continued US + ally action that runs contrary here. I don't believe that there is any evidence to suggest that at least the political leadership and State apparatus of the United States has anything in mind but maintaining dominance.
> Moreover, a protracted war with China will bring the sort of economic discomfort to the american populace not experienced since world war 2. American's don't have the will for it.
I agree that this is a risk, but the US is in a far better position here than China. While Americans may have a hard time obtaining iPhones, Chinese would have a hard time importing food or energy, especially as the US completely cuts off all shipping into the mainland. You're also guessing that this would be a protracted war, when that may not be the case. I'll dig it up if you are interested but the RAND Corporation did a pretty good study about the likely trajectory of the war and surmised that both sides would be incentivized to make the war as brutal and destructive for the other side as possible to get them to capitulate early, but that runs the risk of redoubling efforts to win the war versus capitulation. That is to say, it's possible (perhaps likely) that in the outbreak of a war we eventually wind up in a protracted conflict, but we may also wind up in a position where one side completely dominates the other and the war is short and intense. The scary thing here would be a long and intense war which I believe is most likely unless the US wins decisively and early.
> Russia's war strategy is very different from the west. Where the west see's troop and equipment loses as a negative, Russia views them as a mixed bag. Sure, it sucks to loose hardware but armed peasants will fight harder with the clarity of what loosing means. It's the pattern that won them world war 2 and brought them success in Chechnya.
I agree that Russia views this very differently than the west and it's why so many were surprised by Russia launching the invasion. They'd say things like "but why don't they just stop and sell things and coexist peacefully?" which is to misunderstand what the aim of Russia is here. However, that being said Russia's strategy, as you argue, of just losing troops until they win only works to the extent that they don't lose too much military equipment. This isn't the Red Army. You can also see this in the lack of Russia actually fully engaging in the war in terms of conscription, calling it a "special military operation", etc. Putin rightly fears that public opinion would turn against him and the war should Moscow and St. Petersburg and other more ethnically White Russian areas start to feel the effects in terms of a draft or something like that. So the point there is that Russia does have a limit on what it is willing to lose. Putin is in a tough spot as well here and so far has been unable or unwilling to commit fully to the war.
> Now more strategically think about it this way: Russia has no worries about loosing territory in the current conflict with Ukraine. Even if tomorrow they, say, provoke a Nato member by invading it... Nato will respond only to push Russian forces from their territory. Nato will not use nukes fist. And Nato lacks the political will to invade Russia or impose regime change. Since that's the case, Russia can really do whatever they want. Russia's warning to the west remains. Touch our land and we'll nuke you. And given no credible counter to this threat, Western powers will remain very wary of provoking a 'miss-calculation' that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
I completely agree that NATO has no intention or desire to invade Russia, but Russia runs a huge risk here as well of having its bluff called. Russia can do whatever it wants to Ukraine, and Ukraine can strike Russia (as we can see with attacks in Belgorod) without nuclear retaliation. But if Russia were to attempt an invasion of a NATO country, I think Russia military assets within Russia are on-limits in a similar fashion. It's easy to see where the lines are drawn because the US is/was basically towing missiles and equipment to Ukraine and Russia neglected to strike those assets. Both sides intend to keep the war contained to Ukraine for the time being because both sides think they can win. If Russia was serious about the nuclear threats (most of which the bluffs have been called) they would have used a weapon already at the outset of the war and seized the Baltics before NATO had a chance to make sure all members were ready to go. Given Russia's apparently reluctance to truly create a nuclear disaster and they're unwillingness to engage in NATO air assets feeding intel to Ukrainian missiles, you have to wonder what's going on.
> The same rational exists in Taiwan. So, if China invades Taiwan, Western forces might have a few exchanges with them, but do you really see American boots-on-the-ground fighting and killing hundreds-of-thousands or millions of Chinese troops? When would American troops arrive even? After China starts the war? Because that's what it will take to 'win' for Taiwan. Okay, maybe you think American would do that. That's just defense. Can you imagine American troops landing in China for the purpose of threat neutralization? It'll never happen. Since the west won't violate China's borders China is also secure.
Of course you know I disagree that the same rational exists here as Ukraine isn't an existential issue as Taiwan is.
But no I don't see the US undertaking an invasion of China or anything like that because it is both impractical and unnecessary. Troops on the ground to defend Taiwan or help retake the island? Yea, absolutely, unless China engaged in a fast, decisive victory which pushed the US out of the Pacific completely and permanently. Though I think China runs some risks there because Australia and Japan at a minimum will build nuclear weapons out of fear due to the void left by US exit of the region pending the fallout from such a move. But those ships, planes, air bases, troops, etc. aren't in the Pacific just for fun. The US does intend to maintain what I'll call Taiwanese neutrality here and there's absolutely no doubt in my mind we'd be in a shooting war with China over it because the alternative is the US loses everything. Wars happen because both sides believe they can win. That's why we'll be in a war here soon unless something changes in China.
Ultimately I hope for peace and kindness for us all; as I suspect you do too.
How long will it take for the emerging Chinese middle class to force changes internally, move up Maslow's hierarchy, and demand freedom of conscience, speech, religion, assembly, press, petition, and privacy? IMO it's a bit of a race between the Chinese middle class' moderating influence and whatever spark (Taiwan?) sends us tumbling to war. Maybe if we can make it 60 more years (2 generations) without a war, the Chinese middle class will pick up some momentum in demanding their rights. That's the larger, longer-term tragedy of Tiananmen Square, that it set this process back decades (again, IMO).
We're not going to be able to avoid a war with China, because Pooh Bear has to have a scapegoat and the U.S. will be it, but make no mistake, China is on the way down, not up...
Standards of living in China were low very recently, for now middle class remembers this, and not having access to a parallel timeline (plus being under influence of ever-present propaganda) they think they should thank CCP for that. I suspect many of them are dissatisfied Taiwan is not attacked yet, hardly a moderating influence.
As a Chinese have a mostly negative feeling about CCP government, I'm not sure if this is true.
Imagine hypothetically, Chinese government got magically replaced by a democratic regime. Is the intensifying competition between US and China going to stop? I think the same thing like US and Japan competition in the 90's, fuelled by purely economical reasons, will still be there.
While I deeply hope China can get a more liberal government in the future, I don't believe the current concern of US is driven by "belief in democratics".
Also look at non-democratic non-liberal at all countries like Saudi Arab, why US sell F15s to them but have concerns selling chips to China?
Anyway, Chinese determination to recover Taiwan will not change even if her GDPPc is 50k or more. The quest of national restoration will not be abated by a mere richer country.
The importance of TSMC has been vastly exaggerated. In case of war their factories would be destroyed anyway. Remove TSMC and the importance of Taiwan remains exactly the same.
If the USA doesn't protect Taiwan it'll be their Suez canal moment. The moment the British and the French realized they were not great powers anymore.
A majority of Americans support defending Taiwan from Chinese invasion. How much are the Chinese people willing to pay to attempt the largest amphibious invasion since D-Day while being starved of oil and international trade?
In the last 80 years the Chinese have become masters of holding diametrically opposed ideas. I believe they can back down from this without breaking a sweat.
Mining chips don't just simply pay for themselves. If it was cheaper to get the chips fabbed at Samsung or TSMC at any other lithography they'd be fabbed there. The company that made the miners isn't even Chinese. That it was fabbed there means that not only was there yield leftover from whatever state project was required, it was also commercially competitive.
If their yield was abysmal, no one would be willing to buy the chips since they aren't selling them at a loss and have plenty of public sector demand. The fact that they were able to sell them commercially and thus competitively means that their yields are okay at least.
I would consider that a profound hurdle to advancement.
Nvidia has already moved to 5nm (released later this year).
Even with perfect knowledge about how a process is done at TSMC, implementing it in another fab with different equipment requires a very large amount of work done by very competent engineers, to substitute some process steps and tweak the technological parameters for the others.
Someone who succeeds to reproduce a stolen manufacturing process is very likely able to further develop such a process on their own.
Even within a single company, i.e. when having all the technical documentation and when having continuous access to all the people working there, it is extremely challenging to build a second semiconductor plant that will be able to make the same chips as a previous plant, with the same manufacturing process.
It took Intel many years of huge efforts until they have perfected a methodology to "copy exactly", to be able to build additional fabs for expanding the production of an already existing processor.
Of course, and this is partly why they were successful: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-27/synopsys-...
> Someone who succeeds to reproduce a stolen manufacturing process is very likely able to further develop such a process on their own.
And, this is why we'll have to wait and see if their current, successful, strategy will result in future, independent, advances.
Eh, this, and probably others in your list (Nortel breach with 5G is a candidate), weren't really independently developed [1]:
> When the Soviets refused to part with their Su-33 design secrets, China purchased an Su-33 prototype aircraft from Ukraine, dubbed the T-10K-3, and quickly set about reverse engineering it.
> The J-20, ... America’s F-22 Raptor. Plans ... were stolen by a Chinese national named Su Bin, who was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for his crime.
> Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was also compromised by Su Bin, leading to China’s J-31 program
I think it will take some time to see if they can become independent. Or, maybe independence doesn't matter! Copy and improve may end up being a successful strategy.
1. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/g23303922...
And that new world could be dominated by a new technology. Truth is that yes, with enough resources they can catch up technologically as many nations have in the past. That's no big surprise really, being able to produce ones own chips is so useful for defense you'd expect China and India to have that on a priority list somewhere. It wouldn't give them any advantage over other world powers
They do have indigenous CPUs and GPUs.
That's not how tech works. They will master and improve on 7nm, and probably future nodes. But the "reach" isn't 7nm, it's the continuous advancement. Rumors put Nvidia and AMD on 5nm, and Apple on 3nm.
As is, they've shown they can get something very close to the TSMC process working [1], partly by buying talent [2]. We'll have to see how that translates to long term improvements. But, they definitely can't rely on that strategy, long term.
1. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/column_7nm_chips_chin...
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-27/synopsys-...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/baidu-unveils-kunlun-ii-pr...
The models that are trained pushing the H100 to its limits are going to be mind blowing.
Traditional hpc needs a general purpose machine, AI benefits much more from clever but immutable additional hardware.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amd-says-us-told-it-stop-...
I wonder where does Nvidia manufacture them...
My EVGA RTX 3090’s box says “Made in Taiwan”.
the new license requirement will address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia. The Company does not sell products to customers in Russia.
Or at the very least, globalized supply chains and free markets.
In the case of GPUs, the hard manufacturing is not done by USA, only the GPU design is done in USA.
China has just demonstrated that they can design GPUs as fast as those designed by NVIDIA (Biren) so this ban will have only the effect of helping their domestic GPU supplier, who will no longer compete with NVIDIA for sales.
The only effective ban would be one really applying to true hard manufacturing, e.g. forbidding the export of any chips made in Taiwan or elsewhere with 5 nm or better CMOS processes. However, that would really look like a war declaration and not like an ineffective harassment, like the GPU export ban.
I'm wondering what contingency plans US companies have for this? It seems to me like Apple would be screwed. Microsoft's hardware businesses would have problems. Google and Meta and Amazon are probably OK, though it may be tough to build and maintain datacenters, but everyone will be in the same boat.
This would mean catastrophic economic damage. Likely, would be far worse than the great depression. We important so many goods from China.
Err, you other points aside - that's how you'd contest a nail blockade, with an opposing naval force.
Saudis couldn't defend their oil assets from Iran drone attack for example.
[1]: NYT: How China Could Choke Taiwan (https://archive.ph/gS6qb)
Of course it will. US isn't capable of defending TW anymore. They may spoil an invasion, but there's nothing US can do to prevent PRC from trivially destroying infra the keeps fabs operating. You should expect the entire semi supply chain in East Asian (which supplies the world) to stop functioning if US tries to intervene on TW, especially using JP or SKR infra, nearly everythign critical is within 60m PRC missile range. The reality is PRC has much more leverage over global semi supply chain in even of war vs US who has leverage during peace via sanctions.
> major reliance
Are all in US in terms of high tech industry supported and actual patent fees extracted from production of semi. PRC will lose bunch of manufacturing jobs, but indigenous semi efforts will keep chugging along. Both will be reset to as far back as 1980s tech depending on how PRC escalates, which ultimately cripples US as tech leader more.
Lot harder to justify a new PC when no longer receiving a paycheck, though it will likely be even more important to have one then.
Just got a new System76 machine and I have to say, I'm really loving it.
Hard times ahead, unfortunately after that, it's even harder times.
For more than a decade money was more or less free and the only sane choice for investors was to pour cash into anything that might one day get big enough to magically flip the profit switch and make a huge amount of net positive revenue.
I thought the pandemic would be the end of the tech boom, but I was wrong. Not only did more money get pumped into the market but into consumers wallets as well. This led to extremely rapid expansion in the tech industry as investors were willing to pump even more cash into any company (hoping for a rapid IPO and a the ability to cash our there chips before the casino closed) and consumers had a surprising amount of extra cash lying around from being locked up for months.
Unfortunately reality has started to show it's ugly face. Inflation is starting to hit hard, not because of the money supply, but because we are hitting some real resource limits due to a combination of supply chain problems and the Russian war with Ukraine (which, to be fair, is also happening because of resource strain). These are not temporary causes of inflation.
This has caused the central banks to rapidly attempt increase interest to combat this inflation. Ending the era of cheap cash. This is coupled with the fact that things cost more so consumers also can't spend as much (even though they are also taking on more debt then ever, an unsustainable trend).
Sure inflation is cooling a bit but that's largely because of a drop in oil prices (at least in the US) which is a political play from the democrats resulting the record low strategic oil reserves in the US (since 1984) [0]. This cheap oil cannot be sustained and will end after the next election cycle.
The immediate impact of all of this is that direct to consumer companies are seeing an immediate hit (e.g. streaming service subscribers are churning faster than ever). Then non profitable ad revenue companies start to take the hit (see Snap's layoffs today). Next it will be non profitable B2B. But then we'll start to see how much of those profitable companies bottom lines comes form non-profitable companies.
This will have a cascade effect, since as I mentioned, it won't be as easy for us tech workers to find an new job with anywhere near the same TC. As a 200k+ engineer, consider all the crap you pay for without thinking of it because you don't have to. All the ubers and door dash orders that are surprisingly pricy to the average person, but really a brainless decision for any tech workers.
It's just getting started. If you work at a B2B tech company I encourage you to go poke around your internal data and look at how your customers are doing. I promise it's not great.
Then look at the state of venture funding [1]. Sure it's still above 2018 levels but it's rapidly falling. The start up scene is going to dry up quickly.
There's is more I could dive into but this is a good start.
0. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/crude-us-emergency-r...
1. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/venture-trends-re...
+ with such goods if you are in the EU, you have up to 14 days to send them back and get a full refund, so basically you have 14 days to resell them double the price with no downside risk.
ideally you know an insider working there to reserve the products for you.
The headlines about Taiwan, I'm guessing, basically add up to a lot of desire by the media for eyeballs for ad revenue and a lot of face saving by Xi, that is, don't let the media and politician talk erode the long existing images and status of Taiwan.
Net, China has plenty to do now without making a big, real issue about Taiwan.
But there is no force guaranteed to keep Xi from making a mistake. E.g., he had China muscle into Hong Kong and violate the "one country, two systems" promise.
I'm guessing that if Xi does to Taiwan what he did to Hong Kong, then TSMC will be producing in the US and on their way out of Taiwan will junk their factories so that China gets nothing.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581022...
Note a User-Agent header with an email address is required for accessing www.sec.gov.
https://www.sec.gov/os/accessing-edgar-data
Normally I do not send a UA header so I configure the localhost forward proxy to add one automatically for www.sec.gov
It does not appear that the SEC verifies email addresses sent in UA headers.
A suprising policy for accessing public information hosted by a taxpayer-funded organisation.
I am not a "bot", I just prefer not to use Chrome/Chormium-based/Safari or other graphical browsers. I use a text-only browser. Generally, SEC filings are just text.
Now China announces a powerful GPU.
https://videocardz.com/newz/hackers-now-demand-nvidia-should...
https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/08/25/china-launches-the-i...
The grand tour.
I've never heard of this term before. Anyone know what companies it's supposed to include?
I think this ban will result in worse off situtation for both countries. China is a huge market for Nvidia after all. While China will become ever more isolated in the landscape of AI/Graphics community, which is a big bad news for it apparently.
China will create its own GPUs eventually, but probably with an incompatible standard that suits only Chinese market. Like Japan in 80s/90s.
If high speed trains are anything to go by (China sends regards to the California High Speed Rail Project) then the US will be left behind by the end of the decade.
Which I don't think is a given, it will become more like cold wars, where market access will become limited to allies only.
https://howmuch.net/articles/trade-timelapse-usa-china
Most of the world trades more with China than with the USA, if it is contingent on that then not only does China have access they are most often the biggest trading partner.
> it will become more like cold wars, where market access will become limited to allies only.
Yes, it seems like the USA has admitted marketplace defeat and will proceed to isolate themselves as much as possible.
edit.... but apparently the AMD MI200 datacenter chips are subject to this
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amd-says-us-told-it-stop-...
> Aug 31 (Reuters) - Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O) on Wednesday said U.S. officials have told it to stop exporting its top artificial intelligence chip to China, according to a spokesman.
> The company said new license requirements prevent shipment of its MI250 chips to China but it believes its MI100 chips are not affected by the new requirement.
A close analogy might be to East and West Germany: both agreed that there should be just one place called “Germany”; they just didn’t agree on who should be in charge of it.
Which is only ridiculous and unknown to consumers of China and Russia MSM.
It's not China, because of too much history.
To start, why Taiwan exists?
Its roots are related to how China became a republic in first place, when the Emperor was booted from power, China quickly became the land of warlordism, with generals treating their subordinates as personal army, and each warlord promoting a different ideology.
Although officially in history books people separate the period as many smaller civil wars, the fact is that China is having a single civil war that started back when the monarchy ended.
Taiwan itself originated when one of the groups in the civil war (The right Kuomingtang, beacuse by the way, the "Left Kuomingtang" is a thing and one of the few legal parties in China) was losing the war on mainland China, and had a golden opportunity in Taiwan:
Taiwan had been conquered some time before by Japan, and after WW2 ended, it was returned to China, the governor of Taiwan was very corrupt and ended pissing off the population that rioted, so Kuomingtang sent soldiers there to massacre the rioters (alongside a lot of random people). After a while they ended just sending everyone over and basically conquering the island by force.
So in a way, communist party "won" the civil war, they had almost the entirety of Mainland China, and started their communist dictatorship.
Meanwhile, Kuomingtang as they arrived on Taiwan, concluded the Taiwanese were too "japanified" and weren't "chinese enough", and decided that the right thing to do is murder people and terrorize them until they become Chinese, similar to what Mao was doing to "not communist enough" people. People call this period of time the "white terror"
So currently there are three positions about this:
1. Mainland government and a lot of people living there, support the idea Communist party must finish winning the civil war and erase Kuomingtang from the face of the earth, and take Taiwan.
2. Kuomingtang still exists, and their supporters among Taiwan's population believe they should prepare and then fight back, and win the civil war, wipe communist party out of the face of the earth, and re-take mainland China.
3. A variety of people, including a lot of native Taiwanese and pro-japan Taiwanese, want Taiwan to be a real country, that is not China, those that are more dictatorial in views want both the Communist party and the Kuomingtang gone.
Views 1 and 2 are both called "one china policy" and is how you manage to have strategic ambiguity. View 3 is what communist party is accusing Pelosi of spousing.
As for Taiwan current views: officially the government mostly claims there is one China, to avoid resuming the hot war. But pro-independence parties been making gains in elections. It might be just a matter of time until someone officially declares independence and the temporary (even if long lasting) truce ends.
I know a little some Taiwanese people, and can say they have a variety of views, one of the most obvious ones is a guy making indie games that put flag of Taiwan on his games splash screen with the phrase: "If you are not in favor of Taiwan independence you aren't human, and fuck Kuomingtang". I won't say name of games don't ask.
This is a rather outdated caricature. If anything, Kuomintang is now seen as being too soft on the PRC. Of course, the KMT is not a homogeneous blob and there are diverse viewpoints vis-a-vis Cross-Strait relations within the party. But there is zero support for taking the mainland by force.
The majority wish is peaceful reunification, with a small (but growing) wish for independence.
How is he going to make 5 Trillion in ShareHolder Value by 2025?
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We don't need to "officially" recognize Taiwan when many congress folks invest heavily there. Don't unplug the circuit that feeds you.
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https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/442...
Whit the the new delegation headed to Taiwan, they probably do not want to upset the Logan Act:
The Logan Act (1 Stat. 613, 18 U.S.C. § 953, enacted January 30, 1799) is a United States federal law that criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized American citizens with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States. The intent behind the Act is to prevent unauthorized negotiations from undermining the government’s position.[2] The Act was passed following George Logan’s unauthorized negotiations with France in 1798, and was signed into law by President John Adams on January 30, 1799. The Act was amended in 1994, changing the penalty for violation from “fined $5,000” to “fined under this title”; this appears to be the only amendment to the Act.[2] Violation of the Logan Act is a felony.
If we officially recognize Taiwan - then we are in dispute with China - and that fucks up a lot of things.
Its also why certain investments are funneled through Proxy Countries, such has been done recently through Ukraine...
Fun fact about laws: yeah you do. You can only litigate the letter of the law, not the spirit. If the law says "you cannot export to China" and the fabs are in Taiwan, then either NVidia's breaking the law by default, or they're not and the US officially recognizes Taiwan as not being part of China.
Whether that's what they intentionally went for when they wrote this: preeeetty sure it wasn't, but they just created a potentially massive legal situation.
So "by default" the US already "officially" recognizes Taiwan as "not China." I think the mistake here is confusing de facto with "officially."
(To put it another way: even assuming your point that "technically" the US could try to prosecute Nvidia for this and a court would get the question of "is this China" - but do you actually think the US will? Or will they continue to walk the same line they've walked for decades in the same situation?)
Yes, that's literally what the original question was?
China cared a lot. For sure, the US didn't believe china would do anything.
The stance of the US is clear though. China is under US protection.
Doubly so in light of the recent 1.1 billion dollar military aid deal: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/biden-adm...
>China's final warning
It's hilarious when people daftly throw this Soviet meme from the 60 which ended in Sino-Soviet border war in 69. PRC has gone to war with US+UN, USSR, India... threatend UK over HK handover, and supplied Vietnam against France over security concerns much smaller than TW. That makes PRC the only country who has no qualms with going hot with EVERY NPT nuclear state. China's final warning has consistently preluded to war.
https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/156511407338962534...
https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1476589270454390787
Similarly Rand Paul, if he tried to insider trade, lost money too.
https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1425981488408010756
Remember, most of the time, the boring normal story is the accurate one.
That body language is pretty damning
This is just another form of reporting an executive "suddenly sold a bunch of stock" (when they filed a 10b5-1 plan about it months ago).
Semiconductors involve the most advanced manufacturing in human history, and even with blueprints of chips, China is decades behind other countries/companies who have fabs and would have no way to manufacture the chips.
If it was as simple as "steal blueprints", they would've built their own homegrown fabs that rival TSMCs, but they haven't. This is the same reason they haven't managed to build a modern jetliner that can even remotely compete with Boeing and AirBus. For certain types of products, having the blueprint is only half the battle, you need the manufacturing know-how to actually produce something that advanced, at scale, and at high quality.
And similarly, I can say that rather than put up an argument of value that stands on its own, you had to add barely related political commentary at the end of your ramble. This shows someone not arguing in good faith or trying to better understand a topic, but who just wants people to know their views on something.
So the only thing "classic" is your classic conservative rambling talking points that I've heard a thousand times. Try to have a conversation about a topic without injecting commentary on the political figures your type seems to be hopelessly obsessed with.
It's no different than China's COMAC who's domestically build airliner largely importing various Western components and integrating them. Just because they integrate the GE / Safran LEAP engine in their airliner, doesn't give them the IP or the capability to manufacturer that said engine.
And I got downvoted. Shows you how good karma works for information not well distributed.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/05/us_expands_efforts_to...
If the US wants to maintain its hegemonic hood over the world — it best not be relying on these kinds of strategies.
Overall, when thinking about potential war, I think my country is a much better example to rationalize what might happen when compared to situations like ex-Yugoslavia scenario. This isn't meant to say it's not bad here, in Ukraine, because it absolutely is, and some places like Mariupol were hell (up to 100k civilian casualties, I pray for their souls).
However, globally speaking, you can extrapolate the events to the capacity of each country to be self-sufficient when it comes to the basics like food, energy and some manufacturing. So yeah, while the war with China would be a terrible development, US has a lot of resiliency and ability to produce everything domestically, even if it means that inefficient companies and bloated bureaucracy will have to go (maybe favor subsidizing STEM degrees over cancelling student debt for people majoring in gender studies?).
Keep in mind that complex organizations at some point start to survive not because of the complexity of their procedures but in spite of them. So when crisis happens, provided the organization is resilient enough and adapts through pain, the outcome is not as bad as it seems.
Sounds like a blatant propaganda BS for a city with 400k population in regular times. A significant portion of population has left the city before fighting reached it and the Russian army has absolutely no incentives to intentionally kill one the most loyal (to them) populations.
Well, it's technically true, since any number between 0 and 100k will fit.
If you are a EU or US resident, I suggest reconsidering the news you are reading, because you are spreading lies that benefit people who see you as an enemy.