Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

And so then Russia buys them via Armenia or Kazakstan for a 30% markup...

The only way to really do this is to geo-fence disable the chips.

It would take them years to acquire the GPUs at the scale that they need them. By the time they do that they're 2 generations behind. It's about adding a barrier.

This doesn't sound right to me. As a back-of-the-envelop calculation how much realistically would say the Russian government need? Even if they need in the league of 10,000s annually I think it would be easy for them to source this from a handful of friendly countries in a couple of months.

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.

The barrier has been added too late. They have already made their first datacenter GPUs and they are no longer dependent of NVIDIA.

Replacing CUDA programs will take work, but they have enough people for that and this is an easier task than designing a GPU.

> made their first datacenter GPUs and they are no longer dependent of NVIDIA

Russia did that? Right...

You are right that the export ban for GPUs is much more likely to hurt Russia, who are nowhere near of being able to have their own GPU architecture.

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.

I literally know people who fly into Russia with entire disassembled gaming rigs in their suitcases (and do their best to avoid customs) from Turkey, etc. I'm sure if the Russian government needed these, they'd set up an operation to let them through. Russia is not as closed off as people seem to imagine.

This is about A100 and H100 GPUs which are for datacenters. To put how many an adversary would need into perspective- Frontier uses 37,888 GPUs.

Good points

Depends on what you're really trying to do. Having to pay that putative 30% markup on hardware is going to be a crippling disadvantage for a China-based AI product, for example.

It'd be higher than 30%. As larger orders would likely get a discount off MSRP. Where-as buying through a middleman removes that 'bulk order' discount

It's also going to be a 30% additional discount on Chinese TPU equivalent chips, especially since they have 7nm production now. I foresee it backfiring.

That depends on how SMIC's ramp goes. Right now they're shipping what amount to samples only. And even then there's no chips to fab absent more development work. Making a ML accelerator is hard. If AMD and Intel (actually Google and Tesla seem closer) can't beat NVIDIA, you really think Goodix is going to get it done?

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.

Are they? Do you know why China stopped submitting any supercomputers to Top500 despite widespread reports of two exascale supercomputers coming online? And why would they prioritize commercial chip sales over national security projects?

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.

> They can make an ML accelerator comparable to the A100 if they want to.

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).

Your contention is that SMIC is successfully operating a high volume 7nm process... in secret? What potential incentive would they have to do that? This isn't a spy novel; if a company has a money factory they tell their investors about it!

Why they do this can be only guessed, but it is a fact that SMIC has made chips using a 7 nm FinFET CMOS process very similar to the TSMC 7 nm process.

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.

previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639681

They have an incredibly strong incentive which is to buy as many 28nm lithography machines as possible before the US forces ASML not to sell those as well! So they wanted to keep 7nm production secret for as long as possible, because the US operated on the incorrect assumption that blocking EUV sales was enough to stop SMIC from moving forwards.

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.

There is no company and yes it's a spy novel.smic and moat tech companies are being subdued and converted into CCP pawns.

Downvoter: Just literally read the news about Jack Ma and BABA and Tencent etc.

Hmm ... kind of ...

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 buy less GPUs and run them for more time. It's not like GPU clusters are running at 100% anyway

"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."

This is not it.

Lol, how would geo-fencing even work/help here?

At the price of those things, bake a GPS IC deep into the chip

GPS wont get a signal in many datacenters given the amount of EM radiation

I've seen plenty of racks in my time with stuff like this installed https://www.gpssource.com/products/irms18-gps-integrated-rac...

That product mentions the roof antenna in the description.

GPS is not hard to spoof.

That could also be a good way to get their sales banned to Armenia and Kazakhstan.

And then Kazakhstan buys them from the Saudis or from Turkey, who are de facto US allies (Turkey is even a NATO member, a big one). The US can try and do something about it, as supposedly the CIA has just tried to do a couple of weeks ago in connection to the recent sanctions against Russia, but what do you when the Turks tell you to shove it? (which is what Turkey's response to the CIA demands was). This is one of the "best" sources I could find in English [1] because, obviously, the Western media has not reported on it.

[1] https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/CIA-Allegedly-Targets-Tu...

Bingo. The current work-around to get electronics to Russia is via Dubai. It's harder with Turkey because their airlines don't allow lithium batteries for safety reasons.

any vendor has an owner who very likely enjoys traveling to the west, banking there etc. risking being on some black list for a marginal gain is not very attractive prospect

Hackers always find a way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com