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Comment by JustExAWS | Hacker News Reader

Right now, for the US national interests, our biggest concern is that Intel continues to exist. Intel has been making crappy GPUs for 25 years. They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now.

Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA?

Everyone designs better GPUs than Intel - even Apple’s ARM GPUs have been outpacing Intel for a decade even before the M series.

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> They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now.

But that's exactly what they started doing with Battlemage? It's competitive in its price range and was showing generational strides.

> Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA?

ML is starting to trend away from CUDA towards Vulkan, even on Nvidia hardware, for practical reasons (e.g. performance overhead).

Intel has been trying to make decent GPUs for 25+ years. No company is going to invest billions buying Intel GPUs - especially not the hyper scalers.

Why does it matter if Intel exists if they can't compete? AMD exists. The only point of hoping they remain is to create an environment of competition as that drives development and progress.

Though fair and free markets is not at all what the current regime in the US believes in, instead it will be consolidation, leading waste, and little innovation and progress.

AMD doesn’t have a foundery. They are irrelevant.

Well, I guess enjoy using your 3rd world Intel GPUs. A shitty foundery is irrelevant.

Intel isn’t that far behind. But it is dumb to depend on fabs in a country that is just one Chinese missile away from getting destroyed.

And why would they when TSMC is in both China and the US in some fashion?

And Taiwan is forbidding TSMC from building their cutting edge fabs in the US…

https://www.asiafinancial.com/taiwan-says-tsmc-not-allowed-t...

That may have changed since then. But do you really want to depend on a foreign government for chip manufacturing?

As Taiwan should, it's their prerogative. People often think when global policy changes abruptly everything stops; in reality, the contrary is true: supply chains and demands shift.

For what it's worth, its TSMC's expertise in semiconductor manufacturing that has been loaned to the US, not bought, settled, and forgotten.

That's most of the world, including the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...

So you don’t see the difference in the threat level of China bombing and invading Taiwan - which they already claim they own - and China attacking the US directly?

I don't, because I'm not in the US. But my comment was in reply to the actual text of the grandparent, not some imagined subtext between the lines.

So its just an imagined subtext that China that has been rabble rousing about taking over Taiwan is more likely to attack a tiny island nation right next to than attack the US?

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