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New Chinese GPU Maker Moore Threads Unveils the MTT S60 GPU
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago6 teraflops is on par with the NVidia Titan V, from 2017
- AbuAssar 4y ago
- daneel_w 4y agoThat's a less interesting question on the whole. But, it quite likely does.
- WithinReason 4y agoThe bigger question is, does it violate any patents? Not necessarily intentionally, but because there's only so many ways you can build a GPU and (almost) all of them are patented already. Apple themselves failed to build a GPU from the ground up, so it's actually difficult.
- Retric 4y agoMany of those core GPU patients must be expiring right now. The GeForce 4 is 20 years old at this point, and many newer technologies are going to have significantly older patents.
- WithinReason 4y agoThat's right, but then you're building a GPU with 20 year old tech
- Retric 4y agoIt’s a question of wiggle room. Foundational patents are generally a lot harder to work around.
- speed_spread 4y agoEven with 20 year old design, you'd be using modern process which in itself should make room for significant improvements in scaling, frequency and power usage.
- ac29 4y agoYeah, but it would still be stuck at supporting something like DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.3 (like the GeForce4). It would certainly be faster and more efficient but modern games and other software wouldn't run on it.
- MichaelBurge 4y agoThe hardware seems separate from the software interface. Projects like WINE can convert DirectX calls to OpenGL or Vulkan calls, so it seems like a driver update could support a newer interface if needed. For something that isn't supported at all like raytracing, those API calls would have to be dropped so you'd get a blank screen or only a UI. But something polygon-based, maybe you could drop the resolution and polygon count and that could be translated to the newer API.
- _kbh_ 4y agoThis isn’t entirely true. The software that a GPU supports (DX version, etc) is directly tied to certain specifics about the hardware. Have a look at the “Shader model comparisons” to see an example of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Level_Shader_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Level_Shader_Language
- imtringued 4y agoAre there any patents blocking GPUs from implementing all features of SPIR-V?
- inetknght 4y ago> does it use any stolen ip? > The bigger question is, does it violate any patents? The former implies the latter. On the other hand if the IP isn't stolen but would still fall afoul of the patent then I would argue that the patent is wrongly provided. Patents don't exist to protect obvious implementations. I'm not a lawyer but we all know patent law is all kinds of fucked up.
- jhgb 4y ago> The former implies the latter. Isn't it the reverse? Patents are one of the several forms of IP that one can violate, so the latter should imply the former.
- nynx 4y agoWho cares? Intellectual property frankly makes no sense if you don’t worship money.
- causality0 4y agoIt makes sense if you have one scheme that creates that is choked out by a different scheme that copies instead. Eventually there is no creation.
- tovej 4y agoPatents also choke creativity, and arguably in a worse way. If you can't remix existing ideas, how are you supposed to create anything useful if you need to come up with an alternative scheme to every component problem that has already been solved but is already patented.
- FpUser 4y agoYeah, it had taken me 10 years of heavy R&D investments to come up with this ingenious idea that the phone can have rounded corners. /s Sorry but the situation now it that one can not even fart without breaking some patent. It is ridiculous, serves only big corps and keeps smaller companies under constant threat of litigations they can not afford. And most of the patents are plain obvious. I was once asked to come up with the idea of how to implement some XXX feature. It had taken me about 10 minutes to "invent" the main approach and then couple of days to spec it down to such form that it could be given to subcontractor. Upon checking however we've easily found at least 10 patents covering this exact XXX. And this is everywhere. From a tool to compensate the inventors the patents system has become a tool to serve fat cats.
- JaimeThompson 4y agoShould all software be licensed as public domain or the closes available to PD in countries that don't allow public domain software?
- nynx 4y agoSoftware is a lot less important than patents. Patents should not be allowed or should expire in a year.
- machinekob 4y agoAs it is in China you can bet on it. There were no major china tech company that product something and do not steal tech from "west" yet (maybe there are smaller companies but no big tech got it yet).
- jbay808 4y agoDJI seems pretty big. Whose tech are they stealing?
- chaboud 4y agoThey scuffed with Autel and initially lost (but then had that patent invalidated), and their currently brewing fight is with Bell Textron for camera control. (This is just a quick googling. I have no skin in this game either way, but I believe that the assertion that Chinese companies always steal is a bigoted position to take. Perhaps a more accurate description would be that IP is most commonly held by incumbent businesses, and businesses in China in new segments are, necessarily, new to market.)
- chrischen 4y agoI think the last point you make is a big one, and partially used to justify the Chinese industry behavior. Basically China is late to the game and if they follow Western rules they will be perpetually behind, partially because such rules are obviously designed to preserve wealth. That being said, there is still plenty of legit innovation coming from China and Chinese founders/contributors: ant framework for react, vue, tiktok. I don’t think it’s a coincidence a lot of the innovation is in the software sector, especially ML, which has less incumbent IP protections.
- randyrand 4y agoDJI is mostly an assembler.
- qiskit 4y agoHope so. IP is rent seeking and should be abolished. Or china might as well demand everyone pay IP for firecrackers or paper. India, middle east, ASENA, africa, etc should steal as much IP as they can and develop. Just like china did. Just like the US did. Just like everyone did.
- cscurmudgeon 4y agoShould Russia also do the same? Going back a year, would a similar statement apply to Russia too?
- dataangel 4y agoTime limited "rent seeking" that feeds the technologists necessary to develop the technology. In the absence of IP businesses just rely on obfuscation to try to get the same effect, except now you don't have a patent application to read and can't take someone to court for stealing your years of research.
- t0suj4 4y agoExcept that it is used now to drive companies out of business. I honestly think that it has done more damage than benefit. IMO If the funds used to prevent people from applying technology would be used to fund research instead, the gains would net at least zero. Right now the benefits are localized to jurisdictions that don't care about IP. It is impossible to measure how much could have been gained from businesses that never existed due to uncertainty arising in the jungle of IPs.
- 4y ago
- ksec 4y agoDepends on how you define stolen in this context. It uses GPU IP from IMG commonly known as PowerVR, the same technology powering current Apple's GPU and some Mediatek SoC. And IMG the company is now wholly owned by Chinese Private Equity Fund. The fund acquired IMG when Apple claimed to no longer be using any of their IP and caused their market valuation to drop by more than 70%.
- StopDarkPattern 4y agoAnd has 100% appropriated Western hero names.
- marcan_42 4y agoApple GPUs have little to no IMG technology left. You can tell there is some remaining influence in the design, but Apple's is much better and cleaner and what IMG's GPUs should have been.
- ksec 4y ago>Apple GPUs have little to no IMG technology left They still uses PVRTC and are still licensing and paying IMG royalty. Surely if there were little to no IMG tech left Apple could have simply stopped paying them and dont renew the contract. They are not paying substantially less royalty than they were previously either.
- marcan_42 4y agoWhat the lawyers do and how the technology actually works are not necessarily related. The shaders are completely different, the controller is completely different, the command submission structures are different. Sure, it's still a tiled architecture and they probably have to keep PVRTC for compatibility and pay the royalty for that, and you can see some remaining PVR influence in the design. But it's not PVR, and quite possibly has zero actual PVR technology left (as in silicon IP from IMG). They're probably only paying patent royalties. We know this because we're reverse engineering AGX and IMG just dumped an upstream submission to Mesa and now anyone can compare them. PVR's architecture is, for starters, a lot more insane than Apple's.
- MangoCoffee 4y agoi don't think so. the gpu is based on ip from Imagination Technologies. the company is sold to China. unless MTT didn't licensed the tech from Imagination
- jonkoops 4y agoInteresting, are the Linux drivers upstreamed or is this another proprietary GPU driver?
- casta 4y agoIt looks like Imagination is trying to land their user space drivers for Rogue GPUs in mesa3d: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15243 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15... In parallel, they're working on upstreaming the kernel bits too: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/frankbinns/powervr/-/tree/powervr-next https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/frankbinns/powervr/-/tree/pow... Their ISA is here: http://cdn.imgtec.com/sdk-documentation/PowerVR+Instruction+Set+Reference.pdf http://cdn.imgtec.com/sdk-documentation/PowerVR+Instruction+...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- curling_grad 4y agoIs "Moore" of the company's name is the "Moore" of Moore's law? If so, I wonder why one would name his/her company after their competitor's founder.
- ramesh31 4y agoSame reason I have a $25 pair of "Tesla" brand sneakers from Amazon. The Chinese are as obsessed with American brands as we are.
- throwaway4good 4y agoYeah - because Tesla is a classic all-American name, right?!
- hulitu 4y agoYes, today Tesla is a classic all-American name. I really doubt that many people heard about this obscure guy called Nikola Tesla.
- spzb 4y agoDepends on whether they've seen S12E04 of Doctor Who https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9354212/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9354212/
- GauntletWizard 4y agoEven when he was working, the majority of his output was as a naturalized American Citizen, on American soil. Tesla is as classicly an American name as Edison, Eisenhower, Truman or Monroe - It's an immigrant name from a country of immigrants.
- MathYouF 4y agoIn case anyone reading this is interested in specific historical information the origins of the listed last names in order are English, German, English, and Gaelic Here's a census of immigrants roughly around the time Tesla was working in the U.S. (1910's), showing the relative percentages from each region (a point of comparison which is not even accounting for the ones who came from the above regions before this time): https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/volume-1/volume-1-p11.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjavquz5Ir3AhVnDkQIHeYLDUEQFnoECBEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1rPaO2RoNqUfQJIMRElqx_ https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/... It's good to read the facts of history rather than hear trite historical narratives. In this case, it seems inbound immigrants from the Balkans made up just 1.6% in the 1910's. I'm pretty sure the intention of saying a last name is "all-American" is to comment on the relative statistical frequency of it in a population at any given time, since that is a name people in another country (like China) would associate and know because of their likelihood of seeing it. But again, a lot of people discuss historical narratives rather than historical facts, so the above poster is not uncommon in continuing that tradition of pushing a trendy idea rather than discussing facts and information.
- bcatanzaro 4y agoImportantly, it appears some of their GPU comes from Imagination Technology. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinas-little-nvidia-has-a-big-secret-its-homegrown-ai-chip-isnt https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinas-little-nvidia...
- throwaway4good 4y agoEven if relies on TSMC and IP-blocks purchased from other companies - it is still cool that a 2-year old startup can create graphics card that appears to compete with what giants like NVDIA and AMD are offering.
- ferminaut 4y agothere is no price, there is no power usage, the rated fp32 is roughly on par with a video card that is 6 years old now. unless it's crazy efficient (at 12nm I doubt it), I wouldnt say it's competing with the giants.
- nwatson 4y agoBut maybe it can be sold in Russia.
- keewee7 4y agoDoubt it. It's either manufactured in Taiwan or by a Taiwanese compant in China.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rjzzleep 4y agoIt doesn't matter. You could always still buy everything in Iran regardless of what's sanctioned. Engineering firms were actually a bit upset because even though they wanted to buy licenses for e.g. STAAD Pro, they were forced to use pirated copies. At the end of the day the sanctions will do nothing but increases prices. The goods themselves won't stop flowing.
- edge17 4y agoWho manufactures it? I think TSMC and Global Foundries both do 12nm?
- calin2k 4y agocan I has more threads for my gamez
- kldx 4y agoCan't find anything about opencl support
- MangoCoffee 4y agowould it have any backdoor? https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/ https://www.phonearena.com/news/xiaomi-browsers-have-backdoors_id124332 https://www.phonearena.com/news/xiaomi-browsers-have-backdoo...
- DethNinja 4y agoProbably, but I would imagine it would be a lower priority compared to NIC or CPU based backdoors. Considering that China controls most of the NIC supply, I doubt they would be too concerned about implementing a GPU based backdoor. I’m surprised that we still don’t have a cheap domestic Data Diode option. It is clear that only way to be secure is to never directly connect to internet.
- userbinator 4y agoConsidering that China controls most of the NIC supply If you're referring to Realtek, that's Taiwanese.
- kjs3 4y agoAnd Intel might have have an opinion on the NIC supply numbers.
- pzduniak 4y agoWasn't the Bloomberg story debunked?
- heavyset_go 4y ago"Debunked" as in no conclusive evidence was confirmed by 3rd parties. It could just as equally mean that investigators might not have found the needle they're looking for in the supply chain haystack.
- emodendroket 4y ago
- zitterbewegung 4y agoIf it performs similar to a 1060 or 1070 gpu from MVIDIA and has an appropriate price point people who want to create a budget gaming computer would be an appropriate target market.
- linuxbo 4y agoWhy did you call if Mvidia? As a proud owner of a 1070ti, I don't think that's the budget gaming computer.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoProbably because M and N are adjacent on most keyboards
- zokier 4y ago6TFLOPS would be competing against 3050 (9TFLOPS), lowest tier current-gen GPU from nvidia.
- zitterbewegung 4y agoIt was a typo sorrry.
- StopDarkPattern 4y ago
- antattack 4y agoMTT S60 has a 6-pin power connector so it's safe to assume that power consumption is under 150W (75W PCI + 75W connector). That would be on par with GTX 1070 but hopefully it's lower due to 12nm vs 16nm process.
- tryptophan 4y agoHmm, thats actually quite decent. Enough to play 95% of games at 1080p currently.
- haunter 4y agoSo it's a card equal to the performance of the 2016 Nvidia cards (1060/70)
- imtringued 4y agowhich are equivalent to the 2060. Yeah it's a bottom barrel GPU originally intended for mobile SoCs.
- simne 4y agoIt smells, China systematically prepare to seize Taiwan, so will got extremely hard sanctions, and they create their own CPUs, GPUs.
- noobermin 4y agoWhile I'm wary for Taiwan what does that have to do at all with this story??? This sort of sentiment reminds me of those Americans who want to stop drinking Vodka over the invasion of Ukraine.
- kova12 4y agoI think what he's trying to say is that China wants to have GPU production ready before it happens, so that they are not left without technology once the sanctions kick in
- noobermin 4y agoWhile they likely are subject to government scrutiny and probably will have to heel to the government in case they want them to put in backdoors or something, one small fresh company (from 2020) does not signal CCCP policy, although they probably should if they were smart start some level of manufacturing separate from Taiwan. If it were part of a push directly from the government I'd understand that but it sounds like this is unique because they are the first and currently, only, company trying to make gpus. Otherwise this is a bad reading of things, that every single Chinese company is somehow the arm of the CCCP which is way too simplistic.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoBut is this getting ready for that? Until China can produce its own fab equipment (taking Taiwan intact won’t help here), they will simply have fancy designs that they can’t produce. It doesn’t make sense unless they are betting on continued business relationship with the west.
- simne 4y ago
- ggm 4y agoFor those of us who don't follow closely, whats the ranking for deployment of these kinds of cards? I assume it is like this: 1) bitcoin class Proof-of-Work time and power wasting in giant DC racks 2) TPU class ML in giant DC racks 3) gaming 4) @home ML and bitcoin If the supply chain dynamics for gamers puts them as low as I think they're fighting with @home bitcoin rig owners, when the real enemy is the number #1 slot.
- jefftk 4y agonit: it would be other cryptocurrencies, not Bitcoin. Since the development of ASIC minors GPU Bitcoin mining has almost never been profitable.
- ggm 4y agogood nit. The principle being the same: its compute at scale in DC which is consuming these cards, it has almost nothing to do with painting pretty 3D in consumers eyeballs.
- gumby 4y agoA side point: Moore Threads is an awesome name for a company like this.
- redisman 4y agoVery punny
- everyone 4y agoIf they're available at anything near MSRP I'd be interested. I've been using the same GPU since 2015. I've been interested in upgrading for several years now, but prices have been consistently insane all that time.
- self_awareness 4y agoI wish it was named Moore Cores :) But Moore Threads is also really nice ;)
- shdon 4y agoThought it looks plausible enough, are we sure this is actually real? The date on the article is 1 April.