4 ms·

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.

ajross 4y ago
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.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  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.
  - ajross 4y ago
    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!
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      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.
      - homarp 4y ago
        previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639681
    - arisAlexis 4y ago
      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.
    - 4y ago

ajross 4y ago

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.

sudosysgen 4y ago
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.
- ajross 4y ago
  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!
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    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.
    - homarp 4y ago
      previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639681
  - arisAlexis 4y ago
    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.
  - 4y ago