7 ms·

The US government has been setting the ceiling on performance that can be exported since the beginning of the computer industry. This is not really new but NVi

by zerohp 4y ago

The US government has been setting the ceiling on performance that can be exported since the beginning of the computer industry. This is not really new but NVidia was caught by a surprise change in the limits.

LionTamer 4y ago
When was this done previously?
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  Check out the limitations ITAR places on exported electronics.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  In many (most?) manufacturing industries there is an upper limit on export product performance. If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology. If you make microphones there is a limit on those that might be used in sonar arrays. Certainly all manner of limits exist in aerospace. Even game consoles have been limited (Iran). This is not an unusual regulation.
  - freeflight 4y ago
    > If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology. Assuming said steel is actually of the quality it's certified as [0] [0] https://asiatimes.com/2017/10/nuclear-tentacles-kobe-steel/ https://asiatimes.com/2017/10/nuclear-tentacles-kobe-steel/
- zerohp 4y ago
  You can go down the rabbit hole at federalregister.gov. Here's a couple places where they talk about it: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII/subchapter-C/part-743/section-743.2 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII... https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/04/24/06-3647/implementation-of-new-formula-for-calculating-computer-performance-adjusted-peak-performance-app-in 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.
  - LionTamer 4y ago
    Hmm I’ll have to check that out, thanks for sharing
- MarkSweep 4y ago
  There are all kinds of things subject to export restrictions: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/regulations/export-administration-regulations-ear 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_the_United_States 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?login=false https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/43/1/57/5068654...
  - LionTamer 4y ago
    I knew about the previous cryptography restrictions, but I also knew that the Supreme Court overruled them by ruling (as I understand it) that “code is speech”. I’ll have to check out the other links though
    - tankenmate 4y ago
      This brings back memories of a t-shirt I had that had big red letters on it "Export Controlled" and an implementation of RSA in perl on it.
      - Theodores 4y ago
        #!/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);' __..-~ ,/.~ ~~~~----........._______________________.......-----~~'
    - schoen 4y ago
- Kadin 4y ago
  Apple made a fairly big deal of the fact that the G5 processor, when they started putting it into their machines (or maybe it was when they went to dual G5s?), had just recently stopped being export-controlled by virtue of being classified as a "supercomputer". (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.)
  - geerlingguy 4y ago
    Close, but it was actually the G4 where they started doing that. They made a big deal about it in their commercials at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw
- spockz 4y ago
  There was also a ban export of strong cryptography. So Java couldn’t use string ciphers and algorithms without adding some additional jar which basically just turned the `enableStrongEncryption` flag on. This isn’t necessary anymore but I don’t know what changed legally.
  - LionTamer 4y ago
    I believe this is what changed legally: > One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
  - emiliosic 4y ago
    Let's not forget that these policies fostered the development of encryption in Canada, Australia and other countries (See SSLEay for example). So it ended up being counter-productive. The simplest way to stop competition is to subsidize a product. In this case, offer the tools openly.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  US tried to block PlayStation 2s from going to China as they were too powerful: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/061399china-chips-review.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/0...
- ezconnect 4y ago
  Since the creation of the United States of America. One famous in the computer era is the banning of encryption algorithm.
- semi-extrinsic 4y ago
  The opposite was of course done when the US sold a ton of Xeon Phi accelerators to China when they built the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. 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.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    Intel processors were always a waste of money.
coretx 4y ago
It's not just the US government, it's many civilized governments doing these sort of things. And in this particular case this european is grateful for it because it is not about setting ceilings or hindering industry, it's about preventing the abuse of dual use goods. In other words; Not being fsckd by our own stuff. Other examples can be found here: https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vol-II-2021-List-of-DU-Goods-and-Technologies-and-Munitions-List-Dec-2021.pdf https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vo...
- RF_Savage 4y ago
  I hate it when I have to check if my hobby projects hit Wassenaar limits or not.
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    They often do! Hobby drones, GRBL hobby CNCs, hobby micrcontrollers and SBCs, open-source SDR projects, etc. will often exceed the performance of devices that were ITAR restricted a decade or two ago. And "a decade or two ago" is a generous expectation for lethargic legislative, regulatory, or judicial systems to evolve. 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.
- concordDance 4y ago
propogandist 4y ago
a surprise for everyone except Nancy Pelosi’s husband who unwound his Nvidia positions early, avoiding by exposure to this news
jimmySixDOF 4y ago
I worked with a company that upgraded a mainframe cluster not located in the USA. The upgrade topped out a collective rating of that user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes. So, to do the upgrade, US Export controls required the client to decommission some older nodes and that had to be witnessed by US Consular representatives walked through the whole process taking video and photographic evidence. And the agreed method of decommissioning was to haul these old nodes out in to a deserted area and run bulldozers over them in a pit. Not joking. Wish I kept some of the photos though.
- SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
  > user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes I don't know what this means. Would you explain?
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    ITAR has limits on processing power that can be exported: supercomputers have "dual use" and can be used for military applications, such as simulating nuclear explosions or designing hypersonic weaponry, e.t.c. 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.
    - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
      Correct.
sithadmin 4y ago
Truly a surprise change. The new requirements do not appear to be published in the Federal Register, which is a massive screwup that potentially renders the requirements illegal and invalid. My contacts in the trade compliance world are aghast. Will be interesting to see if Nvidia challenges it.

by zerohp 4y ago

LionTamer 4y ago

When was this done previously?

bobsmooth 4y ago
Check out the limitations ITAR places on exported electronics.
sandworm101 4y ago
In many (most?) manufacturing industries there is an upper limit on export product performance. If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology. If you make microphones there is a limit on those that might be used in sonar arrays. Certainly all manner of limits exist in aerospace. Even game consoles have been limited (Iran). This is not an unusual regulation.
- freeflight 4y ago
  > If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology. Assuming said steel is actually of the quality it's certified as [0] [0] https://asiatimes.com/2017/10/nuclear-tentacles-kobe-steel/ https://asiatimes.com/2017/10/nuclear-tentacles-kobe-steel/
zerohp 4y ago
You can go down the rabbit hole at federalregister.gov. Here's a couple places where they talk about it: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII/subchapter-C/part-743/section-743.2 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII... https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/04/24/06-3647/implementation-of-new-formula-for-calculating-computer-performance-adjusted-peak-performance-app-in 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.
- LionTamer 4y ago
  Hmm I’ll have to check that out, thanks for sharing
MarkSweep 4y ago
There are all kinds of things subject to export restrictions: https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/regulations/export-administration-regulations-ear 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_the_United_States 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?login=false https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/43/1/57/5068654...
- LionTamer 4y ago
  I knew about the previous cryptography restrictions, but I also knew that the Supreme Court overruled them by ruling (as I understand it) that “code is speech”. I’ll have to check out the other links though
  - tankenmate 4y ago
    This brings back memories of a t-shirt I had that had big red letters on it "Export Controlled" and an implementation of RSA in perl on it.
    - Theodores 4y ago
      #!/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);' __..-~ ,/.~ ~~~~----........._______________________.......-----~~'
  - schoen 4y ago
Kadin 4y ago
Apple made a fairly big deal of the fact that the G5 processor, when they started putting it into their machines (or maybe it was when they went to dual G5s?), had just recently stopped being export-controlled by virtue of being classified as a "supercomputer". (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.)
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  Close, but it was actually the G4 where they started doing that. They made a big deal about it in their commercials at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw
spockz 4y ago
There was also a ban export of strong cryptography. So Java couldn’t use string ciphers and algorithms without adding some additional jar which basically just turned the `enableStrongEncryption` flag on. This isn’t necessary anymore but I don’t know what changed legally.
- LionTamer 4y ago
  I believe this is what changed legally: > One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
- emiliosic 4y ago
  Let's not forget that these policies fostered the development of encryption in Canada, Australia and other countries (See SSLEay for example). So it ended up being counter-productive. The simplest way to stop competition is to subsidize a product. In this case, offer the tools openly.
robin_reala 4y ago
US tried to block PlayStation 2s from going to China as they were too powerful: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/061399china-chips-review.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/0...
ezconnect 4y ago
Since the creation of the United States of America. One famous in the computer era is the banning of encryption algorithm.
semi-extrinsic 4y ago
The opposite was of course done when the US sold a ton of Xeon Phi accelerators to China when they built the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. 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.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Intel processors were always a waste of money.

coretx 4y ago

It's not just the US government, it's many civilized governments doing these sort of things. And in this particular case this european is grateful for it because it is not about setting ceilings or hindering industry, it's about preventing the abuse of dual use goods. In other words; Not being fsckd by our own stuff. Other examples can be found here: https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vol-II-2021-List-of-DU-Goods-and-Technologies-and-Munitions-List-Dec-2021.pdf https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vo...

RF_Savage 4y ago
I hate it when I have to check if my hobby projects hit Wassenaar limits or not.
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  They often do! Hobby drones, GRBL hobby CNCs, hobby micrcontrollers and SBCs, open-source SDR projects, etc. will often exceed the performance of devices that were ITAR restricted a decade or two ago. And "a decade or two ago" is a generous expectation for lethargic legislative, regulatory, or judicial systems to evolve. 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.
concordDance 4y ago

propogandist 4y ago

a surprise for everyone except Nancy Pelosi’s husband who unwound his Nvidia positions early, avoiding by exposure to this news

jimmySixDOF 4y ago

I worked with a company that upgraded a mainframe cluster not located in the USA. The upgrade topped out a collective rating of that user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes. So, to do the upgrade, US Export controls required the client to decommission some older nodes and that had to be witnessed by US Consular representatives walked through the whole process taking video and photographic evidence. And the agreed method of decommissioning was to haul these old nodes out in to a deserted area and run bulldozers over them in a pit. Not joking. Wish I kept some of the photos though.

SpelingBeeChamp 4y ago
> user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes I don't know what this means. Would you explain?
- sangnoir 4y ago
  ITAR has limits on processing power that can be exported: supercomputers have "dual use" and can be used for military applications, such as simulating nuclear explosions or designing hypersonic weaponry, e.t.c. 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.
  - jimmySixDOF 4y ago
    Correct.

sithadmin 4y ago

Truly a surprise change. The new requirements do not appear to be published in the Federal Register, which is a massive screwup that potentially renders the requirements illegal and invalid. My contacts in the trade compliance world are aghast. Will be interesting to see if Nvidia challenges it.