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Are they? Do you know why China stopped submitting any supercomputers to Top500 despite widespread reports of two exascale supercomputers coming online? And why

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.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  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.
adrian_b 4y ago
> 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-compute-and-ai-workloads/ 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).

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.
sudosysgen 4y ago
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.

adrian_b 4y ago

> 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-compute-and-ai-workloads/ 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).