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I don't know. I thought Gina specifically said the recent ban is for AI. [0] > "What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing

• alephnerd 3y ago
  The origin of these bans started in 2016-17, with Intel Xeon processors being restricted after the Chinese NSC program was found to be using some of their HPC infra for nuclear weapons simulations. No one wants to say the "Ne" word as it causes some pretty severe domestic political blowback. Already China has been looking at countering American second strike capabilities with their nuclear weapons buildup over the past decade. It also doesn't help that unlike most previous Premiers post-Mao, Xi Jinping started his administration career in the PLA.
  • rfoo 3y ago
    Xeon Phi bans were targeted and successful. It shows that you don't need to issue a country-wide ban to prevent China from using a chip to build their supercomputers. And then, Sunway happened, it's built for military-use supercomputers. Do we even know whether it's 40nm, 28nm or 14nm or who on the earth fabricated them? And nothing changed on how export control works after that, that's certainly not the trigger. GPU bans before ChatGPT happened were also targeted, similar to how BIS Entity List works. Let's face it: the recent ban-entire-China movement was just about "AI", instead of HPC/simulations, the only purpose of it is to deny China NVIDIA GPU access and ensure they can't compete on SOTA language models.
    • alephnerd 3y ago
      > Do we even know whether it's 40nm, 28nm or 14nm or who on the earth fabricated them Based on the network bandwidth and clock speed of the SW26010P, my hunch is most likely 40nm [0] > ensure they can't compete on SOTA language models I disagree. For commercial NLP applications, a leading edge GPU like an A100 can help (due to cost constraints), but the true value is unlocked from Monte Carlo Simulations (heavily used in Nuclear Physics to simulate interactions among particles), as bechmacks have show magnitudes of performance in GPUs over CPUs for MC and MCMC simulations [1] just with commercial untuned hardware alone. This itself was a major reason Nvidia has been working with the DoE since the beginning of the Exascale program [2], which itself was driven by NatSec priorities [3] Raimondo's ban also came after the WSJ leaked how the CAEP and other sanctioned entities were accessing Nvidia GPUs despite an export ban since 1997 [4][5] Of course this is dual use, as math is critical to everything, but at the end of the day - Nuclear Weapons is the driving factor and China's ability to erode American Nuclear Deterrence [6] and the fact that China now has a "launch-on-warning" posture [7] since 2022 instead of "on-launch" has severely spooked the US. [0] - https://sc23.supercomputing.org/proceedings/tech_paper/tech_paper_pages/pap103.html https://sc23.supercomputing.org/proceedings/tech_paper/tech_... [1] - https://indico.cern.ch/event/1106990/contributions/4991264/attachments/2533517/4359780/ACAT%202022%20final.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/1106990/contributions/4991264/a... [2] - http://helper.ipam.ucla.edu/publications/nmetut/nmetut_19423.pdf http://helper.ipam.ucla.edu/publications/nmetut/nmetut_19423... [3] - https://www.exascaleproject.org/research-group/national-security/ https://www.exascaleproject.org/research-group/national-secu... [4] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-top-nuclear-weapons-lab-used-american-computer-chips-decades-after-ban-11674990320 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-top-nuclear-weapons-lab-... [5] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/06/30/2022-14069/addition-of-entities-revision-and-correction-of-entries-and-removal-of-entities-from-the-entity-list https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/06/30/2022-14... [6] - https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/47/4/147/115920/The-Dynamics-of-an-Entangled-Security-Dilemma https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/47/4/147/115920/The-Dyna... [7] - https://media.defense.gov/2023/Oct/19/2003323409/-1/-1/1/2023-MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2023/Oct/19/2003323409/-1/-1/1/202...
• rokkitmensch 3y ago
  To what degree do you discount proclamations of the official propaganda organ? In what world, and under what set of motivations, would they ever say what their internal truth is? Far safer, intellectually, to assume everything they omit to be a ploy, and to try to understand (with what limited information we have, comrade), the Real Juice.