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So the Huawei Ascend 920 is produced by SMIC on a 6 nm process. I always thought sceptical of the US sanctions, but that they backfire so fast is insane. Out
by randomNumber7 1y ago
So the Huawei Ascend 920 is produced by SMIC on a 6 nm process.
I always thought sceptical of the US sanctions, but that they backfire so fast is insane.
Out of China's perspective it might make sense to take out the wests AI capabilities soon.
- seydor 1y agoeven if their chips weren't as good, what stops a company from training a large model for a very long time in less capable hardware? Is there a way to overcome memory limitations somehow?
- umgefahren 1y agoIn general yes, you can (and do) shard the model over multiple GPUs. If you want to do that yourself look at DeepSpeed or FSDP . There is a communication overhead though and the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key. Thats where NVLink comes in btw. So yes, it’s actually what you can and do do. However this limits your ability to iterate on the models quickly and from what I‘ve read a lot of times the foundational labs throw out their models because by the time they are done training they are already outdated.
- checker659 1y agoNVLink isn’t magic
- rfoo 1y ago> the speed at which the GPUs can communicate is key Guess what a telco equipment company is good at :p
- corimaith 1y agoDid they do it with EUV or just more multipatterning DUV? If it's the latter then it's not anything particular to worry about or unexpected.
- bayindirh 1y agoIf the chip is working, has a comparable performance and slows the gap or reverses the trend, does it really matter?
- imtringued 1y agoIntel struggled with 10nm and you're shrugging off 6nm as if it was nothing?
- nickysielicki 1y agoProcess node naming is completely made up. It’s been this way for a very long time. https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-bytes/posts/process-nodes https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-by... It has nothing to do with the size of anything.
- linotype 1y agoIn fact, process node naming has always been made up.
- nickysielicki 1y agoNot really? The physical gate length matched the node name all throughout the 2000s.
- linotype 1y agoeven that concept was in fact made up.
- trq01758 1y ago"China has EUV" would be news of the century. No doubt they are trying.
- saubeidl 1y agoThe only ones that have EUV are the Europeans. Despite all the anti-EU propaganda in these parts, the entire AI stack is powered by us.
- bayindirh 1y agoSanctions are generally a stopgap measure. They can't create any meaningful gap for a very long time. I live in a country which has experienced some hard and soft embargoes over the years, and let's look what has it done. - We wanted to buy drones, and denied. Now we are one of the biggest drone manufacturers in the world. - We denied air defense systems. We are developing a whole arsenal of missiles and rockets now, incl. standoff/cruise missiles. - We denied planes. Our 4.5th generation fighter program got a great speed boost. - We denied advanced naval technology. We built stealth ships, fast coastguard boats and all navigational systems which goes inside them. - We denied optical pods for drones and aerial vehicles. We built our own in 6 months. etc. etc... Sanctions and embargoes are the biggest catalyst for a country to advance their tech at tremendous velocity.
- gabrielgio 1y ago> They can't create any meaningful gap for a very long time. That highly depends on the size and natural resource available to the country.
- sillystu04 1y agoTo play devils advocate, a lack of sanctions also allows countries to advance technology at a tremendous velocity. The Ford Motor Company's dealings in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union significantly helped the adoption of mass production in those countries.
- heavyset_go 1y agoThey work for countries that kneecap themselves by being at the whims of capital and the market. Countries that don't constrain themselves like that can laugh at sanctions because they don't matter in that context.
- polytely 1y agoAdding more sanctions seems to be the default US move it seems, to the point that there are so many sanctioned entities that they've formed a paralel world economy. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/when-sanctions-go-too-far/566771/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/wh...
- blackoil 1y ago10s (maybe 100s) of billions that could have gone to Nvidia are going to Huawei, so not surprising they are able to make the progress and pulling along SMIC with them. Most of the sanctions against Huawei were because they were a credible threat to US companies, so again not surprising.
- mtkd 1y agoIn 2023 Huawei surprised with the Kirin 9000S in the Mate 60, this seems to get forgotten when talking about GPU moats and sanction effectiveness
- lostmsu 1y agoSame as Pixel 8 performance according to https://nanoreview.net/en/soc/hisilicon-kirin-9000s https://nanoreview.net/en/soc/hisilicon-kirin-9000s and https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks
- yorwba 1y agoYou cannot just point to some amount of a sanctioned good being manufactured to claim a sanctions backfire, you need to look at the difference between with and without sanctions, and also consider the cost. Huawei was going to work on GPUs anyway, SMIC was going to fab chips anyway. How much of the total GPU compute is the result of increased investment after sanctions, and how much was already planned? And how does it compare to the alternative of importing Nvidia GPUs for the same amount of money? Unless Huawei is getting better performance per dollar than Nvidia, this is them implementing a costly workaround, which is the point of sanctions: increasing cost.
- like_any_other 1y agoIncreasing short-term cost, at the price of losing leverage in the medium/long-term. Or even ending up on the wrong side of that leverage, if SMIC (who was just handed control of China's domestic market) ends up outcompeting TSMC/Intel/Samsung.
- randomNumber7 1y agoWithout sanctions noone would buy the Huawei chips. With sanctions they get free money to develop better chips. == sanctions backfire
- corimaith 1y agoWhy not just put in import restrictions then?
- quantum_state 1y agoSanction motivates … import restriction discourages and may not work in reality …
- corimaith 1y agoSounds like a weak argument to me, businesses are profit making entities, they certainly would be motivated to keep their profits irrespective of the cause.
- starfallg 1y agoSMIC is running into real problems without EUV. Just because they are able to produce something at 6/7nm, it doesn't mean that it is efficient or competitive. Right now, they do it because of strategic considerations.
- randomNumber7 1y agoWhat is so hard about EUV that they cant develop/reverse engineer themself?
- starfallg 1y agoWhy is ASML's market cap so high? Only ASML has commercialized EUV at scale. In order to generate enough EUV consistently for use in lithography, the equipment fires lasers thousands of times a second on a drop of tin. It's really hard, but you can replicate this or develop another method given enough time and money.
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y agohttps://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quand_la_Chine_s%27%C3%A9veillera%E2%80%A6_le_monde_tremblera https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quand_la_Chine_s%27%C3%A9veill... It's funny how it's impossible to find English coverage of this book :')
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dist-epoch 1y agoChina would have invested in SMIC anyway, with or without sanctions. They consider semiconductors critical technology.
- tonyhart7 1y agochina literally "steal" talent from taiwan TSMC, of course they "progress" fast, it literally the same people
- codedokode 1y agoYou mean people are ready to exchange a democracy and freedom for a tiny increase in income?
- em500 1y agoThey're not just doing this for money... They're doing it for a shitload of money!
- jjcc 1y agoThe founder of SMIC(Zhang Rujing) was a manager from TSMC. He created SMIC not for money but for patriotism because he see himself as Chinese even he was from Taiwan. You can do some research on this guy, especially try to find some Chinese sources with google translation. The western media has a narrative with many real evidence to support the narrative so most western people take it for granted. But the reality is more complicated. For many engineer money is an important factor for sure but maybe not all.