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[–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is actually because of Trump. If the man would have some kind of common sense and not ruin decades of cooperation....

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    You just don't understand his master plan! He needs a third term to see this out \s

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago

    idk why there are so many images of the flag of china photoshopped onto computer chips but I find the trend strangely funny

    PRoCessor hehe

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago

    Next up, cards with RTX 6090 performance for $150 on Temu.

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  • [–] 40 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    It's not just the chips that keeps NVIDIA ahead, it's the 20ish years of optimizing their software across every industry.

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  • [–] 55 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Exactly right! This why China is banning the chips. They caught up in hardware and now need to catch up in software. If they continue to allow people to use NVIDIA chips, then their software will never progress as they won't have users to optimize them.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    This is more a tit-for-tat with Trump tariffs and trade embargoes. I don't think the Chinese state leadership cares about going heads up with NVIDIA in the public market, even if they're hosting the inferior brand (for now). They've been operating as a second-best option in manufacturing and tech for decades as they built up their capacity.

    But this kind of power move is a kick in the teeth to some of Trump's wealthiest supporters. It gives Chinese diplomats enormous leverage as they go into another round of trade negotiations with a country whose economy increasingly revolves around making and selling chipsets.

    Edit: Incidentally, NVIDIA has $165B/year in revenue and a $4.5T market cap. Just think about that for a minute.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    You're right about that, BUT I'd argue that's all small potatoes. If no one develops on Chinese chips, then they'll never actually be competitive. The only way for China to push ahead in any capacity, or even to catch up is to have thousands of users on their chipsets.

    Let's look at the MooreThreads MTT80. When it started it was performing like a 2017 GPU GT1030. They did 0 hardware upgrades. I will repeat that 0 hardware upgrades. But today, it's able to run the domestic game Black Myth WuKong at 4k at 40 fps. Yes I realize that means it stutters, but with no hardware changes they were able to make a fairly demanding modern game playable. What this has rang through out China I am sure is, China has to do everything on earth to fix their software. If that means banning NVIDIA, so be it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    If no one develops on Chinese chips, then they’ll never actually be competitive.

    People will develop on Chinese chips because they're cheaper and more open-sourced. Also, because their specs are written in Chinese rather than English and that's their native tongue.

    But today, it’s able to run the domestic game Black Myth WuKong at 4k at 40 fps.

    That's not because of a chip import policy the state issued last week. Someone's obviously working on these things, even without a bunch of state-issued trade restrictions.

    What this has rang through out China I am sure is, China has to do everything on earth to fix their software. If that means banning NVIDIA, so be it.

    NVIDIA does not have the export capacity to feed the entire Chinese state's demand for new hardware. Never did. The real reason for a domestic Chinese investment in tech is that China is also a global leading consumer. They need to fab their own chips for the same reason they need to build their own cars and grow their own rice. Their economy can't work as an import economy when they represent 16% of the global population.

    This change in policy will undoubtedly accelerate domestic investment in new software. But it wasn't strictly necessary.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The problem is the Chinese chips are not cheaper. Huawei's 910c is about 30% slower and 1/3 more expensive. Add on top of that a lack of software, without government force, who would buy it?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Huawei’s 910c is about 30% slower and 1/3 more expensive.

    NVIDIA H100s are currently going for around $25k to Huawei's $28k. And that's before you get to the secondary market, where NVIDIA chipsets will inevitably jump in price based on availability and relative demand. Without Huawei in the market, I guarantee NVIDIA's chips would be even more expensive.

    At some point, its just a matter of what is available. American tech companies are demanding more chipsets than NVIDIA can currently produce, which is why the company's still considered a growth investment play. Chinese competitors aren't going to be able to import NVIDIA to meet their own internal demand. They'll buy Huawei units because that's what is on the shelf.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    I don't think you realize it, but your proving my point. I never said no Huawei chips would be sold. I said China wants to reach criticality with it's users. With Huawei chips being more expensive and less capable, the big boys won't buy Huawei. And the secondary market doesn't matter to the big boys who will get it at MSRP because orders always go to them first. Since they have the most users and will have the most exposure for stress testing.

    The last thing China wants is for Huawei to only sell to smaller companies and start ups where it's entirely possible there will be no users and money wasted. That's why the new law only targets the major companies.

    *Edit on that point I'm going to predict the future now. In a few months we're going to see an article saying China has bought record amounts of H20s and NVIDIA's stocks are going to go up again. This is because the smaller companies are still going to be buying and at MSRP because the big boys can't.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    a few months we’re going to see an article saying China has bought record amounts of H20s and NVIDIA’s stocks are going to go up again. This is because the smaller companies are still going to be buying and at MSRP because the big boys can’t.

    I would not bank on it, but I guess we'll see.

    At the moment, NVIDIA and CoreWeave are busy swapping spit while Trump is throatling the export economy at record speed.

    But hey, time will tell.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Huwei and SMIC are iterating too fast. As they get good enough yields on current/last generation, they move up/announce new generations that freeze a bit of demand. I think they are doing this to get good pricing for SMIC and local designs. It doesn't help that all the Trump sycophants are calling him brilliant for enslaving China to "NVIDIA's 4th best chips and software stack".

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Probably. It's hard to say since so much is behind the veil. In fact it's likely China has its own DUV lithography supply. US estimates on what China can produced based on number of asml units sold is wildly wrong.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Optimization? Did you mean to write monopolistic, anti-competitive, and unethical practices?

    Because if there's one thing Nvidia knows how to do, it's to play dirty.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    6000d with 48gb gddr7 at 1100gb/s bandwidth, or just H20s, should be sold to us for cheap if Nvidia can't sell them. H20 at 96gb and 4tb/s is awesome.

    There's still a price that compares well to multiple 5090s that is more suitable to tasks.

    h20 is actually faster than h100 for inference (what most of us would use most of the time) at less than half the price to China.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Isnt't NASDAQ at all-time high, and keep rising, despite all the instabilities and troubles? I don't think NASDAQ would be affected.

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  • 15 comments in c/hardware@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] [S] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Not at all surprising. It doesn't matter what Huang says, this would have happened if there were no restrictions on Nvidia/AMD enterprise GPUs sales to China.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    I mean yeah, GN did a whole movie on how easily available they are still, both for purchase or modding them to fit your needs. Link below. But yeah, this is pretty normal for China to try and keep cash flow within country. They wouldn’t limit themselves if they hadn’t caught up, but if they have now then it makes sense to try and stop cash flowing out by restricting to their version. Do it with apps and plenty of other things so it’s nothing new. Literally irrelevant that it’s export banned from the US.

    https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI

    Note: it is 3 hours… but it’s not a bad watch if you haven’t seen it and are interested.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I wonder if this is blowback from the Gamers Nexus investigation?

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I highly doubt GN has any role in shaping the CCP's policies. The CCP likely already knew the facts behind the investigation (I haven't seen the video, just read summaries).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

    Beijing claims its homegrown AI processors now match H20 and RTX Pro 6000D

    So do they? Last I heard (which was not that recently) they were still notably behind in performance and I'm surprised if they were able to catch up that quickly?

    The TH article doesn't really discuss the performance claim.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 year ago

    In my limited understanding, they do not. I get the impression performance claims in this area tend to be very PR-heavy with limited independent validation.

    Try finding independent benchmarks for Huawei Ascend 910. This GPU is claimed to be at 60% performance of the Nvidia H100 (last generation starting enterprise GPU compute SKU).

    That being said, I don't speak Chinese.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    They did, but you're not understanding what's being said. The H20 is a crippled chip that NVIDIA made for the Chinese market because of US sanctions. This chip is about 50% slower than NVIDIA's latest Blackwell B200 chip. China is saying the caught up to the crippled version. Which is true, they have not however caught up to the latest and greatest. They haven't even caught up to the non-crippled version the H100 which the poster below mentions.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Do you have a source for english language benchmarks for the H20 versus say Huawei Ascend 910 (or honestly any latest Chinese compute GPU)? I am genuinely curious, independent benchmarks (at least in English) seem difficult to find. Searches in other languages that I do know lead to the same PR statements that are available in English.

    I have done foreign language desk research (high level stuff, mostly looking for very specific things), but that was for a big paid project where we needed the data and I am not that interested in this topic. 😀

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The impression I get (not a professional in this area, so maybe I don't know what I am talking about) is that this a pure brute force approach for gaining performance at the rack system level.

    It would be interesting to see direct benchmarks for H20 verses Ascend 910C across the different precision formats.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Thank you! Will need to read it in more depth.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Ultimately what I would take from all of this is on hardware China is close. Not at NVIDIA chips yet, but without software optimization, it doesn't matter how close the hardware is. Imo what China is doing right now is to force a criticality in number of users to find bugs and optimize the software. It's literally the only way they can catch up. What's hilarious is Lutnick literally told them this.

    And to prove my point, just look at MooreThread S80. When it first released it had the hardware but ran so poorly it ran like a GTX1030. But with software optimization, it could run wukong at 48fps at 4k. Without the users, China can't improve. So now they're forcing people to be users.

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