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Does that mean the US is acknowledging that Taiwan isn't China?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My other concern is the collapse of the tech sector in a few months. I'm roughly 80% certain I'll be subject to layoffs in October (though all my coworkers are clueless), and I don't think it will be anywhere close to as certain I can find a new job as during the pandemic (then for every one company doing layoffs there were two with "unprecedented-who-could-see-this-might-end" growth). Lot harder to justify a new PC…
Why is the tech sector about to collapse?
For more than a decade money was more or less free and the only sane choice for investors was to pour cash into anything that might one day get big enough to magically flip the profit switch and make a huge amount of net positive revenue.
I thought the pandemic would be the end of the tech boom, but I was wrong. Not only did more money get pumped into the market but into consumers wallets as well. This led to extremely rapid expansion in the tech industry as investors were willing to pump even more cash into any company (hoping for a rapid IPO and a the ability to cash our there chips before the casino closed) and consumers had a surprising amount of extra cash lying around from being locked up for months.
Unfortunately reality has started to show it's ugly face. Inflation is starting to hit hard, not because of the money supply, but because we are hitting some real resource limits due to a combination of supply chain problems and the Russian war with Ukraine (which, to be fair, is also happening because of resource strain). These are not temporary causes of inflation.
This has caused the central banks to rapidly attempt increase interest to combat this inflation. Ending the era of cheap cash. This is coupled with the fact that things cost more so consumers also can't spend as much (even though they are also taking on more debt then ever, an unsustainable trend).
Sure inflation is cooling a bit but that's largely because of a drop in oil prices (at least in the US) which is a political play from the democrats resulting the record low strategic oil reserves in the US (since 1984) [0]. This cheap oil cannot be sustained and will end after the next election cycle.
The immediate impact of all of this is that direct to consumer companies are seeing an immediate hit (e.g. streaming service subscribers are churning faster than ever). Then non profitable ad revenue companies start to take the hit (see Snap's layoffs today). Next it will be non profitable B2B. But then we'll start to see how much of those profitable companies bottom lines comes form non-profitable companies.
This will have a cascade effect, since as I mentioned, it won't be as easy for us tech workers to find an new job with anywhere near the same TC. As a 200k+ engineer, consider all the crap you pay for without thinking of it because you don't have to. All the ubers and door dash orders that are surprisingly pricy to the average person, but really a brainless decision for any tech workers.
It's just getting started. If you work at a B2B tech company I encourage you to go poke around your internal data and look at how your customers are doing. I promise it's not great.
Then look at the state of venture funding [1]. Sure it's still above 2018 levels but it's rapidly falling. The start up scene is going to dry up quickly.
There's is more I could dive into but this is a good start.
0. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/crude-us-emergency-r...
1. https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/venture-trends-re...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The only countries which officially recognize Taiwan as independent are: Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Holy See (Vatican City), Honduras, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tuvalu.
Slightly missed the point: NVidia uses TSMC to make their GPUs. TSMC is in (as the name suggests) Taiwan, so either NVidia -by default- is violating this order by exporting to China because the fabs are in China, or they're not exporting to China because the US now officially recognizes Taiwan as "not China".
So "by default" the US already "officially" recognizes Taiwan as "not China." I think the mistake here is confusing de facto with "officially."
(To put it another way: even assuming your point that "technically" the US could try to prosecute Nvidia for this and a court would get the question of "is this China" - but do you actually think the US will? Or will they continue to walk the same line they've walked for decades in the same situation?)
Does that mean the US is acknowledging that Taiwan isn't China?
Pelosi's visit was a sufficient statement, especially in light of their military bravado. China made a bluff, the US called it, and China backed down.
This doesn't just ban A100s. It bans those and "any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100." It's a ceiling on the performance that can be exported. In an exponentially scaling industry, this is the equivalent of an announcement in advance of a complete ban on competitive products 2-3…
wouldn’t a better strategy be have china depend on those product but require a sorts of built-on remote control in them in case of a conflict.
Edit: why disagree?
Serious Question: What about the Apple M[x] series things? The M2 integrates an Apple designed ten-core (or eight-core) graphics processing unit (GPU). Each GPU core is split into 32 execution units, which each contain eight arithmetic logic units (ALUs). In total, the M2 GPU contains up to 320 execution units or 2,560 ALUs, which have a maximum floating point (FP32) performance of 3.6 TFLOPs.
Not going to happen.
A100 are current-gen Ampere NVIDIA cards on ~~Samsung's~~ TSMC's N7 processes for the datacenter, whereas H100 are next-gen Hopper NVIDIA cards on TSMC's N4 process for the datacenter.
A100, unlike the current generation consumer cards, is still made at tsmc. They just had a weird foundry split this generation.
Fabbed at TSMC. (I guess we are about to see if SMIC can do their 7nm at scale.)
https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/08/25/china-launches-the-i...
CHINA LAUNCHES THE INEVITABLE INDIGENOUS GPU
…
Here is how Biren says it stacks up on various machine learning workloads, pitting the BR100 against the Nvidia A100:
…
We presume this is for AI training workloads, not inference. The average speedup over the A100 is around 2.6X. It is not clear if the Nvidia machines were using sparse matrix features, which doubles the throughput, or not. Our guess is they were not.
This doesn't just ban A100s. It bans those and "any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100." It's a ceiling on the performance that can be exported. In an exponentially scaling industry, this is the equivalent of an announcement in advance of a complete ban on competitive products 2-3…
wouldn’t a better strategy be have china depend on those product but require a sorts of built-on remote control in them in case of a conflict.
“Knowing where the chips go is probably a very good thing. You could for example, on every chip put in essentially a public private key pair, which authenticates it and allows it to work”.
hxxps://www.reuters.com/technology/chip-challenge-keeping-western-semiconductors-out-russian-weapons-2022-04-01/
What he won’t tell is that this is already a reality, as I learned after having my air-gapped system and Pixel phone wiped remotely for researching “silent speech interfaces”. There is no security when silicon trojans are in all devices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pelosi's visit was a sufficient statement, especially in light of their military bravado. China made a bluff, the US called it, and China backed down.
In so many ways: it really wasn't. China made a bluff, because that's what you do when you're in power in China, and the US went "we're not Chinese" and then China went "k" and nothing happened and no one cared. China didn't back down, they never stepped up. Blustering is literally part of "that just what you do". You don't call someone's bluff in China, you never believed them in the first place, you only nodded ini…
China cared a lot. For sure, the US didn't believe china would do anything.
The stance of the US is clear though. China is under US protection.
Doubly so in light of the recent 1.1 billion dollar military aid deal: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-30/biden-adm...