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US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

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Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#371

Post by School-Cotton »

gambiting wrote: post #362
DSingularity wrote: post #360

Funny. And when the Chinese steal whatever IP they want they will eventually produce their own chips. Then when they improve the designs they will produce them in bulk, sell them at a premium, and buy them at a discount. If the US wants to maintain its hegemonic hood over the world — it best not be relying on these kinds of strategies.

How would they produce them, exactly? A design is worth nothing if you don't have a single fab capable of making them.

The US does not fab nvidia chips either. Taiwan and Korea do, and to my knowledge neither has yet sanctioned China in this way.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#372

Post by adrian_b »

jhanschoo wrote: post #217
wmf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMIC just announced 7 nm and Biren announced a GPU with claimed H100-like performance.

Thanks; it looks like my understanding is outdated, though note the following caveats: SMIC 7nm: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-chipmaker-smics-7nm-... (ignore the journalist-speculative headline, but pay attention to the following) > "This low-volume production product may be the steppingstone for a true 7nm process that incorporates scaled logic and memory bitcells. Since bitcoin miners have limited RAM re…

Biren is made at TSMC, exactly as NVIDIA A100 and H100.

Biren is designed in China, like A100 & H100 are designed in USA.

As long as TSMC is not forbidden to export to China, forbidding only the export of chips designed in USA can no longer affect China, when they have pretty much identical chip design capabilities with USA.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#373

Post by School-Cotton »

quantum_state wrote: post #296
onepointsixC wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>is the United States determined to deal with this earth war? How much are you willing to pay to protect Taiwan? Yes the US is very much determined to win such a war. A free and independent Taiwan is the linchpin of American foreign policy in Asia. America is willing to spend great fortunes in treasure and blood to keep it that way.

Counting the track records … Vietnam, Afghan … apart from wasting lots of tax payer money and making the people in the area miserable, what else did we achieve?

In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the US was participating (on the losing side) in an asymmetric civil war between local factions. In Taiwan they would be allied with a modern state, with a modern military and very high support among the population, attempting to repel an invasion from a (de facto) foreign state.

Completely different scenarios.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#374

Post by homarp »

adrian_b wrote: post #367
ajross wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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 abou…

previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639681

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#375

Post by School-Cotton »

dontlaugh wrote: post #137
neysofu wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No NATO member even recognizes Taiwan as a sovereign country, going from that to NATO membership seems... quite the leap.

Taiwan doesn’t even see itself as a independent, the government there still claims all of (Qing) China.

No they don’t. They have a totally obsolete, totally ignored (by the government and everybody else) article in their constitution claiming China, which they can’t remove because the actual China has threatened to immediately invade them if they do.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#376

Post by School-Cotton »

jhanschoo wrote: post #33
rvnx wrote: post #21

Very worrying to see the restrictions against China escalating; Especially since China is incredibly advanced in hardware manufacturing and is not at war with the West. At best, this is just pushing for escalation so they can restrict exports on their side too. Even, for them. In one of their speech (in France, on a YouTube channel called Thinkerview for those who know), one of their representative quoted a Chinese p…

Mainland China has no current and short-term future capability to manufacture cutting-edge chips of the kind used in these GPUs.

Neither does the US.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#378

Post by bfung »

Kadin wrote: post #318
user3939382 wrote: post #306

Won’t this just spur investment in alternatives in those markets and backfire?

Denying the Chinese access to American-designed parts broadens the competitive landscape, by forcing them to compete not just on supply chain, integration, and software, but also on chip design, in order to maintain parity in a key technology area. This is advantageous to the US, or at least it's not as obviously disadvantageous as national competition centered on, say, manufacturing. The US is never going to compete…

>machinery used in high-end fabrication... if it's not export-controlled for one reason or another already.

EUV lithography machines used in =See articles: https://www.google.com/search?q=euv+lithography+machine+chin...

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#380

Post by adrian_b »

nomel wrote: post #297
sudosysgen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if it didn't just turn out that China has been producing 7nm chips for at least a year.

I think it's generally accepted that this was a copy paste of the TSMC process. I think we'll have to wait to see if they can advance this, on their own. As the other person pointed out, a good indicator would be yield.

Only people without experience in semiconductor manufacturing imagine that it is possible to copy and paste a CMOS manufacturing process.

Even with perfect knowledge about how a process is done at TSMC, implementing it in another fab with different equipment requires a very large amount of work done by very competent engineers, to substitute some process steps and tweak the technological parameters for the others.

Someone who succeeds to reproduce a stolen manufacturing process is very likely able to further develop such a process on their own.

Even within a single company, i.e. when having all the technical documentation and when having continuous access to all the people working there, it is extremely challenging to build a second semiconductor plant that will be able to make the same chips as a previous plant, with the same manufacturing process.

It took Intel many years of huge efforts until they have perfected a methodology to "copy exactly", to be able to build additional fabs for expanding the production of an already existing processor.

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