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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

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew about the previous cryptography restrictions, but I also knew that the Supreme Court overruled them by ruling (as I understand it) that “code is speech”. I’ll have to check out the other links though

This brings back memories of a t-shirt I had that had big red letters on it "Export Controlled" and an implementation of RSA in perl on it.

    #!/usr/local/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-sardine -RSA-6-line-PERL-fish
    '\~.         __......--------~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-------....____
     \  ~.__---~';($k,$n)=@ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo  "[o~~-._
      \  ]s!16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa2/d0

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

#552
post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the US government, it's many civilized governments doing these sort of things. And in this particular case this european is grateful for it because it is not about setting ceilings or hindering industry, it's about preventing the abuse of dual use goods. In other words; Not being fsckd by our own stuff. Other examples can be found here: https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vo...

I hate it when I have to check if my hobby projects hit Wassenaar limits or not.

They often do! Hobby drones, GRBL hobby CNCs, hobby micrcontrollers and SBCs, open-source SDR projects, etc. will often exceed the performance of devices that were ITAR restricted a decade or two ago. And "a decade or two ago" is a generous expectation for lethargic legislative, regulatory, or judicial systems to evolve.

Yes, in the 70s and 80s, it made sense to say that 5-axis NCs systems that can cut Inconel turboprops for ICBMs should be export controlled; those were multi-million-dollar flagships of the biggest and best manufacturers and were key to the country's military edge. Now you can get one shipped from China for a couple thousand dollars, with servo loop times, encoder and linear scale resolution, memory capacity, processor speed, axis counts, etc. that are better than the originals that cost a thousand times more half a century ago.

Today, it's true that the A100 is a cutting edge, shockingly powerful, uniquely capable processor. You can do machine learning/computer vision projects with it that you can't do with any other technology. Eighty gigabytes! 256 GB/s per package! Almost 20 teraflops of FP32! Compared to the GPU in the desktop you bought 8 years ago, yes, these are huge. But if you plot interconnect bandwidth, memory size, core counts, price, and so on, and extrapolate forward... yeah, your little hobby Kubernetes cluster of 2030-era Raspberry Pi equivalents will probably be at a performance level that's export controlled.

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

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to only make sense if we feel that advanced technology enables a greater threat in the near future... ... or we're governed by morons. Take your pick. Nice that this comes a month after the Pelosis cleared their NVDA holdings. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

It's kind of astounding that the Senate can literally legalize insider trading for themselves and nothing comes of it. There's no one pointing out how that's just garden-variety corruption common in every authoritarian, extractive state, but one step removed. A great example of how even in a democratic society, the people cannot realistically expect lawmakers to pass laws against those lawmakers' own economic interes…

They passed the STOCK Act in 2012 ostensibly to combat insider trading in Congress but it's basically toothless.

They're still doing it. But in the case they get caught the standard fine is $200 and even that gets waived by House/Senate officials. They don't even bother to keep records on violators.

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

#554

There is a newly announced Chinese alternative to those GPUs - the Biren BR100. 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 tr…

I'm optimistic that this diversity will unseat the CUDA framework's dominance in high-performance compute. OpenCL, AMD ROCm, and now "Birensupa" will compete with CUDA; hopefully leading to reduced dependence on any individual manufacturer's proprietary APIs.

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

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning 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...

PRC set new military norm across the strait completely uncontested, and now post Pelosi policy wank in US is how to reset that new balance... and the answer was... 2 DDGs transiting through the strait, aka nothing. Not even a carrier. PRC chipped more away at defacto TW soverienty than US gained trying to boost TW dejure status. >China's final warning It's hilarious when people daftly throw this Soviet meme from the…

I find that opinion to be hilariously out of touch but ok.

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

#556
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the tech sector about to collapse?

There are basically two types of companies in tech: a.) companies that don't make a profit, and b.) companies that make a profit from those companies. As an example just consider every startup is basically in category A, and Amazon's most profitable sector, AWS, in category B. 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 ge…

There are so very many companies that exist in category c.) companies that make a profit from non-tech companies. Many of them are not public. Many of them are small. Many of them "only" pay SWEs as CPA-level salary. Many of them are working on "boring" problems. But there are plenty. If you're concerned about categories A and B, perhaps search for a position at companies in category C?

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

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US will win in a non-war scenario, by using its influence over the other countries and isolating China from the US's western allies. The US has lost a lot of their soft power, beginning with the Iraq war, but exploding during the 45th Presidency. Their failure to convince Germany to drop North Stream 2 is the best example of that loss - particularly the gang of senators which thought it would be a good idea to…

I agree that the US lost a lot of soft power capabilities over the years, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine really reversed most of those loses in short order. What a blessing in disguise for the United States. For example, you mention that a lot of allies are highly skeptical of how reliable of an ally the US is, but you can see actually that when it came down to it the US was extremely reliable in defending Ukrai…

> And the issue of Taiwan is a linchpin of US hegemony: it's existential, there's no doubt the US will go to war to defend allies in Asia including Taiwan because failure to do so basically kicks the US out of Asia and destroys those alliances.

For now it is, the interesting question is if the US voter class is ready to go to war again after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan - at least from an European POV it looks like wide swaths of the population do not want further overseas engagements and wish to reduce military spending in order to have more money available to fix pressing issues (crumbling infrastructure, healthcare, poverty, high energy prices). Additionally, while Trump himself is a very vocal opponent of China and I think Taiwan will be secured even if the Republicans win either of the next elections, it is nowhere near certain that Trump as a President will apply the same towards Russia or other enemies of the Western sphere - particularly not given strong indications of both himself and his close environment being influenced by Russia, both financially and via "kompromat" rumors (e.g. the "pee tape" allegation).

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

#558
post #181

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.

no.

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

#559
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the 80s/90s 208hp “gentleman’s agreement” in Japan. Most of those cars put out 320+hp with trivial bolt-on mods but they were all “208hp nudge nudge wink wink ”

You're a little confused, the number was 276hp/280PS/206kW.

My mistake, 208kW (not hp) was the number advertised here.

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

#560
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Under the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (50 U.S.C. §§ 4801-4852) (ECRA), criminal penalties can include up to 20 years of imprisonment and up to $1 million in fines per violation, or both. I work in CPU design and I wouldn't risk it.

I'll eat a hat if any major league manager in the US who could decide this ever goes to prison. To be clear, I'd celebrate it, but the mortgage crisis showed that laws and punishment hardly work on top level execs.

According to the linked reply, you owe us eating your hat. We'll wait for video, thanks.
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