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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

#571

Post by cycrutchfield »

eunos wrote: post #529
gred wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd be seeing significantly less concern in the West if the "official" Chinese worldview were more democratic, less authoritarian, more humanistic, and less illiberal. How long will it take for the emerging Chinese middle class to force changes internally, move up Maslow's hierarchy, and demand freedom of conscience, speech, religion, assembly, press, petition, and privacy? IMO it's a bit of a race between the Chine…

Theoretically it's supposed to be now (>$10K GDPPc). Yet, 4 years of Trump really wrecked everybody minds. Now those values aren't seen as ideal but surrender to the US. I saw Chinese reaction to the death of Gorby recently, wasnt pleasant. Anyway, Chinese determination to recover Taiwan will not change even if her GDPPc is 50k or more. The quest of national restoration will not be abated by a mere richer country.

Sure, it will be abated by deterrence from a stronger military and international allies.

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

#572

Post by sangnoir »

SpelingBeeChamp wrote: post #569
jimmySixDOF wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with a company that upgraded a mainframe cluster not located in the USA. The upgrade topped out a collective rating of that user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes. So, to do the upgrade, US Export controls required the client to decommission some older nodes and that had to be witnessed by US Consular representatives walked through the whole process taking video and photograph…

> user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes I don't know what this means. Would you explain?

ITAR has limits on processing power that can be exported: supercomputers have "dual use" and can be used for military applications, such as simulating nuclear explosions or designing hypersonic weaponry, e.t.c.

Parent poster likely worked for a US company that was doing a customer upgrade abroad (i.e. exporting US technology) that would have tipped the cluster compute capacity above the permissible limits, unless some older nodes were decommissioned and destroyed.

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

#573

Post by emiliosic »

spockz wrote: post #328
LionTamer wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was this done previously?

There was also a ban export of strong cryptography. So Java couldn’t use string ciphers and algorithms without adding some additional jar which basically just turned the `enableStrongEncryption` flag on. This isn’t necessary anymore but I don’t know what changed legally.

Let's not forget that these policies fostered the development of encryption in Canada, Australia and other countries (See SSLEay for example). So it ended up being counter-productive. The simplest way to stop competition is to subsidize a product. In this case, offer the tools openly.

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

#574

Post by chmod600 »

KronisLV wrote: post #393
shotta wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of an old Apple ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw

I wonder how they could have said: "As for Pentium PCs... well, they're harmless." without that resulting in lawsuits. Somehow I feel that in our world the majority of corporations don't make direct comparisons to their competitors that often, preferring to use "competing brands" or something of that variety instead.

"As for Pentium PCs... well, they're harmless."

Hard to see how Intel could sue over a statement like that.

The reason many companies say "competing brands" is because they don't want to mention an alternative, because it increases the mindshare of the other brand.

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

#575

Post by barelysapient »

lizardactivist wrote: post #546
poszlem wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization has ended with the Russian invasion on Ukraine. What we are seeing now is a huge "divorce" between the West and China/Russia that will only get more and more intense as the international order no longer works for the biggest players.

I think the US finally realized they can not compete in a globalized world and keep 8000m people obedient and dependent, so the push to partition the world to remain relevant and competitive has now come. What's worse is that the US is fully aware this could result in another European war, and they coldly calculate that the US mainland would be entirely spared of damage, and that the US would be the single condition…

I think the Western pattern of a 'rules based' international order worked fairly well for the last 70-80 years. As the world order migrates into a new system, be that whatever it shapes up to be, our grandchildren will be best positioned to learn if its an improvement. I don't think the transition will be orderly. It'll be dirty, violent and probably a major bummer to a lot of poor people.

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

#577

Post by mrguyorama »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #554
throwaway4good wrote: post #198

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.

Does anyone actually use ROCm? It seems barely supported by AMD, with minimal development, and difficult to run in nearly any scenario. It's been a massive disappointment for someone who generally prefers AMD gpus.

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

#578

Post by tristan957 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #376
jhanschoo wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you missed the announcements by Intel, Samsung, Micron, and TSMC to build new fabs in the US?

US semiconductor manufacturing has a bright future. The next decade will see an amazing push.

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

#579

Post by barelysapient »

ericmay wrote: post #288
butterfly771 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Chinese, what I want to say is that populism here has risen rapidly in recent years, the Thucydides trap has been fulfilled again, and a war is basically inevitable. is the United States determined to deal with this earth war? How much are you willing to pay to protect Taiwan?

Wars happen because each of the two sides think they can win. In this case, the US is obviously confident it can win. This one is easy to see in this scenario. China on the other hand questions the commitment of the US: “really, you’re going to go to war to protect Taiwan? It’s China! What do you care?”, and this could be true if geographic and geopolitical realities were different. But what the CCP somewhat and I th…

The US doesn't think they can "win" in the sense that someone 'wins' chess or checkers.

What the US can do however, it make the conquest of Taiwan very expensive. Sort of what they're doing in the Ukraine but probably with a shade more direct involvement. China will experience a abrupt cutoff from the US lead international order in addition to some limited skirmishes with western forces. But they also won't be physically prevented by western forces from occupying Taiwan. Western arms and intel will help fuel the Taiwan government until it's defeated. The goal isn't to win. It's simply to make the invasion very expensive.

Now, what I think western leaders are missing in this calculus is that China will not stop at Taiwan. The expense of exclusion from the western system is already priced in. It'll be paid for with additional expansion. So, after a short rest, China will ramp up with the annexation of additional territory within and around the nine dash-line setting up further conflicts with those countries. Taiwan's violent subjugation will give those countries pause and likely result in some combination of territorial concessions or vassalization; similar to the recent integration of the Solomon Islands into China's new extra-national order.

In parallel, Russia will solidify their holdings in western and southern Ukraine. I think at some point they'll test European and Nato resolve with a handful of attacks / incursions. But don't expect Nato to invade Ukraine or Russia anytime soon, because, you know, nukes. Ultimately, I predict Russia will move to finish their conquest of Georgia or accept their capitulation. Armenia will welcome Russian forces and Russia will begin moving further south into the middle east where they'll support Iran in conflict with some of the wealthy but poorly defended Arab states in the late 2020's or early 2030's.

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

#580

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

trasz wrote: post #537
quitit wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason why you don't send good money after bad. A line is drawn in the sand and while this isn't significant at first - it compounds over time, and allows businesses to divest, avoid new relationships and allow existing ones to become redundant. From war-mongering, using arbitrary embargoes as political retaliation, to farcical business practices (e.g. the ARM China saga), to a lop-sided approach to inte…

>From war-mongering, using arbitrary embargoes as political retaliation, to farcical business practices (e.g. the ARM China saga), to a lop-sided approach to intellectual property and using the state to remove competition This description fits USA much better than China. Especially the war mongering - China hasn’t invaded anyone for five decades now.

And China doesn't use sanctions or embargoes on anywhere near the same scale as the US does. Nobody does.

What meaningful sanctions has China imposed? The US has imposed very harsh sanctions against China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and many other countries. Because of the US dollar's position as the international reserve currency, US sanctions are highly effective. Huawei can barely even do business with other Chinese companies, because they're all afraid of getting hit by secondary sanctions.

The grandparent comment poses this as an issue of confronting a China that is behaving unfairly or erratically. That's not what this is about at all. Chinese policy has been relatively stable. In terms of how it treats foreign firms (for example, on IP protection issues), it's been getting progressively better. China doesn't want to rock the boat, because it is still developing and believes that things will go its way if it just smoothly grows its economy.

The real issue is that the US political class is panicking about being eclipsed as the world's top power. The panic began during the Trump administration, but it has now infected both political parties and is consensus in Washington. We'll see more and more disruptive moves like this until one of two things happens:

1. WW3, which everyone on Earth will lose.

2. The US realizes that being #2 isn't that bad.

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