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How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

japantimes.co.jp

71–80 of 645 posts

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#71
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-verifiable by what standards?

Modern GPU's often have on device firmware, secure boot chains, microcontrollers, etc. If you don't control silicon design, firmware signing and update pipelines you can't meaningfully attest to what the advice is doing.

But for most of us, that's already the case, isn't it?

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#72

[flagged]

Most of that entire network is easy to replicate, as in it's not technically hard, the hard part is validation, no one in PRC wants to use unproven PRC inputs if risk is 100m wafer run goes to trash. Hence PRC now basically insuring domestic fabs on risk runs using domestic inputs, which are being validated on full scale production, instead of taking 5 years to verify, it'll take 2. Export controls help this, i.e. domestic resist basically required now after JP export controls.

The hard part, i.e. optics, light source. Zeiss had like 3k engineerings, Cymer 1k, ASML 13k during EUV commercialization process. PRC can (and is) just throwing bodies at problem, lots of parallel execution with clear second mover road map. That and as this article suggest, they're literally poaching people with the tacit knowledge which will help speed run. I'd wadger they get there sooner than later.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#73

A "Manhattan Project" would be building some shocking new technology that didn't previously exist. If they're cobbling together old parts, it sounds more like something you'd to to keep things running in case a conflict erupts: > The availability of parts from older ASML machines on secondary markets has allowed China to build a domestic prototype

A “manhattan project” can just mean a massive secret scientific war project? Seems apt.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#74

With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...

scale down or not, we will see consumer GPU from China in the future. might be a copy or rip of existing GPUs, but it will happen. 3 of my GPU rigs are chinese MB built for the chinese market, ripoff of dual x99. They work, they are cheap, I got them for under $100 a piece. So maybe 5 years from now, we get cheap GPUs, and maybe they will be equivalent to 5090s, but who cares if the price is right?

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#75

Seems like demographics, AI, and tech parity are converging on a Taiwan takeover attempt in the 2027-2030 timeframe.

I know mass media keeps pounding this "eventual scenario" (manufacturing consent and all). Maybe it will happen, but the Chinese think on longer timelines than the ADHD West and are probably banking on A). Out-attriting, B). Out-innovating. If both happen, we might find ourselves with a situation where Taiwan voluntarily wants to align closer with China as the West flails.

> manufacturing consent

I think it's more like smearing/projection, like Republican conspiracy theories about Democrats being pedophiles. Guess where the real pedophiles were hanging out the whole time.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#76

With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...

You don't need CUDA for gaming but software is still just as big of a moat. Gaming GPU drivers are complex and have tons of game-specific patches. With their new Radeon/RDNA architecture it took AMD years to overcome their reputation for having shitty drivers on their consumer GPUs (and that reputation was indeed deserved early on). And I bet if you go read GPU discussion online today you'll still find people who avo…

Yea, but less than in the past. Modern graphics APIs are much thinner layers.

This was even proven in practice with Intel’s Arc. While they had (and to some extent still have) their share of driver problems, at a low enough price that isn’t a barrier.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#77

With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...

Yeah PRC probably going to dump 1T into indigenize semi efforts by end of decade, but IMO good chance they're going to treat strategic semi as commodity utility business than make NASDAQ lines go up model. When western semi has 1st tier suppliers taking 30% margin, asml taking 50%, tsmc taking 50%, nvidia taking lol 70%, there's alot of fat on the pyramid to trim. PRC doing cost plus 10-20% will basically be able to brrrt chips stupid cheap if they have mature domestic tool scaling, enough to wipe litho+yield inefficiencies.

Western semi still "safe" since west+co aren't going to source from PRC leading edge due to national security, but pretty soon they're either going to need to compress margins to compete which means cutting costs, which means cutting R&D because shareholder going to get theirs or western semi business model going to run on permenant subsidies. Which is what will probably happen considering their performance is why stonk lines go up right now. That 1T PRC spend and choose to simply discount for utility chips is going to wipe multipel trillion of western semi market cap and all the economic implications that entails so it might not even be bad idea.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#78

With Nvidia scaling down their consumer GPU production [0] I wonder if we will see consumer GPUs shipping from China in the future. Western companies seem to be abandoning the consumer/prosumer market which will have bad implications for hobbyists and aspiring professionals down the line. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nvidia-might-cut-rtx-50-gpu-suppl...

Yeah PRC probably going to dump 1T into indigenize semi efforts by end of decade, but IMO good chance they're going to treat strategic semi as commodity utility business than make NASDAQ lines go up model. When western semi has 1st tier suppliers taking 30% margin, asml taking 50%, tsmc taking 50%, nvidia taking lol 70%, there's alot of fat on the pyramid to trim. PRC doing cost plus 10-20% will basically be able to…

"your margin is my opportunity" - bezos

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#79
post #20

It seems extremely dishonest to frame the project of improving computer chip manufacturing to the development of weapons of mass destruction— weapons that went on to be used against civilians. Sensationalist and propagandistic framing for what is otherwise an interesting article.

The term 'Manhattan Project' is a common and widely used metaphor for R&D programs with effectively unlimited resources applied to them. The actual Manhattan Project is simply a very famous exemplar of such a program. Use of that term is not propaganda, it's normal English.

When referring to the efforts nation-states, I'd be very interested to hear how often such metaphorical usage is used to describe the work of adversarial vs. friendly countries. I would be shocked if it's as often (in the Anglophone press) used to describe the work of US-aligned countries as it is that of US-adversarial countries.

Re: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips

#80
post #55

I'd argue ASML's moat isn't the machine itself but the ecosystem: Carl Zeiss optics, decades of supplier relationships, institutional knowledge. This is clearly a significant achievement, but does anyone with semiconductor experience have a sense of how far "generates EUV light" is from "production-ready tool"?

They are nowhere close to beat ASML. This isn't a moat ASML can keep for long though. There can be alternatove technologies to achieve the same goal. So far only China has that incentive. The real problem is process scaling is slowing down. How many more generations of lithography machines will ASML design? Probably not many. This means there will be no edge left in 5 or 10 years, as eventually brute force will work…

> So far only China has that incentive.

The US is close to having that incentive, if the rift between the US and Europe keeps widening. The Netherlands has one lever, but damn it's a long one.

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