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Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

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Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#91
post #9

Prediction - we are going to figure out SOTA AI performance without requiring 1TB of memory within a year or so. Of course CXMT, Micron, and family will still be profitable, but maybe not 'surge 470% from IPO' profitable.

How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.

Historical precedent: Quickselect, or any other discovery of a surprising algorithmic speed-up.

LLMs haven’t been on the scene for very long. There’s still lots of room for efficiency discoveries. Plus, I keep hearing quantum is going to be a big deal in the next few years.

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#92
post #9

Prediction - we are going to figure out SOTA AI performance without requiring 1TB of memory within a year or so. Of course CXMT, Micron, and family will still be profitable, but maybe not 'surge 470% from IPO' profitable.

How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.

I haven't tried it, but colibri is meant to allow running GLM 5.2 the 744B model in 32GB by using prefetches and streaming from fast SSDs.

https://github.com/JustVugg/colibri

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#93
post #7

EU chip industry: best I can do is eat glue in the corner.

To be fair, all high end chips are made in Asia with EU tooling. US happens to be the place where the managers are and the trade is facilitated. There has been some good progress to push Asia make cips in USA with EU machines however IIRC significant part of the chain is still in Asia and chips made in USA are shipped to Asia for further processing.

Edit: changed China with Asia to distance the comment from Taiwan-China based politics.

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.

> How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off. Sure, it might be very near using the current approach, but... it might also be might be very far off because we are using the wrong approach. I mean, look at the max amount o…

Though even if there are big further breakthroughs to be made here, they won’t necessarily be made soon, and if they aren’t made in the next ~10 years then they won’t really affect the outcome of chip investments made now or in the immediate future.

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price is similar, as they all rely on same upstream suppliers. The quality is kinda meh.

They don't have access to EUV machines from ASML though.

What they have is good enough for competitive DDR5 DIMMs.

In China they already make integrated circuits with a finer pitch than at TSMC or Intel before the transition to EUV.

This is achieved by multiple exposures, which increase the fabrication cost, but with the current prices they still have very healthy profits.

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#96

The more interesting question is: why does the rest of the world not increase their production prowess? I am aware of most of the reasons, but I am getting tired of the "China is better than the rest of the world". It is more that China did a lot of things that the others either failed to do or no longer wanted to do. Case in point is Germany: from "our cars are best" to "hey, chinese cars are now better" (or, cheape…

The rest of the world is chasing models of investment in procurement of goods and services that get stuck on neoliberal capitalist antipatterns where every action demands a short-term profit motive. These are now very large-scale, highly-complex-supplychain manufacturing projects, and you cannot remain competitive if you are just Putting Faith In The Market to solve your problems. There's too much planning and sustained, structured goal-orientation required for investors or for the sort of contract-bid, public-private actions Western politicals are used to engaging with.

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. However much intelligence you can squeeze into 1 GB, people will always want more. Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.

Your example contradicts you. 2K, 4K, and 8K+ TVs have been around forever, and although 4K has become the norm, it's widely accepted that there isn't much benefit for most people above 1080p

It depends on TV size. If you've ever experienced Netflix on a 75" TV, 1080p content looks mediocre on it. So really it's better expressed as "there isn't much benefit for most TV sizes."

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would we do that? There's no historic precedent for that. Its fundamentally an information theory thing: what's the max amount of intelligence you can get out of 1 KB/MB/GB? There has to be a limit and I'm not convinced that it's far off.

Historical precedent: Quickselect, or any other discovery of a surprising algorithmic speed-up. LLMs haven’t been on the scene for very long. There’s still lots of room for efficiency discoveries. Plus, I keep hearing quantum is going to be a big deal in the next few years.

Super interesting, when Quantum computing would enable really large models, or much larger contexts. But QRAM is even more behind than pure fault-tolerant gates.

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#99
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be working out better than leaving it up to the market

Why does the US stock market keep having record years while the population doesn't seem to benefit, whereas the opposite is happening in China? Isn't that a failure of US capitalism?

What do you mean why?

This memory stock popping on IPO has nothing to do with how well/bad capitalism provides in the USA. This is entirely about Chinese investors speculating on this company's ability to grow and undercut some Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron. Nobody knows on IPO day if a company will grow into the expectations of the investors.

And China's population mostly invested in Evergrande real estate, not stocks. Lots of workers in the US are at least invested in the stock market via their 401k/IRA, but the same isn't true of Chinese workers.

Also worth reiterating that most US stocks aren't doing great. The top 10 by market cap keep dragging the indexes into growth, but success is heavily biased towards the monster caps.

Re: Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

#100
post #9

Prediction - we are going to figure out SOTA AI performance without requiring 1TB of memory within a year or so. Of course CXMT, Micron, and family will still be profitable, but maybe not 'surge 470% from IPO' profitable.

I think the chipmakers are pretty securely set up here, the usual cyclical issues aside. Between the stubborn resistance of the data to being compressed without significant loss, and to a lesser extent the ability to do more with more memory (we’re surely at diminishing returns for LLMs already, but diminishing doesn’t mean zero) it seems like a fairly safe guess (I am not an expert on anything) that for the next decade at least you’ll still want at least 128-256GiB of video RAM to have a comfortably “SOTA-enough” experience. Then the other side of the rectangle comes from putting that VRAM in every consumer and office-worker device. Selling everything at a big premium to a few efficiency-obsessed SaaS providers is what you do when you’re temporarily supply-constrained. Sidelining the SaaS middlemen and selling to gloriously inefficient consumers who will leave their laptops closed for most of the day is the dream. This is probably not unrelated to the fact that the country which is currently making a big strategic push into memory manufacturing is also championing open models.
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