US willing to compromise with Nvidia over AI chip sales to China The Biden administration has taken a special interest in Nvidia's sale of accelerators to China and is now working with the chipmaker to establish which chips the Middle Kingdom is permitted to acquire. In an interview with Reuters, commerce secretary Gina Raimondo emphasized that Nvidia could and should sell GPUs in China, as …
I mean, GPUs for cheap labor. My bad.
You can always count on the USA for "big talk" followed by ... "deals". Predictable. Too much money at stake. The President knows that "bringing it all back" to the USA, means nasty, dirty, industry. We love you China!! Keep making our "stuff"!! So we can have a "good" Christmas under the tree.
O: Well, Mr. Kafka, you do know why I stopped you, don't you!
K: Yes officer. I was driving at a speed of 34 mph on a road with a speed limit of 35 mph. I am guilty of attempting to limbo under the speed limit. Under the rules of metamorphosis, the legal speed of travel in 35 mph zones has to be in the middle of the allowable range. that is between 17 and 18 mph only. Please do place me immediately on trial as required by the laws of overhwelming absurdity.
Hmmmm. Interesting parallax. The screw-up then would be one of regulatory myopic presbyopia through which lawmakers miss the desired enforcement target and place restrictions on transitively related but mostly out-of-focus items instead (rather than doing this through purely absurdist dogma). More Mr Magoo than Franz Kafka then ... a most fascinating outlook!
I thought these "AI Accelerators" were merely repackaged GPUs with maybe some tweaks to internal firmware and different library support. They're still fundamentally vector processors. It was a great move for nVidia to recognized and take advantage of this, effectively turning a competitive 'me too' product (albeit a good one) into a major market that they effectively own. Unfortunately the basic technology is well known but the only barrier to entry for a competitor is the build/buy tradeoff -- the money's been in using these parts, not building them. Disturbing this to try to undermine a potential competitor is just going to give 'them' both a commercial and a nationalistic purpose to develop their own versions. When they do they're going to not only be a formidable competitor but they've also got an excellent reason to stick it to us, to subtly dump product on the world market to undermine our share of that market. (As they say "All's fair in love and war".....)
The writing's on the wall but somehow we refuse to read it.
They accelerate the workloads of AI better than any other competitor. Also, and someone correct me if I'm wrong (most probably am, I'm an eejit) they're not just GPUs. They have accelerator chips, tensor cores, all sorts of special hardware that's either more than the consumer model or a whole other addition. I can't talk about value or price or things like that except to say - people are happily buying em, so they're obviously of value as they are.
I don't believe that they're a well known basic technology. Feels like if that was so the competitors would be a lot closer.
Developing a chip at all is high tech.
But the individual parts of an AI chip are fairly simple, it's a matter of having a lot of them. So power and area optimization, while also optimizing for a high clock speed. And having a really fast memory interface.
And then software & driver development.
So China has the skills to make a not very good one, and then improve it over time. But there was no motivation to do that. Now there is a motivation.
"I'm telling you, if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day,"
So then what is the point of the export controls and limits ? You set a limit, a company comes under the limit, so you change the limit to then include them ? Why anyone would say that out loud is baffling - you're basically saying "we want a total ban, but we're going to do this bit-by-bit and blame it on the manufacturer for following the rules we set out"
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