China's GPU contender Moore Threads reveals card that can cope with Nvidia’s CUDA Moore Threads, a Chinese purveyor of GPUs, has unveiled its mightiest model to date – and it may even give market leader Nvidia a little to worry about. The MTT S4000 packs 48GB of video memory and 768GB/sec of video memory bandwidth on each card. But Moore Threads hasn't detailed core count or frequency, saying only that its …
Meh. At 25 TF/s in FP32, this MTT S4000 performs a bit like a household GPU, where RTX4070 does 29 TF/s, and RX7800XT hits 37 TF/s. Chinese gamers living in their mom's basements may rejoice some though (if the cards are available and inexpensive). MUSIFY likely dog-slows the chip down too I expect.
For AI, it'll be more interesting to see creatively competitive innovation from China (IMHO) -- stuff that'd make us go: "darn, they're real smart ou there!". Their own approach to the dataflow arch for example, or innovations to tackle the longstanding memory bottleneck of Von Neumann machinery, or even new ways to etch transistors at 2nm and beyond.
The MTT S4000 looks more like a ketchup band-aid than research worthy of the Zhiyuan to me.
I have no doubt that the performance will improve, fast.
Even if the documentation is only available to Chinese customers - As soon as China have viable "mainland" alternatives to everything that is produced in Taiwan, then there is nothing stopping them from taking the island by force, and severely borking all Western economies in the process.
Not to mention the fact that "Buy Chinese" sells as well to the public in China as "Buy American" does in the US. There are a lot of Chinese nationals who are going to prefer this card to NVidia's just because it isn't American. The same may prove true of some of China's more "interesting" political partners that take an anti-US stance.
China are not going to invade Taiwan, because they can't.
The last time any significant amphibious invasion was attempted, the invaders had been fighting for 4 years (most of them anyway), they had 2 dress rehearsals and the target did not possess satellites or a significant ally who could intervene.
China would need to get 1,000,000 men across the straights of Taiwan and supply them. Taiwan and the US would be able to watch the build up in real time and would know exactly where the landings were going to be. Imagine China's casualty rate.
China could destroy Taiwan of course, they possess nukes. That's going to cripple their own economy, so they won't do that either.
Yet...
Here is the unintended consequence. China will develop their own stuff, they have plenty of stolen IP with which to do so plus engineers that we conveniently trained for them in our universities. It night not be quite as shit-hot as the West's, but it'll be good enough and cheap as chips. They won't hesitate to sell it to all the non-G7's. Before long it'll come back around to us and we'll have another Huawei on our hands, except instead of eavesdropping on our comms they'll be operating our self-driving cars.
University education won't matter for making chips. They are being trained in our semiconductor companies from Apple to ARM to the chinese companies being supplied with arch licenses by ARM/Imgtec etc. to develop CPU/GPU. The political situation may prevent those employees from going back to China and working at gunpoint I suppose but I'm guessing there are only going to be increasingly ridiculous job offers for those folks once all the IP has been scooped up and China can decouple itself.
>”… and we'll have another Huawei on our hands, except…”
With a home grown industry the balance of power will also shift, so all the tech documentation will be in Chinese (if you are able to get your hands on it) and thus we will need to purchase Chinese engineers at elevated salaries ( that’s if China allows them to leave the country) to get our hands on it and thus keep up with the innovation…
I'm picking that within 20 years China will be selling Thorium MSR nuclear power to all takers and the USA's oil hegemony will be done
That's likely to be more important than any other technology
The supreme irony of this being that it's technology developed originally in the USA (one of the few truely indigenous US technology inventions), tested sucessfully and then OUTLAWED because it posed a threat to the nuclear weapons industry (it's still illegal to run up a molten fuelled nuclear reactor in the USA, which puts a severe crimp in the work of the dedicated few at ORNL)
Without their sanctions, the world would be closing in on a lot of single-supplier monopolies in critical infrastructure
Thanks to their paranoia, we're seeing independent supply chains developing in ways that USA corporates _can't_ buy out or exert political control over
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