Stacking up Huawei’s rack-scale boogeyman against Nvidia’s best

Nvidia has the green light to resume shipments of its H20 GPUs to China, but while the chip may be plentiful, bit barn operators in the region now have far more capable alternatives at their disposal. Among the most promising is Huawei's CloudMatrix 384 rack systems, which it teased at the World Artificial Intelligence …

[HuBo]

Looks perty good

It's a nice system, especially with its use of optics (pluggable) to link units together. Switching to co-packaged optics (CPO) should give it some extra edge in future.

It must be noted though (imho) that two NVL72 racks would be 25% faster than a CloudMatrix 384, at 88% of the price, while occupying 1/8th of the space, and consuming just 40% of the juice.

But yes, where NVL72s (or similar) are not available, a CloudMatrix 384 could be worthwhile -- provided there's software to run on it (eg. on top of Huawei's CANN for Ascend NPUs).

[seven of five]

8.2M vs 3.5M

>Huawei's CloudMatrix 384 will reportedly retail for somewhere in the neighborhood of $8.2 million. Nvidia's NVL72 rack systems are estimated to cost around $3.5 million a piece.

So the US export controls force companies to spend 8M with Huawei instead of an US based company gaining 3.5M.

Genius.