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Comment by aliljet | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious what will happen with the export ban here. Inevitably, the blow back will be alternatives that emerge in markets that are not the United States. I'm curious if there are any non-US GPU contenders on the horizon?

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> I'm curious if there are any non-US GPU contenders on the horizon?

Chinese Startup Biren Details BR100 GPU: https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/08/22/chinese-startup-biren-det...

I think this is bigger news than the Hopper. But we will see if the US finds a way to block its production.

Why do you think it’s bigger than Hopper? It’s most likely going to be slower than H100, with less memory, and no cuda support. Software is likely to be its weak point (e.g. AMD is still struggling in this regard). Though if the price is 1/20 of H100 it might still be successful.

Now, after USA has removed its competitors from the Chinese market, this GPU will be a commercial success, regardless of any technical disadvantages.

So the company that has designed it will survive and it will grow and be able to design a next generation of GPUs, being protected from stronger competitors.

Had China decreed an overtax on imported datacenter GPUs to help its domestic producer, USA would have protested against such a protectionist measure. But now USA has done itself what was needed to protect the Chinese datacenter GPUs.

ASICs/Google TPU like things for AI inference/training will be easy to replicate and will have 95% of the power of existing solutions or maybe even improvements. Because they are simple in design.

As far as dedicated GPUs. There is so much additional work in the software side/driver side of thing unless there was a big concerted effort by a single company to build a solid foundation I see it as unlikely. Look at Intel struggling to get their GPUs out there.

Dedicated accelerated cards just for ML though? I believe some already exist/more will come.

And the biggest push to invest in re-inventing a software stack is a legal ban on access to the existing software.

If previously building a separate CUDA-like framework competed against paying a bit more to Nvidia, now this decision is infinitely simpler, since using Nvidia products is just out of the question.

Yep. This ban basically will force out an (widely used) alternative to CUDA and break Nvidia's defacto monopoly on highend AI compute.

Quite a gift to the Chinese if you ask me but US policy makers seem blind to this.

There is not a lot of high performance digital logic that does not originate in the US.

ARM Ltd is possibly one exception. Though after many many years of attempting high performance designs and coming out with mediocre designs they promptly had their doors absolutely blown off by Apple i.e., the US PA Semi design team, in its first outing (or second, if you count PA6T, which I guess you should, but the PA6T itself was superior in performance to ARM cores when it was released too, they just didn't play quite so obviously in the same markets). Japan does some boutique supercomputer CPUs I suppose although I don't think they're actually competitive so much as a protected and subsidized venture.

I don't know why. China, Russia, Japan, Europe have been attempting this for a long time with comparatively little success, then you get a startup in the US come out with something great.

It's interesting, it almost seems there are dynasties of some secret sauce, the recipe of which was discovered in 1960s and they only pass it down by word of mouth. There are so many of these design teams in startups and established companies you hear about with roots in DEC or Intel or IBM.

Maybe that's changing. Maybe it's less true with GPUs than CPUs. Not sure though, USA is certainly the center of the universe for all that stuff at the moment.

Well, Mali GPU was from Norway. I guess you would say Mali GPU is not high performance, but it is interesting that countries like Norway can come up with commercially competitive GPU design. I am sure China can as well.

It's not that China has not been trying to develop these kinds of HPC technologies for several decades and will begin to now in response to these latest round of embargos. And they have produced things. They just aren't competitive.

According to whom? I know people who sing praise of Huawei Ascend, as the best AI inference chip currently in the market. https://www.hiascend.com/en/

According to their failures in markets where they compete with other products.

I don't know about this chip. Possibly this time it'll be different, unlike all the previous times it would be different but wasn't. I don't think that's been established yet though. And certainly it's not for CPU cores or even more general purpose GPUs.

You don't know about Huawei Ascend, which launched in 2019 (see https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2019/8/huawei-ascend-910-most...), and now after 3 years everyone (at least here in East Asia) trying to actually deploy AI inference at least heard about, as one of the best solution in the market, and still are commenting on AI accelerators and "their failures in markets where they compete with other products", okay. Go on being clueless.

It's already here. What the fuck are you talking about, "I don't think that's been established yet". That would have made sense in 2019, not in 2022.

Swearing and getting angry at the situation isn't going to change things for you.

Could the secret sauce be the outrageous salaries paid by US/SV tech companies? That will suck a lot of the talent away from other nations.

The pay at SV semiconductor companies is great, but not as high as at the sort of modern web companies. Moving from Intel or Nvidia to Google is a big salary bump for a software person.

Hardware side I think this is less true, but in general hardware folks and electrical engineers in general don’t get the absolutely outrageous SV salaries in SV.

It's not that far from the truth, in that much of high-performance chip design knowledge is acquired through on-the-job training / working with more experienced people. Learning computer architecture in school just teaches the basics about how digital logic and CPUs work (frequently with 1980s designs), not how to actually build a screaming fast 4 GHz chip that you can tape out and get high production yield on. So Intel, Nvidia, etc. train lots of engineers that go on to start other companies (or move between companies).

The export ban applies to China only.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-says-us-has-impose...

Computer chip design is one of those fields that takes decades of work to build up the expertise and breakthroughs required to deliver cutting edge performance. Just look at how long it took amd to catch up to nvidia and that’s coming from an established company. It’s one of the few fields where you can’t just copy your way to the state of the art. China is of course working on their own home grown solution but it’s nowhere near the level of the US-designed silicon

The export ban seems serendipitously timed with a number of Chinese alternatives coming available.

The ban makes sense given ML compute is dual-use, but I wonder how hard it would be to train say, a missile targeting system, on AWS. I wonder if any nationstate would take the risk of using the public cloud for classified work as a way around sanctions.

I don’t think it’s dual use for ML, I think it’s more about edge compute. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I think radar resolution is compute bound so an order of magnitude or two could defeat stealth.

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