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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

people who can do this stuff are super-smartypants

but reminds me how we're going to find out on an industrial level when the Saudis give China some nvidia chips they were grifted

they've cloned lots of chips before but nothing that advanced

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I'm a chip designer, back in the early 90s I visited a small silicon house who were doing some work for us, their boardroom table had been taken over by a giant sized photomicrograph of IBM's VGA chip and they had a bunch of summer hire grad students tracing wiring and matching standard cells (easier back then because we only worked in 2 layers of metal).

They weren't trying to steal IBM's design, they already had one of their own, what they wanted to know was "is there any as yet unannounced functionality in the IBM VGA chip?" they didn't want to be caught out when some unknown registers popped up. Of course it turned out there was as yet unannounced functionality - but not by IBM's design, more because of the orthogonality of the design - MODE-X was discovered and became the basis for DOOM's speed, anyone who didn't support it lost out

MODE-X launched 1,000 ships too with the demoscene.

You can do this. If you commit the whole next month to it you'll make quite some progress. But you won't.

They did give the chips to China, but they didn’t work. Turns out they’d first taken them to the basement where someone cut them into pieces before sending them to China.

China has no shortage of Nvidia chips. It costs nothing (relatively) for someone to just buy a 5090 off the shelf and send it there.

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