Apparently DeepSeek’s new model has been delayed due to issues with the Huawei chips they’re using. Maybe raw floating point performance of Chinese chips is competitive with NVIDIA, but clearly there’s still a lot of issues to iron out.
If CUDA isn't that strong of a moat/tie-in and Chinese tech companies can seemingly reasonably migrate to these chips, why hasn't AMD been able to compete more aggressively with nVidia on a US/global scale when they had a much longer head start?
There's a very important point made in the article - with recent export controls, domestic Chinese firms don't need to beat Nvidia's best, but only the cut-down chips cleared for Chinese export.
US government f'ed over Nvidia's China market dominance in order to help OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI.
China shouldn't be buying H20s. Those are gimped 3 year old GPUs. If Nvidia is allowed to sell the latest and greatest in China, I think their revenue would jump massively.
Can someone ELI5 this to me? Nvidia has the market cap of a medium-sized country precisely because apparently (?) no one else can make chips like them. Great tech, hard to manufacture, etc - Intel and AMD are nowhere to be seen. And I can imagine it's very tricky business!
China, admittedly full of smart and hard working people, then just wakes up one day an in a few years covers the entire gap, to within some small error?
How is this consistent? Either:
- The Chinese GPUs are not that good after all
- Nvidia doesn't have any magical secret sauce, and China could easily catch up
- Nvidia IP is real but Chinese people are so smart they can overcome decades of R&D advantage in just s few years
- It's all stolen IP
To be clear, my default guess isn't that it is stolen IP, rather I can't make sense of it. NVDA is valued near infinity, then China just turns around and produces their flagship product without too much sweat..?
- Chinese labs managed to "overcome decades of R&D" because they have been trying for many years now with unlimited resources, government support and total disrespect of IP laws
- Chinese chips may not be competitive at process power/W with Western but they have cheaper electricity and again unlimited loss capacity
- they will probably hit wall at the software/ecosystem level. CUDA ergonomy is something very difficult to replicate and, you know, developers love ease of use
> Nvidia has the market cap of a medium-sized country
This makes no sense. Market cap is share price times number of shares, there is no analog for a country. It’s also not comparable to the GDP of a country, since GDP is a measure of flow in a certain time period, whereas market cap is a point in time measurement of expected performance.
Perhaps China’s actions are less of a problem for Nvidia and more of a problem for other chip makes. After all, if Alibaba can make this chip, what justifies the valuation of companies like Groq?
"According to investors, today's value of Nvidia's expected future profits over its lifetime equals the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a medium-sized country in a year."
Don't compare market cap with GDP, when you spell it out it's clear how nonsensical it is.
Several years ago, whenever some Chinese engineers dared to propose using some Chinese parts, the challenges he/she had to face is always "who is going to be responsible if it is not reliable enough for its quality?"
Nowadays, whenever some Chinese engineers dared to propose using some American parts, the challenges he/she had to face is always "who is going to be responsible if it is not reliable enough for its supply?"
Considering the fact China controls most of the world supply of rare minerals, considering the fact the US is lead by a incompetent leader, considering the fact Nvidia looses a big market, I think China can compete with even the leading Nvidia chips in a couple of years time.
If that happens, China in turn can export those Chips to countries that are in dire need of Chips, like Russia. They can export to Africa, South-America and the rest of Asia. Thus resulting in more competition for Nvidia. I see bright times ahead, where the USA no longer controls all of the worlds chip supply and OS systems.
Why do we look at these as a race? There is nothing to win. Nobody won space, or nukes, and they won’t win AI. You might get there first, but your competitor will get there soon after regardless. Embrace it.
So about 5 years behind the cutting edge, SMIC showed their advanced lithography tools today(still no ASML) but come 2030 at this rate? Hard to say they won’t catch up.
While their lithography may lag, their system-level engineering is leveraging unique strengths.
China's lack of power constraints allows them to build massive, optically-networked systems like the CloudMatrix 384.
There is a SemiAnalysis that compares it to Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72.
It looks like they overcome weaker individual chips to outperform Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 with 2x the compute, 3.6x the aggregate memory, and 2.1x the memory bandwidth.
with scale-out networking and software optimization, not just silicon.
They seem to be highly pragmatic. Rather than chasing AGI, they are more interested in what can be done with today's technology. Any breakthrough towards AGI will inevitably leak quickly, so they'll be able to catch up as long as the foundation is ready. In a bicycle race, it can be quite beneficial to travel behind the leader and enjoy a reduction in drag forces. Perhaps that's their guiding principle.
If you have the most basic understanding of chips its not just design, as that has a high degree of coupling to manufacturing and this article doesn't say where, who or how the chips are being made.
China, at last check was behind Intels home grown chip making efforts when it came to sizes and yields.
Hype and saber rattling to get the US to (Re)act, or possibly ignore the growing black market for Nvidia gear (that also happens to be bi-directional with modified cards flowing back to the US).
So faced with a choice of buying hobbled H20 GPU chips vs developing their own (so far behind the SOTA), the Chinese market decided to develop/buy their own GPU chips?
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 57.8 ms ] threadhttps://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c91695119...
I believe about 1000 S&P points down - to just above the trade war lows from April.
China shouldn't be buying H20s. Those are gimped 3 year old GPUs. If Nvidia is allowed to sell the latest and greatest in China, I think their revenue would jump massively.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275070
China, admittedly full of smart and hard working people, then just wakes up one day an in a few years covers the entire gap, to within some small error?
How is this consistent? Either:
- The Chinese GPUs are not that good after all
- Nvidia doesn't have any magical secret sauce, and China could easily catch up
- Nvidia IP is real but Chinese people are so smart they can overcome decades of R&D advantage in just s few years
- It's all stolen IP
To be clear, my default guess isn't that it is stolen IP, rather I can't make sense of it. NVDA is valued near infinity, then China just turns around and produces their flagship product without too much sweat..?
- Chinese labs managed to "overcome decades of R&D" because they have been trying for many years now with unlimited resources, government support and total disrespect of IP laws
- Chinese chips may not be competitive at process power/W with Western but they have cheaper electricity and again unlimited loss capacity
- they will probably hit wall at the software/ecosystem level. CUDA ergonomy is something very difficult to replicate and, you know, developers love ease of use
This makes no sense. Market cap is share price times number of shares, there is no analog for a country. It’s also not comparable to the GDP of a country, since GDP is a measure of flow in a certain time period, whereas market cap is a point in time measurement of expected performance.
"According to investors, today's value of Nvidia's expected future profits over its lifetime equals the total monetary value of all final goods and services produced within a medium-sized country in a year."
Don't compare market cap with GDP, when you spell it out it's clear how nonsensical it is.
Nowadays, whenever some Chinese engineers dared to propose using some American parts, the challenges he/she had to face is always "who is going to be responsible if it is not reliable enough for its supply?"
If that happens, China in turn can export those Chips to countries that are in dire need of Chips, like Russia. They can export to Africa, South-America and the rest of Asia. Thus resulting in more competition for Nvidia. I see bright times ahead, where the USA no longer controls all of the worlds chip supply and OS systems.
I see this as an absolute win.
If you have the most basic understanding of chips its not just design, as that has a high degree of coupling to manufacturing and this article doesn't say where, who or how the chips are being made.
China, at last check was behind Intels home grown chip making efforts when it came to sizes and yields.
Hype and saber rattling to get the US to (Re)act, or possibly ignore the growing black market for Nvidia gear (that also happens to be bi-directional with modified cards flowing back to the US).
Who could have possibly seen this coming? /s
then its just matter of time when SOTA model is produced from china first or not