Huwei and SMIC are iterating too fast. As they get good enough yields on current/last generation, they move up/announce new generations that freeze a bit of demand. I think they are doing this to get good pricing for SMIC and local designs. It doesn’t help that all the Trump sycophants are calling him brilliant for enslaving China to “NVIDIA’s 4th best chips and software stack”.
Exactly right! This why China is banning the chips. They caught up in hardware and now need to catch up in software. If they continue to allow people to use NVIDIA chips, then their software will never progress as they won’t have users to optimize them.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Joncash2@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Probably. It’s hard to say since so much is behind the veil. In fact it’s likely China has its own DUV lithography supply. US estimates on what China can produced based on number of asml units sold is wildly wrong.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is more a tit-for-tat with Trump tariffs and trade embargoes. I don’t think the Chinese state leadership cares about going heads up with NVIDIA in the public market, even if they’re hosting the inferior brand (for now). They’ve been operating as a second-best option in manufacturing and tech for decades as they built up their capacity.
But this kind of power move is a kick in the teeth to some of Trump’s wealthiest supporters. It gives Chinese diplomats enormous leverage as they go into another round of trade negotiations with a country whose economy increasingly revolves around making and selling chipsets.
Joncash2@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
You’re right about that, BUT I’d argue that’s all small potatoes. If no one develops on Chinese chips, then they’ll never actually be competitive. The only way for China to push ahead in any capacity, or even to catch up is to have thousands of users on their chipsets.
Let’s look at the MooreThreads MTT80. When it started it was performing like a 2017 GPU GT1030. They did 0 hardware upgrades. I will repeat that 0 hardware upgrades. But today, it’s able to run the domestic game Black Myth WuKong at 4k at 40 fps. Yes I realize that means it stutters, but with no hardware changes they were able to make a fairly demanding modern game playable. What this has rang through out China I am sure is, we have to do everything on earth to fix our software. If that means banning NVIDIA, so be it.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
People will develop on Chinese chips because they’re cheaper and more open-sourced. Also, because their specs are written in Chinese rather than English and that’s their native tongue.
That’s not because of a chip import policy the state issued last week. Someone’s obviously working on these things, even without a bunch of state-issued trade restrictions.
NVIDIA does not have the export capacity to feed the entire Chinese state’s demand for new hardware. Never did. The real reason for a domestic Chinese investment in tech is that China is also a global leading consumer. They need to fab their own chips for the same reason they need to build their own cars and grow their own rice. Their economy can’t work as an import economy when they represent 16% of the global population.
This change in policy will undoubtedly accelerate domestic investment in new software. But it wasn’t strictly necessary.
Joncash2@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
The problem is the Chinese chips are not cheaper. Huawei’s 910c is about 30% slower and 1/3 more expensive. Add on top of that a lack of software, without government force, who would buy it?