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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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We need to distinguish the USG and Jensen Huang.

Huang says:

The 800 series are fused on, means they’re physically fused, so that it gears down either the floating point processing or the interconnect or both, in order to comply with our export controls and so they’re physically fused and they cannot be unfused. But however, it’s form-fit function identical and it plugs into the same sockets, it runs the same software just slower. And it’s slower, but it’s still the world’s best.

So A800 is indeed not qualitatively inferior to A100 (although it's obsolete compared to H100, as will be the similarly gimped H800). It also seems that anything beyond Infiniband, eg NVLink, isn't necessary. I'd say GPT-4 and perhaps GPT5 can be trained on these things on acceptable timescales, maybe at less than 2X the cost (I suspect there are compounding inefficiencies so it'll be 3X – but whatever, so long as Xi understands the stakes… which he doesn't). The question is whether Nvidia will be able to deliver A800s to the PRC.

There are many commercial parties interested in selling compute and tools (and until recently, entire companies) to China. ASML almost sold them EUV machines but got pressured by US spooks into declining. TSMC produced their Biren GPUs which were compliant with the contemporary version of the sanctions regime, but had to halt shipments, with Biren imploding. Now it's Nvidia.

It may be understood as the usual regulator vs. loophole user game. I'm more pessimistic and suspect the US has such fine control over the situation they can afford to bait the Chinese (who are congenitally wed to the assumption of American incompetence and mercantilism and cannot anticipate next rounds of attacks; nor realize they'll actually get slaughtered despite being a profitable trade partner) into costly investments, then cut their hands off and force them to chase another loose end. It's pragmatic, if pretty cruel.

There are other ways to handicap Chinese ability to utilize those chips even while they are legal: delaying shipments, limiting supply of Infinibands and other infra…

I'll believe in A800s when I see actual Chinese datacenters running on them, even something merely on the scale of Stability.

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