News AMD's custom Instinct MI309 GPU for China fails export license test from U.S. government

[Admin]

AMD faces a setback to sell its latest Instinct MI309 AI and HPC GPU to Chinese entities.

AMD's custom Instinct MI309 GPU for China fails export license test from U.S. government : Read more

 

[NinoPino]

@Author please fix the subtitle, too much "to sell" 😀

 

[watzupken]

To me, this not a setback, but an advantage for AMD and other potential competitors in this space. The reason is because when you cap how powerful your hardware can be in order to be eligible for sale in a very big market, you are pretty much leveling out the playing field. Nvidia for example likely have the most desirable hardware due to performance advantage. When you cap the potential, and for the price that Nvidia charges, it will become a lot less desirable to buyers in China. Why pay more when they perform round about the same?

Ultimately, the long term effect is detrimental to all these technology companies. The cap performance is likely quite a fair bit lower. And once domestic solutions catches up with this performance, there will be no demand for them.

 

[sygreenblum]

Yeah, I tend to agree except possibly for different reasons.

China is still able to get high end kit from back channels and black markets for their important projects. This site had an article dated January 28th about a smuggling operation trying to import 53,000 chips in violation of sanctions. Reuters has had several similar articles, one of them dated Jan. 15th.

These stories happen nearly every day large and small. If other smuggling operations are to be used as a comparison, authorities only ever catch a small fraction of these operations. This is evident by the fact that Universities like Harbin Institute of Technology and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China still able to build super computers and AI systems using Nvidia products.

 

[FoxtrotMichael-1]

I don’t particularly like when companies try to do this anyway. If the spirit of the US trade restrictions on China are to stop the PLA from developing a military advantage in AI (and it is) then trying to develop specialized chips that come in just barely under the terms of the trade restrictions is directly against the spirit of those rules. If these companies want to be “US” companies and receive all the benefits, material and otherwise, of being so then they need to follow the spirit of the US strategic defense objective and not the letter.

I understand that in this global economy we have a tendency to take a “one world” view but nations do still exist and matter. China is a defense risk to the United States. Companies based in the US should respect that.