Suppose one looks closely at Nvidia's alleged data center product lineup for China. In that case, they will notice that the family is meticulously designed to avoid any possible violations of the latest U.S. export rules concerning AI and HPC GPUs. All the new AI and HPC offerings from Nvidia are designed to fit into the green zone in the chart.
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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How much does having the best performing hardware actually matter in AI?
not much, garbage (quickly) in, garbage (quickly) out, the training data set and novel techniques matter more than how quickly it's processed after a certain point.
I work in the field and I don't know what the others here are saying. In practice the difference in performance doesn't matter, we literally just launch a bunch of jobs on the cluster, and if they finish faster it doesn't matter because I either haven't checked my jobs, or I'm not ready to collect the results yet, or I'm just dicking around with some experiments or different parameters so the actual speed of completion doesn't matter. A bunch of weaker GPUs can do the same task as a stronger one, only memory really matters. Doubly true if the company is big enough that power consumption is a drop in the bucket in terms of operational costs.
What actually matters is the overall workflow, stuff like the cluster having downtime is way more impactful to my work than the performance of a GPU, or the ease of designing and scheduling jobs/experiments on the cluster.
Also in the end all of this is moot, this type of training is probably the wrong approach to AI. Note that a child does not need a million images of a ball to recognize a ball, and it would instantly be able to recognize soccer balls, basket balls, etc as all balls after learning one. The way we train our AIs cannot do this, our current approach to AI is just brute force.
When you are able to choose between 1 rack of latest Nvidia products vs 3 racks of last gen to get results in the same time frame, you find that the performance matters a lot
I don't think the US gov't is taking kindly to Nvidia desperately trying to stay in the Chinese market.
When they tried to reroute all shipments ahead of the deadline the US moved it to be effective immediately.
All it takes is one small change on the sanctions and their new chips go kaput.
These sanctions will negatively impact the next generation GPUs from all vendors, as they will be designed for China first.
These sanctions indirectly make Intel and AMD even more competitive in HPC in China due to the performance cap. Take for example Gaudi2, its significantly cheaper than Nvidia's offerings but also comes up a bit short on performance (ends up being better price to performance than Nvidia). These sanctions would affect Gaudi2 too but not the Chinese variant Intel is making, and with the U.S. government setting a performance cap suddenly the other metrics become far more important, like pricing and availability.
Since when did we care so much about the lawman? Especially the old and white international law man?
Like I would totally download a car. I’ve downloaded many things I shouldn’t have on the internet just because I can. People speed daily because no body is looking. The whole reason why border patrol has a job is because they stop and check vehicles for contraband.
US citizens make money buying drugs from one state and driving it over to another to cut up drugs and sell for more profit.
People overcharge the normal us consumer and we blindly accept it. Heck that extra virgin olive oil you bought at your market likely isn’t even from Italy or it is full of filler.
So why I ask. Who cares if NVIDIA can make more money selling equipment that everyone else is already using? And for what? So people can use bing more for search and some fun Ai Friday after work chat?? Or when you use Ai to generate some warhammer 40K ideas for new colors and inspiration?