this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nvidia, yes, AMD, no. Not pure rasterization. Is this because of the tensor cores?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Nvidia AI performance is faster for the equivalent AMD GPU. 4090 meets the ceiling but not 4080 so 7900XTX is safe as well.

Yes, tensor cores are responsible

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Just a reminder tha't not just china but many other countries as well:

Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Burma, Cambodia, Central African Republic, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Cyprus, Egypt, Eritrea, Georgia, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Macau, Moldova, Mongolia, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Republic of Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen, Zimbabwe

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I understand where they are coming from with all those countries (to restrict parallel imports into Russia) but Turkey not being in the list kinda makes the entire exercise pointless since that's the country most engaged with the practice right now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Basically all the countries that were antagonistic against US this year

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Can’t they just issue sanctions based on a TFLOPS or memory bandwidth ceiling instead of playing whack a mole with dozens of model numbers of the same chips?

They will have to start banning AMD and Intel models eventually too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They will have to start banning AMD

Fortunately for AMD, their software is not yet good enough to leverage those tflops effectively. It'll kind of suck when that day does happen, though, because it probably would lead to a ban.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Software stack is completely useless for datacenters. Nobody is using off-the-shelf solutions.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all building custom chips, you think they need AMD software stack if they bought MI300?

All they need is close-to-metal access via minimal driver.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Nvidia "okay okay, we're banned selling directly to China".... Order comes in "huh a order for 1 million 4090s to the harbour in Hong Kong, seems legit to me". All this means is that smugglers will make some extra cash moving cards from neighbouring countries into China, I doubt the Chinese border will be that bothered about someone walking across with a pallet of 4090s.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Every week, release a new model number.

RTX 6001, RTX 6002..

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Can buy from Huawei or customised with SMIC, or even Loongson for industrial, institutional or commercial use.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (5 children)

that means more supply for western markets resulting in lower 4090 prices again right 🥲

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Not now, because Nvidia will ship exclusively to China til the deadline

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

More demand from 3rd party importers/exporters resulting in even higher 4090 prices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

About that... :(

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

It's probably already baked in, but it might result in a slightly lower price.

But honestly, if you can afford a 4090, then saving $50 on it should be completely and utterly irrelevant.

If $50-100 makes that big a difference, then you shouldn't be pissing away that much on a GPU.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yes but not right now. Chinese importers stocked their supply of RTX 4090 and thus a scarcity of it. Expect it in 6 months (new year's coming and thus demand do go up) to go lower.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

No. The cards will get ever so slightly more expensive in china. They will be freely available as they are right now in russia.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

In the retail market yes, that's what small scale smuggling is for. Getting several shipping containers to fill your DC with, will be harder however.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I wonder how effective these sanctions, from over the sea, can actually be when these cards are also manufactured in China, using a whole bunch of Chinese parts?

Even the parts that come from Taiwan are trivial to cross into China and vice versa as China is Taiwan's largest trade partner.

So the thing this will mostly do is cut into Nvidia's official business in the Chinese market, but I'd be very surprised if this is gonna have any real effect on availability in the Chinese grey market.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

These sanctions are for massive amounts of chips. If the USA wanted to sanction the Chinese ppl they’d ban other stuff like they did in Venezuela

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

I'm pretty sure the taiwanese board partners will give a flying fuck about these sanctions as long as Taiwan isn't telling them to.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I expect it to fail completely, sanctions on consumer goods that sell in tens, hundreds of thousands of units are very hard to enforce. There are sanctions on high-tech consumer goods for Russia(computer components, smartphones, etc), but all online and retail stores are completely stocked up on them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah and the Chinese can access these goods from other markets. They could buy them from India, for example.

It's quite amazing to think some people belive that if the Chinese really wanted to use these GPUs they wouldn't somehow manage to get it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

wow, post 2+ hours and not yet locked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

mods are asleep, post china