Lol. Lmao.
In the funniest timeline, the US nationalizes Nvidia to delay China from making chips that work well with LLM’s… by a year tops.
Link to original Fortune article the PC Gamer article pulled from, with this juicy relevant quote:
To do that, Raimondo said the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which manages export controls for the US, needs more funding from Congress.
“I have a $200 million budget. That’s like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on,” she said. “If we’re serious, let’s go fund this operation like it needs to be funded.”
I kinda doubt this is true. Gamers Nexus did a very interesting video recently ish about a Chinese made video card and it wasn’t as bad as you would expect. It had a lot of driver issues but as a graphics card it was more on par with a 10 year old card. This is for rasterization of course not AI but the company in question hasn’t been making cards for long, just a couple of years, and it is making headway fast. With the correct funding and interest I don’t see any reason why China can’t at least catch up to TSMC. Their processes are broadly understood, enough scientists with enough funding can figure it out.
Yeah. Moorethreads is the company iirc. To put things in perspective, Intel recently also got serious about competing with Nvidia and AMD on discrete GPUs. Intel already has decades of experience making integrated GPUs and has had multiple failed starts into the discrete GPU market but Moorethreads who started a couple years later than Intel’s most recent push, is at about the same stage of development as them.
Like Intel, they are a lot closer to Nvidia/AMD on hardware (roughly 4 - 5 years) than benchmarks make it seem but are being held back by just how much work it takes to bring the software driver stack up to the same level as Nvidia/AMD. Both Intel and Moorethreads are around 10 to 15 years behind Nvidia/AMD on driver software but this is a little misleading because both companies have decided to mostly abandon older graphics/compute apis (DirectX 9/10/11, OpenGL) to focus all their software development work on DirectX12/Vulkan. DirectX12 and Vulkan both have extensions that can handle software written for the older APIs at a 10 - 20% performance hit, which is a fair trade since newer software is more often than not DX12/Vulkan native.
With newer APIs like DX12 and Vulkan, less optimization happens at the graphics API/driver level with instead developers being given low level access to make the optimizations themselves. So, if they can get enough of these new GPUs into the hands of end users, developers will be forced to optimize games and applications for them. This is why both Intel and Moorethreads are just going into full scale mass production and selling their cards almost at-cost.
Intel is controlled by their US defense liaisons, accounting departments, and marketing departments. They will struggle where a company controlled by the manufacturing and design people succeed.