alt Hacker News(I don't understand hardware well)
Can someone shed light on why China still couldn't copy the Nvidia GPUs in some form?
I understand its complex and there many parts to it, but which is the most complex part making it difficult for China to copy it?
Let's say they don't have access to 3nm process, what if they just use 12nm and create GPUs with much bigger size but comparable performance with CUDA compatibility? Or other option could be less tensor units, training will take longer, but they might be able to produce it cheaply
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If engines are hard to build, why not build a car 3x the size of a normal one, well you can but due to things like aerodynamics, etc etc you'll never match the speed or fuel economy of cars.
Same with chips, efficiency, speed, etc all depend on good design, and cutting edge factors, if the main reason your chip isn't faster is because of the distance between your L1 cache and your core is far, then having a bigger node process but bigger chip won't make it quicker.
> Can someone shed light on why China still couldn't copy the Nvidia GPUs in some form?
They have alternatives, like the Tian supercomputer was originally built with Xeon Phi chips that have been replaced with their own domestic alternatives.
A big limitation is getting access to fab slots. Nvidia and Apple are very aggressive about buying up capacity from TSMC, etc, and China's own domestic fabs are improving fast but still not a real match, particularly for volume.
They can given enough time.
But there's a distinct time/value of investment equation with the current AI boom. The jury is at best still out on what that equation is for the goals of capital (it's increasingly looking like there's no moat), but if you're a national government trying to encourage local bleeding edge expertise in new fields like this it's quite a bit more clear.
Another factor, it's not just GPUs it's the full hardware stack. https://static.tweaktown.com/news/1/1/110521_2_nvidia-update...
At 3 GHz, a signal can travel at most 10 cm per clock cycle. You can't really physically scale a chip up.
Mostly high end lithography.
They can copy it. And no, the software moat is not there if someone choose the blatant copy route. They just can't build it in the scale they want yet.
> what if they just use 12nm and create GPUs with much bigger size but comparable performance
Physics do not work this way :/
Copying CPUs isn't really a thing: they are too complex.
If you could steal all the designs at TSMC, and you had exactly the process that TSMC uses, you could definitely make counterfeits. If you didn't have TSMC's specific process, you could adapt the designs (to Intel or Samsung) with serious but not epic effort. If you couldn't make the processes similar (ie, want to fab on SMIC), you are basically back to RTL, and can look forward to the most expensive and time-consuming part of chip design.
This is nothing like copying a trivial, non-complex item like a car. Copying a modern jet engine is starting to get close (for instance, single-crystal blades), but even they are much simpler. I mention the latter because the largest, most resourced countries in the world have tried and are still trying.