6 ms·

At first I thought this was the 48GB card that had been rumored for a while, but it turns out it's just a sanctions-compliant RTX 6000 Ada for export to China.

At first I thought this was the 48GB card that had been rumored for a while, but it turns out it's just a sanctions-compliant RTX 6000 Ada for export to China. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-launches-another-sanctions-compliant-gpu-for-china-rtx-5880-ada-debuts-with-14080-cuda-cores-48gb-gddr6 https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-launc...

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I thought Gina Raimondo warned them to cut it out? https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-about-ai-chip-sales-china-raimondo-2023-12-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-abou... > "That's not productive," Raimondo said. "I am telling you if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day."
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  I saw somewhere that quote mentioned, and then someone had a link to a later article where she walked it back quite a bit.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  > She said traditionally Commerce drew a "cutline" and companies like Nvidia would create a new chip "just below" that line ... "That's not productive," Raimondo said That seems ridiculous at first glance? I'm assuming a "cutline" here is what the maximum performance is allowed to be, and asking companies to add in a fuzzy "extra" bit there, instead of building right to the line is bizarre?
  - bbor 3y ago
    They want them to self-enforce the administrations decision to not enable Chinese AI work. I don’t think they want them to be taking the Chinese professional market into account at all, thus the snarky statement.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    This kind of lawmaking seems obvious insane to logical programmer types, but it happens regularly in government. They don't have to implement anything in code, right? Another example is anti-money laundering laws. They drew a cutline at $10k cash per deposit, so of course criminals started depositing $9,999 at a time. The legislative answer was to say that avoiding the $10k limit is a new crime called "structuring". So what's the actual limit then? There isn't one, you just have to not seem too suspicious. Attempting to follow the law whilst also using a lot of cash is itself a crime. The other fun one is the suspicious activity reports banks are required to file if a customer does something, er, suspicious. What that means isn't defined anywhere. But eventually the regulators advised that knowing SARs exist is itself suspicious, so merely asking if the bank has filed a SAR on you can trigger the filing of a SAR on you.
    - leereeves 3y ago
      > Attempting to follow the law whilst also using a lot of cash is itself a crime. The intended way to follow the law is to deposit large sums of cash and report them, which is not a crime.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tbrownaw 3y ago
  So basically she's saying "if you do exactly as much as the rules allow, I'll change the rules to not allow that". That sounds like the general sort of thing that tends to end up with whichever government agency did that being on the losing end of a lawsuit?
  - salawat 3y ago
    Federal Government has jurisdiction over foreign policy. This is one of those cases where you can sue all you want, but it's working as designed.
    - maxwell22 3y ago
      The federal government foreign policy is giving full bright scholarships to the best of the best Chinese students so that they get PhDs fully paid at the best US tech universities. And then kicking them out for loosing a lottery 3 times and sending them back to China so that they have no choice but working in products and companies that directly compete to the US. Selling or not selling tech to China is the least of the US problems.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Well what she is saying is if you intentionally attempt to circumvent the intent of the regulation they will adjust the regulation to continue to bring about the intent. An awful lot of law and regulation isn’t cut and dry like a computer program but is intent driven. Sounds like Nvidia understood the intent but is trying to knowingly circumvent the intent by being minimally compliant. They can sue but it won’t go their way, and the government could move against them hard for willful non compliance.
    - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
      I thought the performance thresholds they put in the law were supposed to express just that intent (i.e sell only second rate GPUs to China). If the real intent was to stop all GPU sales to China, why doesn't the law say so?
- Aerroon 3y ago
  I find it fascinating that the US government is being openly hostile like that. Surely they just realize that this will be held against the US for a long time?
  - parineum 3y ago
    To China or Nvidia?
  - puppymaster 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - foverzar 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - transcriptase 3y ago
        We understand what it’s for. What we don’t understand is why someone would spend so much time on HN complaining about “westerners” and lobbing ad hominems at anyone critical of China.
        foverzar 3y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 3y ago
        Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - jupp0r 3y ago
        The downward button is for when somebody is making ad hominem attacks against someone else instead of arguing the facts.
- adonese 3y ago
  How effective is that really? The boycott to china policy. I mean, they can proxy the imports through other countries
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    And wont this encourage China to develop their own fabs out anyway. There isn’t much secret sauce. Matmul, attention, RLHF and $$$.
    - visarga 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - theyinwhy 3y ago
        I believe it when I see it. Lot's of companies in the field now and if I need to take a bet I would say Intel has way better chances to succeed with Gaudi than small vendor x.
        two_in_one 3y ago
        Because it's not just a chip, it's everything else too. There were 2 startups in Boston, may be 500 meters apart, doing optical computing. 4 years and there is still no product. "everything else" is a lot. It's hardware and software. Just brilliant idea is not enough.
        visarga 3y ago
        They are delivering Groq cards, nodes and rack. Not vaporware. See an article from the press with details here: https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/groq_ai_dev_kit/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/groq_ai_dev_kit/
        two_in_one 3y ago
        this is more recent and optimistic https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/27/groq-says-it-can-deploy-1-million-ai-inference-chips-in-two-years/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/27/groq-says-it-can-dep... But I don't see any selling numbers or independent performance conformations.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  No: >U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, speaking in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said Nvidia "can, will and should sell AI chips to China because most AI chips will be for commercial applications." >"What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models," she added. >Raimondo said she spoke a week ago to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and he was "crystal clear. We don't want to break the rules. Tell us the rules, we'll work with you." In plain English, that means Nvidia can, will, and should sell products to China below the arbitrary line the US and China have set for the kabuki theater. Anyone who expects these sanctions to actually damage Chinese ambitions or progress or expects the US to win this cold war are either ignorant or delusional. China won this conflict before it even began.
  - SubiculumCode 3y ago
    "China won this conflict before it began' Sad China mythos propaganda. They haven't won much, and are quickly following suit of other past economies like Japan. Conversion from pure industrialization to advanced economy is hard and the slow down is practically inevitable, especially when China started trying to push antiAmerican geopolitical aspirations againsts their neighbors in the China Sea. Th only winner here is Mexico who looks to be the onshore of choice out of China supply chains.
two_in_one 3y ago
If they drop the price 2x that will make it very attractive.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

I thought Gina Raimondo warned them to cut it out? https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-about-ai-chip-sales-china-raimondo-2023-12-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-talks-with-nvidia-abou... > "That's not productive," Raimondo said. "I am telling you if you redesign a chip around a particular cutline that enables them to do AI, I am going to control it the very next day."

KennyBlanken 3y ago
I saw somewhere that quote mentioned, and then someone had a link to a later article where she walked it back quite a bit.
petesergeant 3y ago
> She said traditionally Commerce drew a "cutline" and companies like Nvidia would create a new chip "just below" that line ... "That's not productive," Raimondo said That seems ridiculous at first glance? I'm assuming a "cutline" here is what the maximum performance is allowed to be, and asking companies to add in a fuzzy "extra" bit there, instead of building right to the line is bizarre?
- bbor 3y ago
  They want them to self-enforce the administrations decision to not enable Chinese AI work. I don’t think they want them to be taking the Chinese professional market into account at all, thus the snarky statement.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  This kind of lawmaking seems obvious insane to logical programmer types, but it happens regularly in government. They don't have to implement anything in code, right? Another example is anti-money laundering laws. They drew a cutline at $10k cash per deposit, so of course criminals started depositing $9,999 at a time. The legislative answer was to say that avoiding the $10k limit is a new crime called "structuring". So what's the actual limit then? There isn't one, you just have to not seem too suspicious. Attempting to follow the law whilst also using a lot of cash is itself a crime. The other fun one is the suspicious activity reports banks are required to file if a customer does something, er, suspicious. What that means isn't defined anywhere. But eventually the regulators advised that knowing SARs exist is itself suspicious, so merely asking if the bank has filed a SAR on you can trigger the filing of a SAR on you.
  - leereeves 3y ago
    > Attempting to follow the law whilst also using a lot of cash is itself a crime. The intended way to follow the law is to deposit large sums of cash and report them, which is not a crime.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tbrownaw 3y ago
So basically she's saying "if you do exactly as much as the rules allow, I'll change the rules to not allow that". That sounds like the general sort of thing that tends to end up with whichever government agency did that being on the losing end of a lawsuit?
- salawat 3y ago
  Federal Government has jurisdiction over foreign policy. This is one of those cases where you can sue all you want, but it's working as designed.
  - maxwell22 3y ago
    The federal government foreign policy is giving full bright scholarships to the best of the best Chinese students so that they get PhDs fully paid at the best US tech universities. And then kicking them out for loosing a lottery 3 times and sending them back to China so that they have no choice but working in products and companies that directly compete to the US. Selling or not selling tech to China is the least of the US problems.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Well what she is saying is if you intentionally attempt to circumvent the intent of the regulation they will adjust the regulation to continue to bring about the intent. An awful lot of law and regulation isn’t cut and dry like a computer program but is intent driven. Sounds like Nvidia understood the intent but is trying to knowingly circumvent the intent by being minimally compliant. They can sue but it won’t go their way, and the government could move against them hard for willful non compliance.
  - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
    I thought the performance thresholds they put in the law were supposed to express just that intent (i.e sell only second rate GPUs to China). If the real intent was to stop all GPU sales to China, why doesn't the law say so?
Aerroon 3y ago
I find it fascinating that the US government is being openly hostile like that. Surely they just realize that this will be held against the US for a long time?
- parineum 3y ago
  To China or Nvidia?
- puppymaster 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - foverzar 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - transcriptase 3y ago
      We understand what it’s for. What we don’t understand is why someone would spend so much time on HN complaining about “westerners” and lobbing ad hominems at anyone critical of China.
      - foverzar 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - dang 3y ago
        Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - jupp0r 3y ago
      The downward button is for when somebody is making ad hominem attacks against someone else instead of arguing the facts.
adonese 3y ago
How effective is that really? The boycott to china policy. I mean, they can proxy the imports through other countries
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  And wont this encourage China to develop their own fabs out anyway. There isn’t much secret sauce. Matmul, attention, RLHF and $$$.
  - visarga 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - theyinwhy 3y ago
      I believe it when I see it. Lot's of companies in the field now and if I need to take a bet I would say Intel has way better chances to succeed with Gaudi than small vendor x.
      - two_in_one 3y ago
        Because it's not just a chip, it's everything else too. There were 2 startups in Boston, may be 500 meters apart, doing optical computing. 4 years and there is still no product. "everything else" is a lot. It's hardware and software. Just brilliant idea is not enough.
        visarga 3y ago
        They are delivering Groq cards, nodes and rack. Not vaporware. See an article from the press with details here: https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/groq_ai_dev_kit/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/29/groq_ai_dev_kit/
        two_in_one 3y ago
        this is more recent and optimistic https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/27/groq-says-it-can-deploy-1-million-ai-inference-chips-in-two-years/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/27/groq-says-it-can-dep... But I don't see any selling numbers or independent performance conformations.
Dalewyn 3y ago
No: >U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, speaking in an interview with Reuters on Monday, said Nvidia "can, will and should sell AI chips to China because most AI chips will be for commercial applications." >"What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models," she added. >Raimondo said she spoke a week ago to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and he was "crystal clear. We don't want to break the rules. Tell us the rules, we'll work with you." In plain English, that means Nvidia can, will, and should sell products to China below the arbitrary line the US and China have set for the kabuki theater. Anyone who expects these sanctions to actually damage Chinese ambitions or progress or expects the US to win this cold war are either ignorant or delusional. China won this conflict before it even began.
- SubiculumCode 3y ago
  "China won this conflict before it began' Sad China mythos propaganda. They haven't won much, and are quickly following suit of other past economies like Japan. Conversion from pure industrialization to advanced economy is hard and the slow down is practically inevitable, especially when China started trying to push antiAmerican geopolitical aspirations againsts their neighbors in the China Sea. Th only winner here is Mexico who looks to be the onshore of choice out of China supply chains.

two_in_one 3y ago

If they drop the price 2x that will make it very attractive.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]