Baidu Placed AI Chip Order from Huawei in Shift Away From Nvidia (reuters.com) 31
Baidu ordered AI chips from Huawei this year, Reuters reported citing two people familiar with the matter, adding to signs that U.S. pressure is prompting Chinese acceptance of the firm's products as an alternative to Nvidia's. From the report: One of the people said Baidu, one of China's leading AI firms, which operates the Ernie large language model, placed the order in August, ahead of widely anticipated new rules by the U.S. government that in October tightened restrictions on exports of chips and chip tools to China, including those of U.S. chip giant Nvidia.
Baidu ordered 1,600 of Huawei's 910B Ascend AI chips - which the Chinese firm developed as an alternative to Nvidia's A100 chip - for 200 servers, the source said, adding that by October, Huawei had delivered more 60% of the order, or about 1,000 chips, to Baidu. The second person said that the order's total value was approximately 450 million yuan ($61.83 million) and that Huawei was to deliver all of the chips by the end of this year. Although the order is tiny relative to the thousands of chips top Chinese tech firms have historically ordered from Nvidia, the sources said it was significant, as it showed how some firms could shift away from the U.S. company.
Baidu ordered 1,600 of Huawei's 910B Ascend AI chips - which the Chinese firm developed as an alternative to Nvidia's A100 chip - for 200 servers, the source said, adding that by October, Huawei had delivered more 60% of the order, or about 1,000 chips, to Baidu. The second person said that the order's total value was approximately 450 million yuan ($61.83 million) and that Huawei was to deliver all of the chips by the end of this year. Although the order is tiny relative to the thousands of chips top Chinese tech firms have historically ordered from Nvidia, the sources said it was significant, as it showed how some firms could shift away from the U.S. company.
They wanted a reliable supplier (Score:4, Insightful)
For companies in China, the US controlled markets are rather unreliable.
Re: They wanted a reliable supplier (Score:3)
Bingo, the unintended consequence is an increase in investment at home, increasing competition overall.
American arrogance didn't let them see this potential outcome
Re: They wanted a reliable supplier (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely wrong. This was a 100% expected consequence. The goal is to reduce their effectiveness. If they have to buy budget knockoffs from Huawei then that has been achieved. And that is what they are doing. They will need more machines, more processors, and more power to do the same work.
Re: They wanted a reliable supplier (Score:2)
"their development has far outpaced US firms."
[Citation needed]
Re: (Score:1)
So where is their Snapdragon X or M3 chip?
Oh Kirin from Huawei, got it, good luck with that.
Re: They wanted a reliable supplier (Score:1)
> they are still a year or two behind, but nothing of significance anymore.
Did you deliberately not read the above?
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The A100 is a bit old by this point. If that's the best they can do - and we have no assurance that Huawei really can match even an A100 - then Baidu isn't exactly doing well.
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Completely wrong. This was a 100% expected consequence. The goal is to reduce their effectiveness. If they have to buy budget knockoffs from Huawei then that has been achieved. And that is what they are doing. They will need more machines, more processors, and more power to do the same work.
Correct. Buying Huawei hardware instead of Nvidia A800 is similar to buying A800 instead of A100 or H100.
However, the notion of "effectiveness" is nuanced. As pointed out, the same results are theoretically still achievable but with some combination of more time, power, and space. If time, power, and space are not an issue, then the remaining challenge is software, i.e., the so-called Nvidia software moat, which is arguably more challenging than creating the hardware. This is where the Huawei et al. eff
Re: They wanted a reliable supplier (Score:2)
Those are good points, the question is whether China can continue to advance at a meaningful rate while its corporations are micromanaged by its government and they're not getting regular technology transfers from other nations. Time will tell.
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Except that they aren't budget knock offs. They may be a little slower, but they are fully capable of running the necessary software. And when they are cheap and subsidised by the government to make up for US sanctions, Chinese companies can just buy and run more of them.
All the US did was accelerate China's development of high end chip manufacturing and AI processors, and signal to other countries that the US is an unreliable trade partner with an unstable government that lurches from conservative to bonke
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Facts. They are merely doing the same thing we're doing to them. There are no trusts and thus instead of working together, both companies will have to work in silos and possibly waste resources because neither side is willing to share knowledge.
The AI age of reinventing the wheel. :-/
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We're helping them develop their own markets and manufacturing capacity.
Re:They wanted a reliable supplier (Score:5, Interesting)
We're helping them develop their own markets and manufacturing capacity.
We started doing that over 50 years ago, thanks to Tricky Dick. It's the main reason we're at our current crossroads, having turned China into a global manufacturing powerhouse.
We should NEVER have normalized economic relations with dictatorial China. His administration was warned by just about everyone that it would damage our economic power, but those in charge completely ignored everyone else.
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In retrospect, we should have cut them off immediately after the Soviet Union fell and applied pressure to bring down their regime when we had the chance. Remember that Nixon's gambit was to weaken the USSR by cutting them off from China.
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And yet every administration following Nixon up to Trump continued with the policy - even doubled-down on it.
But remember its all Tricky Dicky's fault.
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The alternative was for the Cold War to continue with China. It's not like China was never going to industrialize if it didn't trade with the West, it would just do it differently. Taiwan might not have becoming a successful democracy either.
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Realities (Score:3)
While interesting, there have been some tests of the recent attempts at making a decent GPU in PRC in the wake of sanctions, and these are just awful. We're talking performance of the maybe low end of the first generation Maxwell architecture when at its finest with everything actually working. That's GTX 750 for those in need of context. This is the architecture that came in early 2014, and that's the one that started with low end and grew into high end, rather than the opposite, so the speed is on part with low end chips of the architecture, not the high end that is usually present in server GPUs.
I find it doubtful that these are significantly better. This is likely a small scale buy to see what new domestic architecture they will have to work with, and beginning the long journey of preparing for being fully cut off from global modern GPU/AI accelerator market. To be fair, we used to run search engines and nascent AI systems on cards with this level of performance just a decade ago. This isn't that far back, and it's certainly doable. You will need to do a lot of work on optimization, architecture specific modifications and so on.
And this is where you start. Buy enough servers on the new architecture, and start the long work in adapting your software to run on them. The actual GPUs in those systems when the're going to production will likely be two-three generations newer, and by that time, things like drivers and software compatibility will likely be mostly ironed out.
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It's the tech stack trendline that's important. China only needs its trendline to be steeper than the west's and eventually they'll intersect. China's plan if for the intersection to happen in 2030.
That said, there are industry rumours (out of Taiwan) that the plan is ahead of schedule by a year or two (lets say, 2028). A mere four years - sometime during the next US Presidency.
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If you watch the Gamer's Nexus reviews of Chinese GPUs, they are damn impressive for first generation products. They only target games that are popular in China, and performance in other software is all over the place as the drivers aren't mature yet. Kinda like early Intel ARC drivers.
But they have come from nothing to decently competitive in a narrow range of tasks, and each generation shows big improvements. At the rate they are moving, we will have a 4th serious competitor in the GPU space in the next 5
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Communists propping up communists, news at 11. All the standard talking PRC points too: "It's only aimed at people in China, so it's ok if it's bad. Also there are bad (but obviously far better) Western company products. Also graph goes up and that's all that matters. Made in China 2025 in 2020... sorry, Made in China 2028 in 2023"
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Huawei's Ascend 910 AI processor has 320 TFLOPS@FP16 and 640 TOPS@INT8 performance.
This compares with 312 TFLOPS@FP16 for the NVIDIA A100.
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Google "how Chinese culture generates performance numbers" to understand why you're comparing apples to tractors.
great! maybe this year (Score:2)
I can get two new graphics cards for less than the cost of a trip to Europe.
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You're assuming the west will allow the importation of leading-edge competitive Chinese gear. I'm guessing that when China becomes competitive, the US will find an excuse to refuse importation of Chinese chipsets. Of course there'll be all sorts of veiled phrases about "security" (the 5G nonsense proves those claims work), but we'll all know the real reason. That means the customers of western brands like NVIDIA will have no choice but to dig deeper in to their pockets.
The thing is that China has a domes
This is why CHIPs is going to fail (Score:2)
The difference is that CCP than makes the local chinese companies USE the locally manufactured items, such as PV, LEDs, Electronics, EVs, batteries, and of course, silicon.
America is pushing to restore a bunch industries that was destroyed by China's targeting them, but the problem is, that they are ignoring the NEEDED DEMAND for these items.
For example, 52B for restoring Chip manufacturing here. Th
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You ban China from buying NVIDIA, and then cry that they aren't buying NVIDIA anymore.
And it's not "the young people" who are the cause of insanity like this. Look how old your politicians are who make these boneheaded decisions. Then with a straight face blame young people...
What is that? (Score:2)
Can someone explain to a dullard like myself what an "AI chip" even is? Why do we need new purpose-built cores for whatever these are supposed to do?
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Largely parallel processor specializing in usually 16-bit float or 8 bit int matrix multiplication and a few other common fixed functions.
With a lot of the programmability and complexity out of the way you can get a lot more band for the buck from the same silicon.
Branch prediction? not needed. Cache sizes ideally suited to the fixed functions and how they're expected to be used and half or quarter the data width per work item etc.