Xeon Phi bans were targeted and successful. It shows that you don't need to issue a country-wide ban to prevent China from using a chip to build their supercomputers.
And then, Sunway happened, it's built for military-use supercomputers. Do we even know whether it's 40nm, 28nm or 14nm or who on the earth fabricated them? And nothing changed on how export control works after that, that's certainly not the trigger.
GPU bans before ChatGPT happened were also targeted, similar to how BIS Entity List works.
Let's face it: the recent ban-entire-China movement was just about "AI", instead of HPC/simulations, the only purpose of it is to deny China NVIDIA GPU access and ensure they can't compete on SOTA language models.
> Do we even know whether it's 40nm, 28nm or 14nm or who on the earth fabricated them
Based on the network bandwidth and clock speed of the SW26010P, my hunch is most likely 40nm [0]
> ensure they can't compete on SOTA language models
I disagree.
For commercial NLP applications, a leading edge GPU like an A100 can help (due to cost constraints), but the true value is unlocked from Monte Carlo Simulations (heavily used in Nuclear Physics to simulate interactions among particles), as bechmacks have show magnitudes of performance in GPUs over CPUs for MC and MCMC simulations [1] just with commercial untuned hardware alone.
This itself was a major reason Nvidia has been working with the DoE since the beginning of the Exascale program [2], which itself was driven by NatSec priorities [3]
Raimondo's ban also came after the WSJ leaked how the CAEP and other sanctioned entities were accessing Nvidia GPUs despite an export ban since 1997 [4][5]
Of course this is dual use, as math is critical to everything, but at the end of the day - Nuclear Weapons is the driving factor and China's ability to erode American Nuclear Deterrence [6] and the fact that China now has a "launch-on-warning" posture [7] since 2022 instead of "on-launch" has severely spooked the US.
And then, Sunway happened, it's built for military-use supercomputers. Do we even know whether it's 40nm, 28nm or 14nm or who on the earth fabricated them? And nothing changed on how export control works after that, that's certainly not the trigger.
GPU bans before ChatGPT happened were also targeted, similar to how BIS Entity List works.
Let's face it: the recent ban-entire-China movement was just about "AI", instead of HPC/simulations, the only purpose of it is to deny China NVIDIA GPU access and ensure they can't compete on SOTA language models.