Blade-Runner
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U.S. issues warning to NVIDIA, urging to stop redesigning chips for China
- Thread starter Blade-Runner
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Armenius
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NVIDIA is doing nothing wrong. They're navigating the regulations as they're written. If the government doesn't want them to export products to China, then they should just outright ban the export of products to China.
![Zarathustra[H]](https://cdn.hardforum.com/data/avatars/m/9/9298.jpg?1707758471){kind=avatar}
Zarathustra[H]
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I think it depends.
On the surface they are redesigning GPU's to meet the export restriction requirements, which means they looked at the law, and designed a product that met the law so they could export. Nothing wrong with that.
-- HOWEVER --
...with past such special China versions, the limitations were quickly broken and unlocked back to full capability chips. Sort of how LHR restrictions were quickly broken. That is something which is completely unacceptable under the law, and if they are doing it amounts to malicious compliance.
If Nvidia is intentionally shipping them in a state such that China can reverse the limitations on them, then they are in fact violating export restrictions, which is a crime.
They need to be physically laser cutting traces on the dies of the GPU or some other method to make certain that the limits are irreversible, or they are indeed in violation of the law.
That_Sound_Guy
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All countries, businesses and other rhetoric ignored for now. Just this comment and the arrogance and power stand it implies makes me angry:
"Im going to control it" - Who the F are you, the lunch money bully?
"Im going to control it" - Who the F are you, the lunch money bully?
Zarathustra[H]
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She is the commerce secretary. It is her job to control exports enforcing the laws congress has enacted, and I hope she brings down the hammer with the full force of the federal government. Call in every last applicable three letter agency. Consent decree, FBI raids, seizure of assets, criminal prosecution for violating export regulations, etc. etc. etc. Use every tool necessary, and absolutely flatten everyone and anyone who thinks they are above the law. Zero compromise.
If there is intent to violate export restrictions I want to see Jensen - smug face, leather jacket and all - do the perp walk. It needs to be made excruciatingly clear that no violation of law is acceptable by anyone, no matter how rich or powerful, and if direction to violate export restrictions goes straight to th etop, then maybe, just maybe, Jensen himself needs to spend the next 20 years in a federal "pound me up the ass" prison.
Laws need to be enforced no matter what, and if people or corporations try to violate or circumvent them they need to be on the receiving end of a complete and total regulatory beat down by any means necessary. Pound them out of existence if you have to.
Make it extremely clear to all operators on the market, that ever you dot every i and cross every t when it comes to the law, or you cease to exist.
There can be absolutely zero wiggle room here.
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Armenius
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The law is being enforced, she just doesn't like that NVIDIA is finding ways to get around it, and she is taking that personally going by the tone of that quote.
Comixbooks
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That guy Rodger actually replied to me on his Youtube channel lol I told him Dan Bongino talks about him all the time.
He replied "How Cool is That"
Zarathustra[H]
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Not if they are using weak (like the LHR mining restrictions) controls that can (and will) be broken the second the GPU's wind up in China.
A company like Nvidia is not that incompetent that they cannot physically disable portions of their product in ways that they cannot be circumvented. The assumption then has to be that it is on purpose, and if it is, then they are complicit in export restriction violations.
Its certainly enough to get a judge to sign a warrant, and equipment to be seized looking for those smoking gun emails...
Export restriction violations are serious business. I have seen raids where chains are put on the doors, everyone gets sent home, and FBI swoops in with evidence boxes and starts building a case.
I'm not saying Nvidia is guilty, but I am saying that the strategy they have embarked on on these Dragon version 4090 cards is highly suspicious, and looks a whole let like they are intending to circumvent the export restrictions with weak circumventable blocks much like the LHR GPU's, and if true that makes them complicit. At the very least there is enough smoke there to warrant an investigation.
But they can't use this for training military AI. We put a block on it.
The block:
Yeah, that's a crime right there.
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At what point does a federal law constitute harassment?
They wrote the law, Nvidia is 100% compliant with the law and it’s well within their right to sell hardware that doesn’t violate the law.
Telling Nvidia that if they comply with the law they will just change it so that they aren’t is kind of a bullshit move.
Either ban everything from going to China or don’t, but moving goalposts monthly will just land someone in a lawsuit that taxpayers pick up later.
They wrote the law, Nvidia is 100% compliant with the law and it’s well within their right to sell hardware that doesn’t violate the law.
Telling Nvidia that if they comply with the law they will just change it so that they aren’t is kind of a bullshit move.
Either ban everything from going to China or don’t, but moving goalposts monthly will just land someone in a lawsuit that taxpayers pick up later.
That_Sound_Guy
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If a business is dodging the rules, great, go after them, make em burn. Have a bit more tact and professionalism in your approach.
Where I agree with you entirely on making people pay dearly for breaking rules to play fair, you have to see the irony here that the government is saying "follow the rules" but they absolutely don't themselves. End of my political misdirection of the OP.
That feel like a bit should we ban Play station 3 because they are making supercomputer with them and it is dangerous.
Biden anti-China, anti-capitalism, anti-liberty rhetoric has been quite extreme since the beginning and a bit out of control.
The everyone break the law 3 times a day is maybe an exaggeration, but there is so many laws, sometime in exact contradiction, that this view does not match modern rules books. That view work well if there is 10 clear obvious laws, that do not infringe on something as legitimate as making a video card and selling it to who you want.
Yes and no, the rules (not sure if it need to go to law) make almost all nvidia cards (4070ti, 4080, 4090) above the limits in some interpretable ways (you can use 8 bits tflops, it does not specificy which). And this add to the confusion, the rules in some ways say that you cannot sell a 4080, but selling them is not seen as going around, they wrote a rule and did not put all the skus that violate it because it is a bit of a stupid rules.
Biden anti-China, anti-capitalism, anti-liberty rhetoric has been quite extreme since the beginning and a bit out of control.
cageymaru
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She isn't moving goalposts; just telling them in advance that her agency is capable and willing to add every new A.I. chip they develop to the list.
It wasn’t just some firmware block the card the government is referencing is the H800, which was physically different and designed to be a cut down H100 to comply with the laws as they were written and was approved as meeting those restrictions.
https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp18...tween the H100,speed and the FP64 performance.
What happened in was software got better and training methods improved and the whole architecture got a 1.6x speed increase for specific LLMs. Then some people online figured out a way in PyTorch to get the VRAM to overflow to system RAM and that essentially bypassed the interconnect limitations placed on the NVLink chips where they had half their lanes cut. Which even with half the lanes gone resulted in speeds exceeding what the card would have been capable of with the full NVLink capability.
So again things got faster, even more so for the full H100’s.
The change in the ban added the 4090 because it shares the silicon with the RTX 6000 which thanks to the LLM and PyTorch updates was a super viable alternative to the H100 and H800.
Looking at the regulations though if they just change a few words they could essentially just block the entire Ada Lovelace architecture as only the lowest of the mobile chips would be compliant, and even then the AD107 could fail that check if they just lower the bar by a few percent.
Well the export restrictions are based on specific values based on power, performance, and density. Then they banned all enterprise and workstation silicon that doesn’t meet that criteria.
Changing the criteria is the literal definition of a moving goalpost.
All that this does is give AMD a huge in to China instead and they will build something with them instead.
Why they did not restrict the 4090 in 2022 with the a100/h100 if they are not moving the goalpost ? they gave special license to a list of gpu for them to be sellable and they remove them at will over time.
Will they ban all the Apple product that goes over the 5.92 TPP by mm limits ?
By the time the rules is over 2026, 5.92 of max tflops (regardless if it is int4 or FP64) by mm square on chips, could very well be your entry level laptop or phone.
A simple 4070ti has 641 tflops of FP8/int8, it is only 294mm,
641*8 = 5128 of TPP, on just 294mm, that's 17.44 or 3 time over the limit of the current rules, to show what we are talking about, we are talking about 4070ti being 3 time over the limit
The L4 is a very underpowered 4070ti with a lot of vram after all and is way above the limit after all, and they were sold with a special exception license (at least in the past).
If a 4070TI can be banned right now if they want, will it be moving the goalpost once it became the popular option in China once the 4080 and 4090 are all ban ?
Will any of AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Apple, of the upcoming generation chips (cpu with an AI part of their soc or gpu) not be over the very low threshold ?
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cjcox
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Cheeto used so that fiddling with the expensive lock can be traced to "hands with orange dust". Because..... security.
They are called export controls after all…
Going strictly by the Density requirements the entirety of the Ada Lovelace lineup violates that provision, and as each of the chips has a workstation or enterprise equivalent then really none of Nvidia's current lineup is allowed to be sold in China, and instead of looking at this as a list of banned cards you need to flip it and instead think of it as a list of allowed cards.
Honestly, if Nvidia is going to sell GPU anything in China at this stage they are going to be forced onto an older node
If Nvidia builds a card for China that topped out at 4 TPP/mm on SMIC 10nm would that be allowed or as the threat implies would they just change the language of the ban to include that as well?
These bans are weird, I understand the need for national security and all that stuff, but these bans seem halfassed and overly specific, if the Government is going to start down this road then they better get ready to regulate the crap out of the emerging AI markets for everybody and treat them like a potential weapon. In light of these bans, LLM research in China is already moving to different model types, and they are making good progress on taking big AI systems and breaking them down into very small specific entities that you can run on existing x86 systems, then simply get those individual systems to pass specific questions back and forth amongst themselves like a giant round table until they collectively reach a consensus and an answer. Essentially AI by committee, which isn't as fast as having a single repository for all the answers, but it scales out better.
This is at best a stop-gap, while the US tries to get its heads around AI, it's not like the research is standing still it will progress, the more stuff they ban the jankier and weirder the solutions China builds will become, necessity and intension and all that, and nothing emphasizes necessity like armed guards "protecting" the Chinese scientists working on them.
Blade-Runner
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...for-seeing-it-as-enemy-after-raimondo-remarks
Now China is pissed...
Now China is pissed...
Unless the concept is patented or the IP kept a secret, then some non-Chinese researchers could also work on this approach.
Is that a fact now? Or just speculation? And if not actually protecting them, then just what do these guards do?
(1) Duuh. (2) Not a surprise. And Sec. Raimondo has my support.
No, she is telling Jensen to stop trying evasive actions. Or else, move the company to some other jurisdiction. Nothing is stopping them.
https://ai.meta.com/tools/pytorch/#:~:text=PyTorch is an open source,support needed for production deployment.
Open Source, some of the major contributors are located in China, so they built it as a means to work around the US hardware restrictions. It’s already been rolled into Tensorflow and the latest Nvidia drivers.
Inside joke, I worked with a guy I’m going to call Dave, he worked on satellites. One time while in China troubleshooting a “Communications” satellite he called his supervisors to let them know it wasn’t going well, it was out of alignment and not responding correctly. Shortly after making the call he was assigned some guards and told due to the nature of his work there was a credible threat on his life. He managed to fix the satellite after a bit of an extended stay and the guards were then no longer required. The office gave him a sizeable “stress bonus” after signing an NDA and let him retire to a desk job.
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That would not necessarily stop them, you do not need to be US based to be subject of sanction by the US federal governement if you do not do stuff they want.
As for trying evasive action, there is doing bad for AI but good for other datacenter task like they seem to be trying to do, with those nothing special FP8 datacenter GPU, who decide that trying to evade an anti AI export rule (if that the goals) versus trying to make GPU that non AI client in China can buy ? As the rule were written to ban pretty much all of them for any usage.
I am a bit curious why would anyone support, people say stuff, outside some strange hyperbole, do they think outside helping non American competition in the AI hardware market that it will do much ? Do much of what for what ?
Is the 4090D a terrible AI card that good at playing game, seem to be the case, is that evading US sanction or doing exactly what they wanted them to do and they just being angry that some press present them as sanction evading move instead of a company doing a lot of work to very much not only respect the letter of US sanction but their spirit as well.
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Twisted Kidney
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Everythng seems to be going to shit since Xi made himself Most Belovedest Grandest Lord Emperor of China for All of Time Including Wednesdays and companies started to get weirded out. Now the bloom is off, debt is costing money and all that venture capital is leaving China.
There's a lesson in there about dictatorships.
There's a lesson in there about dictatorships.
Which they're most likely doing. There's a huge difference between designing a chip to comply with US export law, and doing an LHR version of a video card to pacify gamers that you don't really care about. I'm quite certain Nvidia is being a lot more careful here than ensuring that LHR can't be modified to mine Ethereum again.
Frankly, if they're redesigning chips in compliance with US export regulations, then the government should be reacting by either changing the regulations to an outright ban, not complaining that Nvidia is following the law as written.
The biggest problem in Western politics is that the politicians who make the rules have zero idea how anything works in the real world. How many engineers do you see in Congress? They're trying to write legislation on technology and infrastructure and the guys making the call on it are dudes in their 80s who don't know how to properly operate a toaster.
That's not quite how that works. They could do that, but then the US could block their ability to trade within US borders, or with US allies, which is by far their most lucrative market. I mean consider that Britain held up Microsoft from buying Activision over cloud gaming of all stupid things. It's are a bit more complicated than just saying "eff you I'm moving to Dubai".
NukeDukem
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Give Winnie the Pooh some credit. The streets of San Francisco were actually less shitty during his royal visit.
erek
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U.S. revises chip export rules to China, GeForce RTX 4090D likely to be affected
https://videocardz.com/newz/u-s-rev...china-geforce-rtx-4090d-likely-to-be-affected
Yet no restrictions on AMD or Intel hardware, which seems unfair and short-sighted.
If they are going to go so far as to legislate this it seems odd to me that they would only target Nvidia, all this does is open the possibility for China to develop their own AI using AMD or Intel hardware, unless this is the government round about way to get China to pay for the R&D into a competing AI solution that they can later steal, which would be an interesting turn about from the more stereotypical China stealing it from the US.
Darunion
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It isn't specifically nvidia. It is listed as items with greater than 70TFLOPS of compute power.
So the 7900xtx just sneaks in under but the 4080 and 4090 don't
feel bad for the Chinese gamers out there.
GoodBoy
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I can understand them not wanting China to build AI's out of Nvidia's most powerful chips.
Ultimately, the genie is out of the bottle. The attempts to control it are going to fail, or to keep it from China.
But it's bullshit to make a specific regulation to block a chip, and then to turn around and also block the redesigned but compliant chip. That's wasted fucking effort on Nvidia's part, and a big pile of bullshit.
Nvidia and Gov should work more closely together, rather than the Govt basically attack a company for being a leader and innovator. I blame this squarely on the Gov. They are being reactive which is typical. But they need to be proactive. Wishful thinking on my part.
Ultimately, the genie is out of the bottle. The attempts to control it are going to fail, or to keep it from China.
But it's bullshit to make a specific regulation to block a chip, and then to turn around and also block the redesigned but compliant chip. That's wasted fucking effort on Nvidia's part, and a big pile of bullshit.
Nvidia and Gov should work more closely together, rather than the Govt basically attack a company for being a leader and innovator. I blame this squarely on the Gov. They are being reactive which is typical. But they need to be proactive. Wishful thinking on my part.
kirbyrj
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So the 7900xtx just sneaks in under but the 4080 and 4090 don't
I haven't felt bad for Chinese gamers ever.
There are legit ones, not just the prison farms.
Yes those are a thing, in China, they found that putting prisoners out to do manual labor was not cost-effective so instead having them farm digital currencies was a more profitable and less problematic use of their time.
kirbyrj
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I mean, in fairness, if I could figure out a way to consult on farming digital currencies instead of going to work every day, I'd probably do it at this point. Not going to Chinese prison though.
Nobu
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Meh, nvidia knew they were at odds with the gobberment, they took a chance. Even if they don't sell these to china, there are other countries who'd gladly buy them, probably still for a profit.
Gideon
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You can tell who are Nvidia share holders in this thread. In a bit of a note it's been obvious for awhile that the US government is going to clamp down on high powered "AI" chips going to China. Any company looking to export to China with those kind of chips are going to be playing with fire.
d3athf1sh
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it's not like they don't already have spies over here that can just purchase them, box them up and ship them over there anyway. but i guess it doesn't hurt to throw a monkey wrench in their gears. like we've done with nuclear technology with n. korea and iran