Nvidia Delays Launch of New China-focused AI Chip (reuters.com) 10
Nvidia has told customers in China it is delaying the launch of a new AI chip it designed to comply with U.S. export rules until the first quarter of next year, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The delayed chip is the H20, the most powerful of three China-focused chips Nvidia has developed to comply with fresh U.S. export restrictions, the sources said, and could complicate its efforts to preserve market share in China against local rivals like Huawei. The California-based AI chip giant had been expected to launch the new products as early as Nov. 16, chip industry newsletter SemiAnalysis reported this month.
However, the H20 launch has now been pushed back until the first quarter of next year, the sources said, with one saying they were advised it could take place in February or March. The sources said they were told that the H20 was being delayed due to issues server manufacturers were having in integrating the chip.
However, the H20 launch has now been pushed back until the first quarter of next year, the sources said, with one saying they were advised it could take place in February or March. The sources said they were told that the H20 was being delayed due to issues server manufacturers were having in integrating the chip.
Re: In communist China... (Score:2)
I thought that walking on water... And therefore running was a belief associated with a different part of the world
C-minus, could do better (Score:2)
It's a potential waste of time and money designing a chip to match government rules because those rules can change without warning. Delaying release just increases the risk of this happening.
Maybe they should be developing a design with fusible links to power down sections of the processor and local cache. Then they can just configure the permitted performance immediately before packaging the dies.
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Maybe the delay is because they realized they need to do more to compete with Huawei. Now they have competition in China, and are hobbled by US export restrictions, they may be doing some hasty re-design at the last minute.
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This seems like a good way to ensure the CPUs are exportable to whatever changing reqs are done by the government, assuming China doesn't find a way to effectively decap CPUs and add the links (which is highly unlikely at large scale). Combining this plus binning seems to be the best way to do this.
Of course, it may not be long until China gets parity on fabs, making this all moot. There is a lot that can be done with a 20nm process node, especially if work is done to bring RISC-V, POWER, or even SPARC on
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Could always literally burn out the dies of the unused cores so that they're impossible to use.
I kind of wonder if China will pursue an end-run around it. They have a large research base... maybe they'll try to make the leap to neuromorphic hardware? A 20nm neuromorphic processor would crush a 4nm GPU. And because it would probably be PCN-based, it'd offer a lot of capabilities not availab
China might decline the chip (Score:2)
Nvidia could lose sales if they keep delaying. It's entirely possible that the Chinese government might decide the tech is so old, it isn't worth stealing anymore.
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"China" isn't the customer, individual Chinese companies are. But Huawei has developed high end AI chips too, and with Nvidia's product crippled by export restrictions, competition is going to be difficult.
Nvidia needs the US government to keep changing the rules so they can ship chips that are competitive with the latest Chinese offerings, but that's difficult to manage and Chinese companies are iterating rapidly.
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Huawei may sell a few more of their chips if there is a gap and a need, but NVIDIA can already sell pretty much every chip they make outside of these controlled markets, and as we have seen a million times before these chips will still find their way into China.
And it's not like Huawei/HiSilicon/SMIC/UniSOC aren't already trying as hard as they can to develop competing chips, so it won't really impact China's domestic capabilities.
Seems like a nothing story. NVIDIA won't lose money, China won't lose access
Re: China might decline the chip (Score:2)