Tuesday, March 5th 2024
AMD Stalls on Instinct MI309 China AI Chip Launch Amid US Export Hurdles
According to the latest report from Bloomberg, AMD has hit a roadblock in offering its top-of-the-line AI accelerator in the Chinese market. The newest AI chip is called Instinct MI309, a lower-performance Instinct MI300 variant tailored to meet the latest US export rules for selling advanced chips to China-based entities. However, the Instinct MI309 still appears too powerful to gain unconditional approval from the US Department of Commerce, leaving AMD in need of an export license. Originally, the US Department of Commerce made a rule: Total Processing Performance (TPP) score should not exceed 4800, effectively capping AI performance at 600 FP8 TFLOPS. This rule ensures that processors with slightly lower performance may still be sold to Chinese customers, provided their performance density (PD) is sufficiently low.
However, AMD's latest creation, Instinct MI309, is everything but slow. Based on the powerful Instinct MI300, AMD has not managed to bring it down to acceptable levels to acquire a US export license from the Department of Commerce. It is still unknown which Chinese customer was trying to acquire AMD's Instinct MI309; however, it could be one of the Chinese AI labs trying to get ahold of more training hardware for their domestic models. NVIDIA has employed a similar tactic, selling A800 and H800 chips to China, until the US also ended the export of these chips to China. AI labs located in China can only use domestic hardware, including accelerators from Alibaba, Huawei, and Baidu. Cloud services hosting GPUs in US can still be accessed by Chinese companies, but that is currently under US regulators watchlist.
Sources:
Bloomberg, via Tom's Hardware
However, AMD's latest creation, Instinct MI309, is everything but slow. Based on the powerful Instinct MI300, AMD has not managed to bring it down to acceptable levels to acquire a US export license from the Department of Commerce. It is still unknown which Chinese customer was trying to acquire AMD's Instinct MI309; however, it could be one of the Chinese AI labs trying to get ahold of more training hardware for their domestic models. NVIDIA has employed a similar tactic, selling A800 and H800 chips to China, until the US also ended the export of these chips to China. AI labs located in China can only use domestic hardware, including accelerators from Alibaba, Huawei, and Baidu. Cloud services hosting GPUs in US can still be accessed by Chinese companies, but that is currently under US regulators watchlist.
12 Comments on AMD Stalls on Instinct MI309 China AI Chip Launch Amid US Export Hurdles
I'd assume so, otherwise it'd be extremely easy to just re-sell existing (restricted) silicon at lower clocks.
Would the 'responsibility' be 'hands off' for AMD/nVidia? -it's literally operating the hardware outside of "design(ed) parameters"
It's not like they can't send someone to the US or EU to buy some chips, legally or otherwise, take them home and reverse-engineer them after all, it would NOT be the 1st time :D
Somewhere, always.
In may ways, we actually live in one of the most peaceful and prosperous periods of all human history, and even then we still cannot all get along.
we are a strange species, lol
So there was a time in England's medieval countryside that was perceived safe locally. That's great. The same thing occurs today, I can just travel through the country here and not get shot to bits or robbed blind. That's saying what exactly? We just exported our violence elsewhere, a twisted kind of funded proxy war in Ukraine, some several thousand soldiers in the Middle East from various Western nations, we have missions in Africa... the list goes on.
There are a few bright spots in the history books of areas NOT at war or somehow under some kind of conflict, those exceptions just made the rule. The one constant in history though is that when groups have it better than other groups, the other groups will try to take it from them, one way or another. Today a lot of reasons we're not shooting is because we're using money to replace bullets, and trade is clearly weaponized, just look at sanctions. Until trade fails and there's suddenly a few hundred thousand Russians on the eastern EU border.
Anonimity plays a part, but that only goes for the small scale petty local crime. You don't steal cattle from a farmer you know. That's just being stupid, its not an example of humans being nice. What is shows us is that if humans are not bound by rules or social conventions, they do whatever the fck they want and what works out best for them, often even just in the short term.
Its evolution baby. The reason we're nice to each other, is because in social constructs it is in fact a means of survival. You feel better that way, you can give and receive help, etc. But the bottom line is still survival (of the fittest). This being nice works in the local, social context best, and you're right, it gets worse as scale goes up, because the chances of people disturbing that status quo goes up.
Still I (think I) get where you're coming from. We could be a lot nicer to each other and it would probably be better too. For everyone. And it works just fine that way, until someone doesn't want to be nice...
Geopolitics of late are a good example. Nobody wants escalation, and yet, it happens, one step at a time.
US Commerce Department: Nope, too powerful.
AMD: Ah shucks.
Now this is the beauty of the Erasmus Program that Europe does, now in EU and UK any high school/secondary student can study abroad easily for decades now, integrating the youth with other cultures, it would be much much harder to have war now, because that Anon factor is limited.
Europe's most genius program has been the Erasmus Program which started in 1987, if only the world did it at the same level they do... it would be a better place I would estimate. True, the rest of the world does have study abroad options, but not near to the level or frequency or easiness factor of doing it that the Erasmus Program provides.
Overall, I understand where both of you are coming from though and am willing to concede.