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Chinese Chip Makers are Trying to Circumvent US Sanctions by Slowing Down Chip Performance

TheLostSwede

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In what can only be called an unusual move, several Chinese fabless chip makers—such as Alibaba and Biren Technology—who manufacturers at TSMC, are looking at running their chips slower. The reason for this is that they're trying to circumvent the US sanctions against Chinese chip makers. It should be noted that these are chips that have already taped out and gone into sample production, such as Biren's BR100 GPU.As reported earlier today, Alibaba even had one of its chips delisted from the official SPEC ranking, due to being unavailable and it's possible that it's one of the chips that's affected by the US sanctions.

Considering that the Chinese chip makers are dependent on the same cutting edge nodes at TSMC as the likes of Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm etc. it would potentially lead to more capacity for these companies at TSMC. According to the report by the Financial Times, Biren has had to stop shipments of its GPUs, as the company is going to have to prove that its chips don't violate the US export control restrictions. Apparently the rules to work out if a chip falls under the US sanctions or not are anything but clear. One metric is apparently based on the bidirectional transfer rate, which is capped at below 600 GB/s between chips, but the tricky part is that this metric can be calculated in several different ways. As such, Biren has dropped the transfer rate from 640 to 576 GB/s according to the Financial Times. The sanctions are likely to cause longer term concerns for TSMC as well, as the company is likely to lose several big customers for its cutting edge nodes, at least for the time being.



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China needed stopped a long time ago as did US foreign policy. A outright ban on Chinese goods should have been implemented in the 90s with a taper down to nothing or equal trade by 2010
 
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there we go. lack of availability problem is now solved. Can the SPEC results be restored now?
 
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From Reuters:
"We do business on both sides of the Strait. So we can't listen to the U.S. and not do any business with mainland China. Then what would everyone eat?" Huang said. "Our industry's position is to maintain our competitiveness."
For the record Frank Huang is the chairman of Powerchip, which shows how it's not just TSMC that is worried about these escalating sanctions. Eventually they will reach the point where any business with China in this sector will get severely restricted. And at that point I wonder what would be the incentives for the Chinese to not invade Taiwan, if they can't get anything from the island anyway. It's the stick without the carrot, especially considering the poor track record of the US when it comes to rolling back sanctions (just recently the UN voted for the 30th time against the Cuba embargo by an embarrassing 185 to 2, the two were obviously the US and Israel, few if any US media talked about it).
 
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US sanctions China's advancement is like trying to stop tsunami with bare hands.
You like it or you don't, it is coming to get you. lol....
 
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US sanctions China's advancement is like trying to stop tsunami with bare hands.
You like it or you don't, it is coming to get you. lol....
*sighs*

I have to say it again don't I?

It's a stalling tactic yes, but semiconductor research is very much an arms race.

Guess what works in races?
 
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So they will now throw a wrench in the gears spanner in the works, then help remove it when the servers are at customer's site?
 

btarunr

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The trick is not to set TFLOP/s or SPEC score-based limits, but transistor-count per package limits. You can't find a way around that sucker.

Setting a TFLOP/s or performance-based limit means that chipmakers will simply sell their usual chips at 50 MHz clock speeds to fall below the sanction limits, which can be "overclocked" by customers.
 
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