The chipmaker has been quick to redesign its products to pass the current restrictions, but US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo seems to have had enough.
I’m deeply skeptical that export controls are going to work with China if the item in question is a consumer GPU unless you’re going to radically redesign the things to do something extremely obnoxious like require cryptographically-secure online activation every boot. There are just too many individuals and small businesses in random other countries who are going to be able to buy them and resell them. The chain over which a GPU travels is too far disconnected from entities that we can directly affect.
Maybe they can induce a very limited delay, or increase costs to a limited degree, but I assume that that’s not what the goal is.
You can only effectively export-control something if, all along the chain from the manufacturer to the end user, you can clearly distinguish between a legit and non-legit user. There’s no way that some random electronics store in Kazakhstan is going to know whether the person buying a 4090 with cash is going to sell it in China or use it themselves.
It’s also kind of ridiculous to think that anyone using a consumer grade GPU is a threat. No one doing work with AI is using a 4090, they’re using enterprise grade cards with 80GB of vram (H100/A100, even P40’s in a pinch). The 4090 is a nice toy for running Stable Diffusion and low grade ERP LLM models and that’s about it.
I’m deeply skeptical that export controls are going to work with China if the item in question is a consumer GPU unless you’re going to radically redesign the things to do something extremely obnoxious like require cryptographically-secure online activation every boot. There are just too many individuals and small businesses in random other countries who are going to be able to buy them and resell them. The chain over which a GPU travels is too far disconnected from entities that we can directly affect.
Maybe they can induce a very limited delay, or increase costs to a limited degree, but I assume that that’s not what the goal is.
You can only effectively export-control something if, all along the chain from the manufacturer to the end user, you can clearly distinguish between a legit and non-legit user. There’s no way that some random electronics store in Kazakhstan is going to know whether the person buying a 4090 with cash is going to sell it in China or use it themselves.
It’s also kind of ridiculous to think that anyone using a consumer grade GPU is a threat. No one doing work with AI is using a 4090, they’re using enterprise grade cards with 80GB of vram (H100/A100, even P40’s in a pinch). The 4090 is a nice toy for running Stable Diffusion and low grade
ERPLLM models and that’s about it.Bad logic. If there’s risk involved and they can’t get the. Legitimately, it’s going to add a significant overhead.