Here is the link.
I can see people buying GPU, send it to Mexico, and do the same, then export the chips to China. Since China is already offshoring their production to Mexico, the logistic chain is already there.
People here glossing over one very big factor - there is already a large chip salvaging/recycling industry in China.
All the new X79, X99, etc mobos on aliexpress, taobao and so on, come from taking old decommissioned boards’ chipsets and resoldering them onto new ones. Same deal with many mobile/laptop dGPUs and CPUs, often saving functional chips from landfill. And unfortunately also behind the occurrences of those “fake” memory and NAND products.
If the product works and offered for honestly cheaper, this sounds like a win for the environment
newer chips take less energy for the same computation so no
Anything NEW usually takes up a significant amount of resource to make.
Depends how much they expend in the process…that still takes energy and materials, many of which are single use.
Lack of intellect by social media driven, reality tv infested McDonald’s eating simps is my guess.
On a similar note, does anyone know how the US maintains export bans? What’s stopping a Polish shop seeking 100 4090s to a Russian company that resells to China?
Also in this case, they’d need to have designed the PCB/motherboard from ground-up, isn’t that difficult at the high speeds these things run at? Or could a handful of underpaid EE grads do it?
What’s stopping a Polish shop seeking 100 4090s to a Russian company that resells to China?
Pretty sure there is an export ban to Russia on microchips.
Okay yeah that’s fair. But what about say though Singapore (as was earlier in the news I think), or say Mongolia? There are tons of countries bordering China where it would be possible.
it’s already happening right now. The loopholes in the sanction regime is pretty big, and virtually unenforceable given the limited manpower and resources BIS/Commerce dept has.
Singapore is 4000km away from China
I wonder if you mind will be blown when you learn about New Zealand.
What is to stop people what, pulling the chips of GPUs and selling them to China? Probably not lucrative enough to risk the legal consequences.
https://beta.cp24.com/news/2023/11/1/1_6627196.html
Pretty drastic consequences
Unless you are the law.
BIS doesn’t have the budget or manpower to track consumer-grade GPUs end-uses.
Weapons for raging conflict is vastly different.
These sanctions are more political than practical anyways. They’re not actually stopping shit.
Eh, they’re definitely making it harder to acquire, which makes it more expensive.
its slows them down , since they cant buy up in bulk by buying up pallets and pallets of cards , and have to buy through black market where cards likely pass by several hands like a faucet. Getting cards into China via Vietnam and Thailand are going to make serious coin to those resellers that buy them and import them illegally. They have over 400k kilometers of rivers and lakes that facilitate moving goods invisibly super easy not counting ocean.
They can do what they want, ‘gamer’ GPU’s for AI is not a new thing. The theory of Nvidia’s low VRAM comes from GTX 1080 TI’s being used for AI training, Nvidia saw the money lost and locked down that VRAM.
And mining. Ethereum mining is very memory intensive, so they had to limit memory bandwidth and find other ways to make up the performance for games. That’s why you don’t see 384 or 512-but memory bus anymore, they’re all as low low low as you can go. A 128-bit bus isn’t uncommon, sadly.
The reason for the shrinking memory buses is the bad scaling of IO with newer processes. The memory controllers on AD102 have basically the same footprint as that on GA102, in spite of there being a gigantic increase in overall transistor density
Ethereum mining hasn’t been a thing for a year now btw
Exactly, entire planet is consipiring to deprieve gamers of High end GPUs.
That’s why you don’t see 384
2080 Ti, 3090, 4090.
or 512-but memory bus anymore
We haven’t seen them since we moved to GDDR6. Simply because the signal integrity and power requirements makes it quite unreasonable.
find other ways to make up the performance for games
Lack of DRAM scaling is the reason why we are where we are. Computational power has grown much faster than bandwidth.
Nvidia has had around a generation of advantage in bandwidth efficiency/utilization since Maxwell over AMD. Surprise surprise, one generation after AMD they as well have to resort to larger caches to substitute for bandwidth.
A 512 bit G6 bus (which isn’t realistic to begin with), would not have given 4090 enough bandwidth over 3090. To keep up with the growth in computational power.
Nothing at all. China is going to get their GPUs. It’s not going to be as easy, but they will get them. Chinese ships travel all over the world. Getting a box of GPUs on board is not that difficult.
Probably not practical on a scale useful to AI companies. Having the chips alone isn’t enough, you need boards design as server blades, with high bandwidth backplanes, power system, and other custom build things to make use of this. And if these are stripped parts, you would also need testing facilities and certification capabilities for thousands of chips. I don’t see how a striped 4090 would be better than the A800/H800. Lots of video cards are assembled in China, so I would assume they also have the plants to recycle them.
Why bother with desoldering the chips instead of just swapping the cooler for a loud blower cooler?
idk but repurposing GPUs like that in the west will get you instantly in trouble with the law, most likely IP infringement since you are modifying Nvidia’s stuff without approval for financial gains.
Chinese factories can do this without worries since Chinese law probably don’t care about this all that much. And even if NVIDIA do hit them, they’ll simply close down temporarily and rename themselves to a new entity altogether, it’s common practice in China to simply “disappear” if something bad happens. That’s also why you see so many chinese brands with incoherent letters and namings, because those names are disposable and not hard to come with.
Probably depends on whether you’re living in the States or not. If I were to do such a thing as an European citizen -Norwegian to be exact, then nobody could stop me. The US government could be however pissed they want, but they have no juristiction here, nor do my country extradict its own citizens. Neither does it usually acknowledge any US lawsuits, as they are… Extremely exagerated much of the time, and borderline childish. You can’t sue people for serving you hot coffee here, or sue the owner of a house because you fell down the stair.
So in short, I can do whatever I want with my products that I have bought from an US manufacturer, and all they can do is watch me do it.
You can’t sue people for serving you hot coffee here
https://www.citizen.org/article/legal-myths-the-mcdonalds-hot-coffee-case/
McDonald’s and Corporate America as a whole love you for your loyalty and faith in their side of the story as you spread your disdain for dumb US citizens and their frivolous lawsuits about consumer safety like that pesky EU
I am proud to award you the title of honorary American. Keep it up, and day by day, you and people like you will help shift attitudes and make the EU more like US!
Least smug EU redditor
You should read more about the “hot coffee” suit. The (elderly) woman received 3rd degree burns all over her privates. She initially asked for medical costs to be covered, and they denied her. So she sued.