alt Hacker NewsI wonder if it would be viable for the Chinese to pursue a huge buildout of less sophisticated logic fabs. My experience with GPGPU is that it seems to intensely skew towards memory bandwidth, and has a much lower compute intensity than graphics (by which I mean rasterization and shaders).
This seems to be holding true for AI as well. I'm sure if you have an excess of compute and a dearth of bandwidth, you can trade the former for the latter, but still, this is a fundamenta property.
A lot of talk has been said about how companies are doing 'financial tricks' to extend the useful life of GPUs by showing lower depreciation - but what if these are not tricks at all - new GPUs don't really have that much more bandwidth, and while they might be clever in some other ways, they are limited in how much they can improve fundamentals.
This has been reflected in how memory vendors' stock price has exploded, but NVIDIA stayed stagnant.
Since the Chinese are far closer to the US in building SOTA memory chips, it's possible that their disadvantages are far overstated.
The real question is whether it's easier to improve the software side instead. There are likely a lot more optimizations possible in terms of model architecture, and if there is a compute bottleneck, then it's going to put a lot of pressure on Chinese labs to address the problem using more efficient designs.