I've been wrong, again, pooh-poohing another Eurasian autocracy. Or so it seems.
On 29 August 2023, to great jubilation of Chinese netizens («the light boat has passed through a thousand mountains!», they cry), Huawei has announced Mate 60 and 60 Pro; the formal launch is scheduled for September 25th, commemorating the second anniversary of return of Meng Wanzhou, CFO and daughter of Huawei's founder, from her detainment in Canada. Those are nice phones of course but, specs-wise, unimpressive, as far as flagships in late 2023 go (on benchmarks, score like 50-60% of the latest iPhone while burning peak 13W so 200% of power). Now they're joined by Mate X5.
The point, however, is that they utilize Huawei's own SoC, Hisilicon Kirin 9000S, not only designed but produced in the Mainland; it even uses custom cores that inherit simultaneous multithreading from their server line (I recommend this excellent video review, also this benchmarking). Their provenance is not advertised, in fact it's not admitted at all, but now all reasonable people are in agreement that it's SMIC-Shanghai made, using their N+2 (7nm) process, with actual minimum metal pitch around 42 nm, energy efficiency at low frequencies close to Samsung's 4nm and far worse at high (overall capability in the Snapdragon 888 range, so 2020), transistor density on par with first-gen TSMC N7, maybe N7P (I'm not sure though, might well be 10% higher)… so on the border of what has been achieved with DUV (deep ultraviolet) and early EUV runs (EUV technology having been denied to China. As a side note, Huawei is also accused of building its own secret fabs).
It's also worse on net than Kirin 9000, their all-time peak achievement taped out across the strait in 2020, but it's… competitive. They apparently use self-aligned quad patterning, a DUV variant that's as finicky as it sounds, an absurd attempt to cheat optics and etch features many times smaller than the etching photons' wavelength (certain madmen went as high as 6x patterning; that said, even basic single-patterning EUV is insane and finicky, «physics experiment, not a production process»; companies on the level of Nikon exited the market in exasperation rather than pursue it; and it'll get worse). This trick was pioneered by Intel (which has failed at adopting EUV, afaik it's a fascinating corporate mismanagement story with as much strategic error as simple asshole behavior of individual executives) and is still responsible for their latest chips, though will be made obsolete in the next generations (the current node used to be called Intel's 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin, and was recently rebranded to Intel 7; note, however, that Kirin 9000S is a low-power part and requirements there are a bit more lax than in desktop/server processors). Long story short: it's 1.5-2 generations, 3-4 years behind the frontier of available devices, 5-6 years behind frontier production runs, 7-8 years after the first machines to make such chips at scale came onto market; but things weren't that much worse back then. We are, after all, in the domain of diminishing returns.
Here are the highlights from the first serious investigation, here are some leaks from it, here's the nice Asianometry overview (esp 3:50+), and the exhilarating, if breathlessly hawkish perspective of Dylan Patel, complete with detailed restrictions-tightening advice. Summarizing:
- This is possible because sanctions against China have tons of loopholes, and because ASML and other suppliers are not interested in sacrificing their business to American ambition. *
- Yes, it qualifies for 7nm in terms of critical dimensions. Yes, it's not Potemkin tulou, they likely have passable yields, both catastrophic and parametric (maybe upwards of 50% for this SoC, because low variance in stress-testing means they didn't feel the need to approve barely-functional chips, meaning there weren't too many defects) and so it's economically sustainable (might be better in that sense than e.g. Samsung's "5nm" or "4nm", because Samsung rots alive due to systemic management fraud) [I admit I doubt this point, and Dylan is known to be a hawk with motivated reasoning]. Based on known capex, they will soon be able to produce 30K wafers per month, which means 10s of millions of such chips soon (corroborated by shipment targets; concretely it's like 300 Kirins *29700 wafers so 8.9M/month, but the cycle is>1 month). And yes, they will scale it up further, and indeed they will keep polishing this tech tree and plausibly get to commercially viable "5nm" next - «the total process cost would only be ≈20% higher versus a 5nm that utilizes EUV» (probably 50%+ though).
- But more importantly: «Even with 50% yields, 30,000 WPM could support over 10 million Nvidia H100 GPU ASIC dies a year […] Remember GPT-4 was trained on ≈24,000 A100’s and Open AI will still have less than 1 million advanced GPUs even by the end of next year». Of course, Huawei already had been producing competitive DL accelerators back when they had access to EUV 7nm; even now I stumble upon ML papers that mention using those.
- As if all that were not enough, China simply keeps splurging billions on pretty good ML-optimized hardware, like Nvidia A/H800s, which abide with the current (toothless, as Patel argues) restrictions.
- But once again: on a bright (for Westerners) side, this means it's not so much Chinese ingenuity and industriousness (for example, they still haven't delivered a single ≤28nm lithography machine, though it's not clear if the one they're working on won't be rapidly upgraded for 20, 14, 10 and ultimately 7nm processes – after all, SMIC is currently procuring tools for «28nm», complying with sanctions, yet here we are), as it's the unpicked low-hanging fruit of trade restrictions. In fact, some Chinese doomers argue it's a specific allowance by the US Department of Commerce and overall a nothingburger, ie doesn't suggest willingness to produce more consequential things than gadgets for patriotic consumers. The usual suspects (Zeihan and his flock) take another view and smugly claim that China has once again shot itself in the foot while showing off, paper tiger, wolf warriors, only steals and copies etc.; and, the stated objective of the USG being «as large of a lead as possible», new crippling sanctions are inevitable (maybe from Patel's list). There exists a body of scholarship on semiconductor supply chain chokepoints which confirms these folks are not delusional – something as «simple» as high-end photoresist is currently beyond Chinese grasp, so the US can make use of a hefty stick.
All that being said, China does advance in on-shoring the supply chain: EDA, 28nm scanners, wafers etc.
* Note: Patel plays fast and loose with how many lithography machines exactly, and of what capacity, are delivered/serviced/ordered/shipping/planned/allowed, and it's the murkiest part in the whole narrative; for example he describes ASML's race-traitorous plans stretching to 2025-2030, but the Dutch and also the Japanese seem to already have began limiting sales of tools he lists as unwisely left unbanned, and so the August surge or imports may have been the last, and certainly most 2024+ sales are off the table I think.
All of this is a retreading of a discussion from over a year ago, when a less mature version of SMIC N7 process was used - also surreptitiously – for a Bitcoin mining ASIC, a simple, obscenely high-margin part 19.3mm² in size, which presumably would have been profitable to make even at pathetic yields, like 10%; the process back then was near-idential to TSMC N7 circa 2018-2019. 9000S is 107 mm² and lower-margin. Nvidia GH100, the new workhorse of cutting edge ML, made with 4nm TSMC node, is 814 mm²; as GPU chips are a strategic resource, it'd be sensible to subsidize their production (as it happens, H100 with its 98 MTr/mm² must be equally or a bit less dense than 9000S; A100, a perfectly adequate 7nm downgrade option, is at 65 MTr/mm² so we can be sure they'll be capable of making those, eg resurrecting Biren BR100 GPUs or things like Ascend 910). Citing Patel again, «Just like Apple is the guinea pig for TSMC process nodes and helps them ramp and achieve high yield, Huawei will likewise help SMIC in the same way […] In two years, SMIC will likely be able to produce large monolithic dies for AI and networking applications.» (In an aside, Patel laments the relative lack of gusto in strangling Chinese radio/sensor capabilities, which are more formidable and immediately scary than all that compute. However, this makes sense if we look at the ongoing chip trade war through the historical lens, with the reasonable objective being Chinese obsolescence a la what happened to the Soviet Union and its microelectronics, and arguably even Japan in the 80s, which is why ASML/Samsung/TSMC are on the map at all; Choyna military threat per se, except to Taiwan, being a distant second thought, if not a total pretext. This r/LessCredibleDefense discussion may be of interest).
So. I have also pooh-poohed the Chinese result back then, assuming that tiny crypto ASICs are as good as they will get within the bounds assigned to them, «swan song of Chinese industry», and won't achieve meaningful yields. Just as gwern de facto did in October 2022, predicting the slow death of Chinese industry in view of «Export Controls on Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items to the PRC» (even mentioning the yellow bear meme). Just as I did again 4 months ago, saying to @RandomRanger «China will maybe have 7nm in 2030 or something». I maintain that it's plausible they won't have a fully indigenized supply chain for any 7nm process until 2030 (and/or will likewise fail with securing chains for necessary components other than processors: HBM, interposers etc), they may well fall below the capacity they have right now (reminder that not only do scanners break down and need consumables, but they can be remotely disabled), especially if restrictions keep ramping up and they'll keep making stupid errors, e.g. actually starting and failing an attempt at annexing Taiwan, or going for Cultural Revolution Round II: Zero Covid Boogaloo, or provoking an insurgency by force-feeding all primary school students gutter oil breakfasts… with absolute power, the possibilities are endless! My dissmissal was informed not by prejudice but years upon years of promises by Chinese industry and academia representatives to get to 7nm in 2 more weeks, and consistent failure and high-profile fraud (and in fact I found persuasive this dude's argument that by some non-absurd measures the gap has widened since the Mao's era; and there was all the graphene/quantum computing "leapfrogging" nonsense, and so on). Their actors haven't become appreciably better now.
But I won't pooh-pooh any more, because their chips have become better. I also have said: «AGI can be completed with already available hardware, and the US-led bloc has like 95% of it, and total control over means of production». This is still technically true but apparently not in a decisive way. History is still likely to repeat – that is, like the Qing China during the Industrial Revolution, like the Soviet Union in the transistor era, the nation playing catch-up will once again run into trade restrictions, fail at the domestic fundamental innovation and miss out on the new technological stage; but it is not set in stone. Hell, they may even get to EUV through that asinine 160m synchrotron-based electron beam thing – I mean, they are trying, though it still looks like ever more academic grift… but…
I have underestimated China and overestimated the West. Mea culpa. Alphanumericsprawl and others were making good points.
Where does this leave us?
It leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where China as a rival superpower will plausibly have to be defeated for real, rather then just sanctioned away or allowed to bog itself down in imperialist adventurism and incompetence. They'll have enough suitable chips, they have passable software, enough talent for 1-3 frontier companies, reams of data and their characteristically awkward ruthlessness applied to refining it (and as we've learned recently, high-quality data can compensate for a great disparity in compute). They are already running a few serious almost-OpenAI-level projects – Baidu's ERNIE, Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen (maybe I've mentioned it already, but their Qwen-7B/VL are really good; seems like all groups in the race were obligated to release a small model for testing purposes), maybe also Tsinghua's ChatGLM, SenseTime etc.'s InternLM and smaller ones. They – well, those groups, not the red boomer Xi – are well aware of their weaknesses and optimize around them (and borrowing from the open academic culture helps, as can be often seen in the training methods section – thanks to MIT&Meta, Microsoft, Princeton et al). They are preparing for the era of machine labor, which for now is sold as means to take care of the aging population and so on (I particularly like the Fourier Intelligence's trajectory, a near-perfect inversion of Iron Man's plot – start with the medical exoskeleton, proceed to make a full humanoid; but there are other humanoids developed in parallel, eg Unitree H1, and they seem competitive with their American equivalents like Tesla Optimus, X1 Neo and so on); in general, they are not being maximally stupid with their chances.
And this, in turn, means that the culture of the next years will be – as I've predicted in Viewpoint Focus 3 years ago – likely dominated by the standoff, leading up to much more bitter economic decoupling and kinetic war; promoting bipartisan jingoism and leaving less space for «culture war» as understood here; on the upside, it'll diminish the salience of progressive campaigns that demoralize the more traditionally minded population.
It'll also presumably mean less focus on «regulation of AI risks» than some would hope for, denying this topic the uncontested succession to the Current Thing №1.
That's about all from me, thoughts?
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Notes -
Well, I'm happy to be acknowledged! I read Patel on the day it came out, I suspect we follow the same substacks.
I think the fundamental issue with Western technology sanctions (and everything else) is a lack of seriousness. The whole time, Chinese companies have been renting compute from top-tier, banned chips overseas. Apparently its been too hard to stop shell companies doing this. Only recently did the US slap chip restrictions on Middle Eastern countries, knowing they'll sell them on to China. There's a flourishing black market in chips, plus all of the Chinese APTs who can steal IP. Much of the Western hawkishness on Chinese sanctions is not without cause, what we've been doing is ineffective. From a pure balance of power calculation, in the past we should've been trying to bring conflict forward, since our relative strength was declining. But now?
China's always had a lot of brainpower and hard work, observe the physiognomy of Western scientific/maths Olympiad teams. Observe the names of people publishing AI papers. Lian, Guo, Li, Tan, Song... I don't know if Alexander Kruel's highlighted arxiv papers have a bias towards Chinese authors but it seems undeniable that China has a lot of talent. Whatever number of Chinese diaspora we have in the West doing research, it stands to reason there are more in China. We were never going to retain a large technological edge against such a rich and populous country. China is bigger than Western civilization, they have a larger labour force than all of us combined!
However, I go a step further than the hawks and think it's too late to try and suppress China intensely. We should not make a bluff from a weak hand. The same level of unseriousness we see in chip sanctions, we also see in the Arizona semiconductor plant, should it ever open. There have been all kinds of problems with skilled labour shortages, Taiwanese engineers being frustrated by how slack the American workers are, regulatory issues, random thugs breaking into their cars...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-chip-fab-opening-says-us-talent-is-insufficient/
And Arizona still needs Taiwanese advanced packaging: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4996624
Unseriousness is a pervasive and all-encompassing fog in the West. The US Navy is shrinking, just at the time when strength is needed most and it's not even at war! Why is it that chip production left the US in the first place? Why are Taiwanese engineers having to come over to get things back on track? Why is US politics led by geriatrics - Putin and Xi are 'only' 70 year olds to Biden's 80. Why is government debt so high, why can't anyone in the West seem to build warships or anything quickly? Why is the US military so demoralized and disorganized, why can't they fill their ranks? Why is there a huge race spoils program undermining meritocracy across the economy and in the US or UK military (I know of examples in the air force of both countries)? Political/racial division in the US is huge and often a bad sign for one's chances on the battlefield. As for diplomacy - wtf has been happening? Why were there Russian and Chinese troops invited to Mexico's independence day??? Can the US not even keep Mexico under control?
China now has a credible nuclear triad, they have a very large, modern and concentrated navy poised to dominate the approaches to Taiwan, South Korea and maybe Japan. They have the world's biggest economy in PPP terms and in manufacturing, whatever figures you use. It would surprise me greatly if Chinese war industry chokes under the strain of a medium/high intensity war like NATO has in Ukraine - they probably can spool up production of millions and millions of shells very quickly, fill the skies with drones and missiles. China is in a position of strength, while we are in a position of weakness. There are some things that we can't buy even with huge amounts of paper money - quick construction, discipline, efficient organizations, large pools of highly-skilled labour whether that's in semiconductor fab construction, warships or shipyards.
If we fight now or in the near future I believe there is a high chance of defeat and that brings the whole house of cards down. If we lose a war and they get AGI... we're so fucked. Thus, we need to avoid fighting until our domestic problems are solved, which will take many years if it's doable at all. Bully the weak and appease the strong, not the other way around! Fix the deficits, crime, drugs, fill out our militaries, find young leaders, recreate national unity, end race-grifting, streamline regulations, fill up the arsenals, secure spheres of influence and then fight.
As for AGI, its a bit like a game of musical chairs. We don't know when the game ends and should be prepared for near-term or the long-term scenarios (10-15 years). Just don't get knocked out of the competition by losing a war.
No. The USA has way more nukes and better ability to deliver them. The PRC's not catching up that fast.
A full nuclear exchange would certainly bring down the house of cards! It's possible that Russia joins in and anyway, China has more than you'd think (mostly because Minutemen are de-MIRVed):
https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/12/07/china-may-have-surpassed-us-in-number-of-nuclear-warheads-on-icbms/
I was assuming a conventional defeat in Asia, resulting in China securing control over Taiwan and much of the Pacific. The damage to the West would be catastrophic, we wouldn't be world leaders anymore. South Korea would probably find some accommodation with China since they're surrounded and food insecure (maybe Japan too). China would have many more friends, our 'friends' in the Middle East would jump ship, nobody would want to buy our debt anymore, the Washington based finance/banking system would be replaced...
Defeat in war would be a crippling blow to our economy and would probably prevent AGI development IMO. People will be more worried about debt, oil supplies, hyperinflation and defaults, blaming eachother for the disaster, fighting radicalism, sponsoring radicalism...
I would dispute this. AGI, as it already exists in prototypical form in GPT-4 and friends, is a net value add to the economy. The knowhow won't go away, not now, and while I expect the majority of datacenters to get fried in WW3, I'd still expect them to be rebuilt within say, a decade or two, and then governments to focus on AGI as a strategic trump card to forestall a second nuking. AGI x-risk doesn't sound quite as bad when 10-20% of your population perished in nuclear fire and the culprits are around for round 2.
Even a damaged, teetering economy benefits from chatbots, and the mid-tier ones fit on a single consumer gpu. The cat isn't going back in the bag short of complete civilizational collapse on the scale of people struggling to power their electronics at all.
Say US share market takes a 50% valuation cut because the USD is now a second-rate currency... who is going to be doing venture capital for AI startups? Which big company is going to say 'lets be really ambitious in capital expenditure and R&D when our revenue has just collapsed and everyone's panicking?' It would be like a crypto winter but for the real economy. And if it goes nuclear, then I think the US and China are out of the game entirely. There would be massive brain drain away from an irradiated, EMPed, disintegrated state.
Even if you can run a chatbot on your PC, you certainly can't train it there. And if China controls Taiwan and South Korea's shipping lanes, they can siphon off the chips we need, along with much of the apparently-indispensable Taiwanese engineering talent needed to make chip fabs. China as No.1 GP could put a lot of pressure on ASML and the like to give them highest priority.
On the other hand I guess that DARPA and the like would go full speed ahead on superweapon research (why wouldn't they already be at full speed ahead though?) It does depend a lot on timelines. I reckon massively transformative AGI can be 15 years away, maximum. But it could be longer, giving more time to catch up after a loss.
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