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China's first credible gaming GPU sells 30,000 units in 48 hours, despite RTX 3060-level performance (www.techspot.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

My feelings:

  • Neat.

  • Future is interesting.

  • But proof is not in the puddin’ yet.

It’s easy to say “they’ll scale it up. They’ll get to optimizing the software,” but I’ve seen waaay too many hardware makers mess up that step, and fade into the vast graveyard of their peers.

Like, does anyone remember Centaur’s exciting, 8 core x86 CPUs, with a huge block for ML inference, from about a decade ago?

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/via-part-4-a-deep-dive-into-centaurs-last-cpu-core-cns

It was competitive with Zen 1, not even counting the accelerator.

The answer is “probably not.” Even the Wikichip Fuse writeups on the architecture are gone.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I mean China has a proven track record of scaling stuff up once they decide to do something. Look at solar and EVs as two examples. Having sovereign supply chains for computing is obviously recognized as a top priority in China now, so there is every reason to expect that a lot of resources will be poured into making that happen at state level.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    That’s a lot of vagueness though.

    I’m interested in something physical. Something I could buy, that could realistically upgrade an Arc B580 in (say) indie games, or KCDII, or llama.cpp.

    This is nowhere close yet.

    And I dont doubt they’re getting investment, but I’m just skeptical because I’ve seen this story a hundred times before, even in China. And even then, what’s promised to be general hardware often evolves into something for a very nich need. As a recent example, see Tenstorrent.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 month ago

    I mean all we can do is wait and see, but there's nothing magical about this tech, and the geopolitical situation today is very different from what it was in the past. It's not like Chinese people are too dumb to build a GPU, it's that there was no real reason to push this tech hard before when you could just buy these chips from NVIDIA. Now that the US is actively trying to cut China off, there's a reason to make this stuff work. Just look at how rapidly Huawei phones improved and how much progress Huawei is making with their chips in just past few years. Why shouldn't this happen with other types of chips going forward?

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