NVIDIA engineers have been working on a new GPU for several months to artificial intelligence (AI) expressly designed for the Chinese market. Reuters He has confirmed that he will be called B30A, and on his shoulders he will rest, neither more nor less, The future of the company led by Jensen Huang in China. This chip must necessarily meet two conditions. On the one hand it has to be more powerful than The H20 GPUwhich is the last solution that Nvidia has placed in China.
And, in addition, it must meet the restrictions imposed by the US Department of Commerce. Otherwise Nvidia will not get the export license you need to be able to sell this chip in this Asian country. The current situation complicates a lot The future of this company in China. Its main obstacle is the investigation that the administration of cyberspace has initiated, usually known as CAC for its English denomination (Cyberspace Administration of China).
As we have explained in other articles, the problem that Nvidia faces is that The CAC has decided to investigate it Because he suspects that the H20 chip could incorporate a rear door of difficult location by Chinese experts. If so, the possibility of China to use this GPU could be possible. At the moment the CAC has limited himself to questioning those responsible for NVIDIA in China and ask them to demonstrate that the H20 Chip does not represent a threat to the interests and security of the country led by Xi Jinping.
The B30A chip responds to the need to lead in performance in China
Chinese companies that are dedicated to the development of large AI models are trapped. On the one hand they are being forced to deal with the export restrictions of the GPU imposed by the US government. And, in addition, they are subject to their own dependence on American technology. A priori the optimal solution for them would be to stop buying Nvidia and other US companies their chips for AI, and getting “comparable” GPUs proposed by Huawei, Change either Moore Threadsamong other Chinese companies.
Chinese companies prefer GPUs for NVIDIA because their performance is greater
However, as explained in your article to Foreign Policy The American analyst Kyle Chan, the scenario they face is more complicated than it seems. And it is that abandoning Nvidia in practice is very difficult. According to ChanTencent, Bytedance, Alibaba and other Chinese companies They prefer GPUs for Nvidia Because its performance is greater, especially when facing the training processes of their AI models. However, they especially opt for the chips of this American company thanks to CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture).
Most of the AI projects that are currently being developed are implemented on CUDA. This technology brings together the compiler and development tools used by programmers to develop their software for NVIDIA GPUs, and replace it with another option in the projects that are already underway it is a problem. Huawei, who aspires to an important portion From this market in China, it has Cann (Compute Architecture for Neural Networks), which is its alternative to CUDA, but for the moment CUDA dominates the market.
In these circumstances, the B30A chip that is putting to point Nvidia has all the meaning of the world. Presumably It will be half powerful that the most advanced GPU this company currently has, The B300 chipbut, even so, it is reasonable to assume that will overcome performance of all the chips for the developed in China, especially when facing the training processes of the AI models. This is the best asset that Nvidia has. And it’s going to play it very soon. In fact, plan deliver the first samples From the GPU B30A to its Chinese clients before it ends next September.
Image | Nvidia | Zhang Kaiyv
More information | Reuters
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