After the US tightened its chip export restrictions in October, Taiwanese manufacturers of fabless artificial intelligence chips downgraded their designs to maintain access to Taiwan.
MetaX and Enflame, two Shanghai- based graphic processing unit ( GPU) designers, submitted downgraded designs of their chips to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co ( TSMC) to meet the US chip export requirement, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
After its most advanced C500 cards ran out of stock earlier this year, MetaX released a GPU called the C280 for TSMC generation, according to the report. TSMC told Reuters that it works with consumers to ensure conformity with laws that apply to its business.
But, it is unclear whether TSMC had actually started the mass production of C500 bits for MetaX.
According to information gathered by Asia Times, MetaX finished the fundamental assessment of the C500 cards on June 13 last year and planned to begin size production at the end of the same year. Such a strategy might have been hampered by the US restrictions.  ,  ,  ,
A set of new rules, announced by the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security ( BIS ) on October 17, last year, prohibit the shipment of chips with a total processing performance of 4, 800 or more or a performance density of 5,92 or more from China.  ,
The new regulations blocked the sale of Nvidia’s A800 and H800 cards to China.  , It is said that A800’s efficiency has reached 70 % of that of A100. In October 2022, the BIS banned A100’s sale to China.  ,  ,
According to Taiwanese advertising, MetaX’s C500 device is something in between A100 and A800. It has computing power of 15 trillion floating point operations per second ( Tflops ) at a single- precision floating- point format ( FP32 ), compared with A100’s 19.5 Tflops.
In fact, MetaX might ask Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp ( SMIC ) from Shanghai to produce its AI chips. However, Huawei Technologies is rumored to have made up the majority of SMIC’s 7 nm chip production capacity.
H20 cards
After the US tightened its device export controls next October, Nvidia planned to announce in November three AI cards – H20, L20 and L2 – for the Foreign areas. The release was postponed to 2024, however, because the California-based company wanted to see if the cards would cooperate with US export controls.  ,
In March, Nvidia commenced pre-orders for its H20 cards. Alibaba reportedly ordered over 30,000 H20 cards. Last month, distributors sold H20 cards at a more than 10% discount to Huawei’s Ascend 910B due to an abundant supply of the chips in the market in China.
A Hainan-based writer surnamed Tang says that a server with eight H20 cards is now priced at 1.1 to 1.3 million yuan (US$151,783 to US$179,380) while one with the same number of Ascend 910B chips costs about 1.3 to 1.5 million yuan.
Tang points out that H20’s efficiency falls short of Ascend 910B’s.  ,
According to Chinese advertising, SMIC is now in charge of producing Ascend 910B cards. The earlier version of the microprocessor, called Ascend 910, was made by TSMC in Taiwan.  ,
According to SMIC’s limited production capacity of 7nm cards, China also needs to buy Nvidia’s AI chips, some experts said.  ,
Jensen Huang’s conversation
A reporter from the Chinese Television System ( CTS ) approached Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang as he was walking on the streets in Taipei on May 29 during his Taiwan trip. He agreed to an unexpected meeting.  ,
The so-called “godfather of Artificial” claimed that Taiwan is one of the most significant nations in the world because it is the heart of the technology sector.  ,
” The machine industry is built because of Taiwan, so it’s a very, very significant state”, he added. It demonstrated that his use of Taiwan’s name was accurate.  ,
His statement has not yet caused much trouble in China, which is happily for him.
On May 23- 24, China launched huge- level military training near Taiwan. It complained that Taipei President Lai Ching-te criticized Taiwan in his opening statement on May 20 for supporting” Taiwan self-reliance.”
” Huang’s social position seems to be very similar to that of Lai”, Chen Fei, an associate professor at the School of Politics and International Studies, Central China Normal University, says in an article on Wednesday. ” But he, as a businessman, will definitely put commercial benefits on top of his agenda” . ,
In order to maintain stable chip manufacturing, Chen claimed Huang just wanted to say something to satisfy the Taiwanese contract producers during his Taiwan vacation. He claimed that Nvidia will continue to treat China as an essential business even though US device trade controls had hurt the company’s China income.  ,
A blogger from Jiangxi who uses the pseudonym” Spring Music Dream” claims in an article that Huang has a powerful political sense and would not have given any contentious remarks about Taiwan problems.  ,
Some media outlets, according to the author, wanted to push their political mission using Huang’s popularity. In October 2022, Kuomintang, a Beijing-friendly democratic party in Taiwan, complained that a pro-Democratic Progress Party editorial staff was operating in the CTS office.  ,
Read: Huawei plans to make 3nm bits, but when?
Following Jeff Pao on Twitter at , @jeffpao3