I agree Tom’s Hardware is unnecessarily derisive but I also think the performance curve bending to the current date is an exponential difficulty curve. China still has no replacement and no plausible path to a replacement for the most modern EUV nodes that require ASML lithography machines.
They can very very quickly leapfrog older generations of GPU hardware by going straight to the peak of their home-grown lithography processes, that’s not surprising. But getting performance to keep following the curve to the last 2-3 years is a sheer cliff, not a ramp. It took ASML decades to do it and nobody worldwide has replicated it, because it’s just that hard, even as China tries to acquire export-controlled prior-gen machines on the gray market.
Maybe I’ll be wrong, but don’t be surprised if we see no improvement or minor optimizations for years.
I agree Tom’s Hardware is unnecessarily derisive but I also think the performance curve bending to the current date is an exponential difficulty curve. China still has no replacement and no plausible path to a replacement for the most modern EUV nodes that require ASML lithography machines.
They can very very quickly leapfrog older generations of GPU hardware by going straight to the peak of their home-grown lithography processes, that’s not surprising. But getting performance to keep following the curve to the last 2-3 years is a sheer cliff, not a ramp. It took ASML decades to do it and nobody worldwide has replicated it, because it’s just that hard, even as China tries to acquire export-controlled prior-gen machines on the gray market.
Maybe I’ll be wrong, but don’t be surprised if we see no improvement or minor optimizations for years.