Chinese Startup Biren Details BR100 GPU | Another GPU in the competition ? | comparable to A100 ?

[snappercayt]

Summary

 

Quotes

Quote

The company states that a chip with 77 Billion transistors can mimic the human brain nerve cells and the chip itself will be used for DNN and AI purposes so it is more or less going to replace China's dependence on NVIDIA's AI GPUs.

 

My thoughts

 GPU market currently has seen lot of action, the price drop, Nvidia 4000 series launching soon, other players trying to bring some competition is kind of a good thing. Though they claim big numbers, for AI work loads, hands on testing might have different results especially gaming or other tasks. Still, these chips are a way for China to move independently from the West to build their own things, growing self reliance. Not just hardware, they also have BIRENSUPA, a software development platform similar to that of CUDA family from Nvidia. So it is a fresh GPU and didn't get much attention at Hotchips34 so had to share it here. 

 

Sources

https://wccftech.com/china-most-powerful-gpu-birentech-br100-77-billion-transistors-7nm-faster-ai-than-nvidia-a100/

https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/08/25/china-launches-the-inevitable-indigenous-gpu/

https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/08/22/chinese-startup-biren-detail-br100-gpu/

https://hc34.hotchips.org/

https://www.birentech.com/BR100.html

 

 

[manikyath]

as a 'westerner' i wouldnt look too far into this in terms of 'gpu space'.

 

this is 'simply' china responding to a need of their government to not rely on foreign products for it's sensitive compute applications.

 

i do however find it funny that china almost has a "make it so!" attitude towards these things, whereas 'western' countries never seem to get past theorycrafting.

[CarlBar]

6 hours ago, manikyath said:

as a 'westerner' i wouldnt look too far into this in terms of 'gpu space'.

 

this is 'simply' china responding to a need of their government to not rely on foreign products for it's sensitive compute applications.

 

i do however find it funny that china almost has a "make it so!" attitude towards these things, whereas 'western' countries never seem to get past theorycrafting.

 

Money dear boy, money.

 

Outside of the US no-one else in the western club really has the money necessary to just throw at the problem, and the US is really anti-government doing stuff. And that makes it harder for the US to throw the needed amounts at problem.

 

This isn't helped by the fact that IMO the US is really inefficient at doing a lot of things, i think victory disease lays a role. The US is so big and bad and all round mean that there's not a lot of internal pressure to be efficient about things, and that further drives up the costs which further discourages action.

[porina]

12 hours ago, snappercayt said:

Though they claim big numbers, for AI work loads, hands on testing might have different results especially gaming or other tasks.

Gaming performance will be practically zero. It's a compute chip so going against A100 and similar.

[Sauron]

13 hours ago, snappercayt said:

a chip with 77 Billion transistors can mimic the human brain nerve cells

sure...

 

does it even count as a gpu at this point? it's not like CNN accelerators are unheard of outside of the gpu market, it just so happens that gpus are also inherently pretty good at it.

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Outside of the US no-one else in the western club really has the money necessary to just throw at the problem, and the US is really anti-government doing stuff. And that makes it harder for the US to throw the needed amounts at problem.

The US is quite pro throwing government money at corporations that gobble it up and give nothing in return (unless they can sell it back at monopolistic prices) actually.

12 hours ago, manikyath said:

i do however find it funny that china almost has a "make it so!" attitude towards these things, whereas 'western' countries never seem to get past theorycrafting.

Right now western countries don't especially rely on technology that comes from outside their sphere of influence. For us it's more about raw resources and production capabilities. The closest equivalent I can think of would be the incredibly quick development of the covid19 vaccine.

 

Also being a dictatorship undeniably helps when you want something done no matter what, if you're only focused on the goal and not much on the quality of life of the people taking you there. Here we have to rely on the profit motive (unfortunately...)

[williamcll]

This looks like it would operate closer to a high end AMD instinct card, not sure which one however.

[snappercayt]

23 hours ago, snappercayt said:

Summary

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

 GPU market currently has seen lot of action, the price drop, Nvidia 4000 series launching soon, other players trying to bring some competition is kind of a good thing. Though they claim big numbers, for AI work loads, hands on testing might have different results especially gaming or other tasks. Still, these chips are a way for China to move independently from the West to build their own things, growing self reliance. Not just hardware, they also have BIRENSUPA, a software development platform similar to that of CUDA family from Nvidia. So it is a fresh GPU and didn't get much attention at Hotchips34 so had to share it here. 

 

Sources

https://wccftech.com/china-most-powerful-gpu-birentech-br100-77-billion-transistors-7nm-faster-ai-than-nvidia-a100/

https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/08/25/china-launches-the-inevitable-indigenous-gpu/

https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/08/22/chinese-startup-biren-detail-br100-gpu/

https://hc34.hotchips.org/

https://www.birentech.com/BR100.html

 

 

Dr Chips made a video

[AnonymousGuy]

Someone get me the die shot so we can point and laugh how Mr. Chen's cousin who worked for Nvidia ripped off some design files.  2 things always true about China:

 

the specs are a lie

it was ripped off from somewhere else

[Brooksie359]

On 8/29/2022 at 1:48 AM, manikyath said:

as a 'westerner' i wouldnt look too far into this in terms of 'gpu space'.

 

this is 'simply' china responding to a need of their government to not rely on foreign products for it's sensitive compute applications.

 

i do however find it funny that china almost has a "make it so!" attitude towards these things, whereas 'western' countries never seem to get past theorycrafting.

Well China happens to have a very centralized power and they use it to get things done be it good or bad. Compare that to the US where you have two parties always undermining the other from getting anything done and you can see the problem. Also in the US the government is controlled by companies while in China the companies are controlled by the government. Honestly I am pretty impressed how well they have done in the tech industry and they likely would do better if there wasn't a campaign to boycott Chinese tech companies. Granted tiktok is owned by china so not all of the companies are boycotted just mainly hardware manufacturers 

[Brooksie359]

12 hours ago, Sauron said:

sure...

 

does it even count as a gpu at this point? it's not like CNN accelerators are unheard of outside of the gpu market, it just so happens that gpus are also inherently pretty good at it.

The US is quite pro throwing government money at corporations that gobble it up and give nothing in return (unless they can sell it back at monopolistic prices) actually.

Right now western countries don't especially rely on technology that comes from outside their sphere of influence. For us it's more about raw resources and production capabilities. The closest equivalent I can think of would be the incredibly quick development of the covid19 vaccine.

 

Also being a dictatorship undeniably helps when you want something done no matter what, if you're only focused on the goal and not much on the quality of life of the people taking you there. Here we have to rely on the profit motive (unfortunately...)

To be fair china's quality of living has only gone up so it would be unfair to say that they are making progress at the cost of the people. That being said you are correct that when you have a dictatorship that can just do what they want they can often get things done far faster than governments that need a bunch of people with conflicting interest to agree on doing something. 

[Sauron]

4 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

To be fair china's quality of living has only gone up so it would be unfair to say that they are making progress at the cost of the people.

It's not entirely black or white but the increase in the average quality of life is simply a product of the higher overall wealth of China compared to a few decades ago; whether that increased wealth is mainly due to party diktats or outside investment looking for cheap labor is not entirely clear, but personally I believe it's mostly the latter. Average wealth indicators can also be deceiving; while on average wealth and quality of life have increased in China the disparity among citizens is such that millions still live in abject poverty: https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/07/26/chinas-economic-inequality-is-worse-than-americas-and-the-pandemic-hasnt-helped/#:~:text=There are more billionaires in,income inequality a core goal.

 

I'm not implying that none of the decisions made by the dictatorship were positive for the population but I'd say in those cases it was mostly a side effect of them just seeking more power and wealth.

 

And I mean, look at this case specifically; what is the purpose of reinventing the wheel like this? It only serves to increase geopolitical power by reducing their dependence on outside companies, it does nothing for the population at large and it was doubtless a huge investment that could have been used to improve infrastructure in underserved communities.

[Brooksie359]

3 hours ago, Sauron said:

It's not entirely black or white but the increase in the average quality of life is simply a product of the higher overall wealth of China compared to a few decades ago; whether that increased wealth is mainly due to party diktats or outside investment looking for cheap labor is not entirely clear, but personally I believe it's mostly the latter. Average wealth indicators can also be deceiving; while on average wealth and quality of life have increased in China the disparity among citizens is such that millions still live in abject poverty: https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/07/26/chinas-economic-inequality-is-worse-than-americas-and-the-pandemic-hasnt-helped/#:~:text=There are more billionaires in,income inequality a core goal.

 

I'm not implying that none of the decisions made by the dictatorship were positive for the population but I'd say in those cases it was mostly a side effect of them just seeking more power and wealth.

 

And I mean, look at this case specifically; what is the purpose of reinventing the wheel like this? It only serves to increase geopolitical power by reducing their dependence on outside companies, it does nothing for the population at large and it was doubtless a huge investment that could have been used to improve infrastructure in underserved communities.

I mean tbf this did objectively create a ton of jobs so I wouldn't say it doesn't help the citizens. Also china objectively has made huge improvements in their infrastructure. I mean they have made a ton of high speed rail that is super helpful to the citizens allowing for much easier travel. Also sure there are still people in poverty in China but it has objectively gotten much better. Honestly it's easy to say some of these things but let's be honest here it's not like in the US the government is spending money on infrastructure to help the poor lol. Also it would be super cool if the US could get the same high speed rail as China as that would make the need for plane flights way less and be much better for the environment. I mean think of how cool it would be to be able to take high speed rail from California to New York. 

[thechinchinsong]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

Average wealth indicators can also be deceiving; while on average wealth and quality of life have increased in China the disparity among citizens is such that millions still live in abject poverty: https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/07/26/chinas-economic-inequality-is-worse-than-americas-and-the-pandemic-hasnt-helped/#:~:text=There are more billionaires in,income inequality a core goal.

The average Chinese person could care less about inequalities if objectively the quality of life has improved dramatically over the past few decades. Its only until recently that the inequalities have even began to matter due to the speed of development and improvement in China. While inequality is certainly an issue, the roughly 10% living in poverty is a lot better than where they were before 40 or 50 years ago. It just so happens that 10% of 1.4 billion is still 140 million people, but its a similar percentage to the US I believe.

[Brooksie359]

45 minutes ago, thechinchinsong said:

The average Chinese person could care less about inequalities if objectively the quality of life has improved dramatically over the past few decades. Its only until recently that the inequalities have even began to matter due to the speed of development and improvement in China. While inequality is certainly an issue, the roughly 10% living in poverty is a lot better than where they were before 40 or 50 years ago. It just so happens that 10% of 1.4 billion is still 140 million people, but its a similar percentage to the US I believe.

Also its not like inequality isn't a thing basically everywhere.

[IPD]

Either this will be nothing more than a reverse engineering hack-job, or it will be no different than those "GPU Lottery" scams--where they dress everything up to look like 2022 tech, but it's actually a chipset from 2005.

 

It's a known quantity that western businesses that have a footprint in China end up with their products/copyrights/patents all bein infringed within 20 years and booted out of China soon after.

[Sauron]

13 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Also its not like inequality isn't a thing basically everywhere.

Ignoring the fact that it's worse in china than in most other countries, including many with a worse gdp per capita...

15 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

I mean tbf this did objectively create a ton of jobs

That's a funny way of framing what is essentially indentured servitude

[Brooksie359]

8 hours ago, Sauron said:

Ignoring the fact that it's worse in china than in most other countries, including many with a worse gdp per capita...

That's a funny way of framing what is essentially indentured servitude

What do you even mean? In what world is China using indentured servants to create their semiconductor industry? I would like to see what evidence of this there is because thar seems pretty redicilous. Also at least China can get its wealthy to pay reasonable taxes which is more than what most countries can say. 

[Sauron]

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

In what world is China using indentured servants to create their semiconductor industry?

Ever heard about foxconn? Do suicide nets ring any bells?

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Also at least China can get its wealthy to pay reasonable taxes which is more than what most countries can say. 

They could do this in a democracy. Dictators who don't have to worry about reelection are easier to corrupt. Also taxes don't mean anything if instead of redistributing the wealth you use them to increase inequality and make the ruling class wealthier and more powerful at the expense of your poorest citizens. The US is disgustingly unequal and the rich pay a pittance in taxes and SOMEHOW it still has a lower wealth disparity than China.

[IPD]

5 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

What do you even mean? In what world is China using indentured servants to create their semiconductor industry? I would like to see what evidence of this there is because thar seems pretty redicilous. Also at least China can get its wealthy to pay reasonable taxes which is more than what most countries can say. 

As Sauron noted, "suicide nets".

 

As far as "resonable taxes", negative.  If that is the impression one has of China, then one should be researching further.  Tax dodging is rampant in China.  The CCP allows this, as "tax evasion" works just as well against those who would run afoul of the CCP as it has against organized criminal masterminds (eg. Al Capone) here in the USA.

[TheReal1980]

U.S. officials order Nvidia to halt sales of top AI chips to China

https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-says-us-has-imposed-new-license-requirement-future-exports-china-2022-08-31/

 

Something tells me that this Biren chip is more or less a strait copy of the Nvidia chip and by banning China from using it they can not make it anymore? Or are these chips just rebranded Nvidia chips? I dunno, but if it is a copy they should be ashamed of themselves.

[Brooksie359]

19 hours ago, Sauron said:

Ever heard about foxconn? Do suicide nets ring any bells?

They could do this in a democracy. Dictators who don't have to worry about reelection are easier to corrupt. Also taxes don't mean anything if instead of redistributing the wealth you use them to increase inequality and make the ruling class wealthier and more powerful at the expense of your poorest citizens. The US is disgustingly unequal and the rich pay a pittance in taxes and SOMEHOW it still has a lower wealth disparity than China.

Foxconn is a Taiwan company and most of the blame can be put on the Taiwan ceo who allowed these conditions. Also at least when China's realistate market was going under due to some shady businessmen China went and forced those who caused the problems to liquidate all of their assets to fix the problem which helped insure the common people still got paid. When this happened in the US the government just balied out the people who caused the problems and those people used that government money to take big bonuses while all of the common people got screwed. I think it would be better to look at the actual state run companies that are doing these ai chips before we assume they are run the same as foxconn as again foxconn as again foxconn isn't a state run company. 

[Sauron]

54 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Foxconn is a Taiwan company and most of the blame can be put on the Taiwan ceo who allowed these conditions.

Lmao, all its major production plants (including the suicide nets ones) are in China and they're allowed to do this because there are virtually no labour protections in China. Do you seriously think this would fly in a western country? Do you think the Chinese government couldn't stop this if they wanted to? You said yourself they can just unilaterally force billionaires and corporations to do whatever, so why don't they?

1 hour ago, Brooksie359 said:

Also at least when China's realistate market was going under due to some shady businessmen China went and forced those who caused the problems to liquidate all of their assets to fix the problem which helped insure the common people still got paid.

Ah yes I'm sure it had nothing to do with members of the CCP having sizeable real estate investment

[IPD]

I'm sure it being 1 letter off from Biden is not at all coincidental and a tongue-in-cheek poke at the USA's incompetence.

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

Lmao, all its major production plants (including the suicide nets ones) are in China and they're allowed to do this because there are virtually no labour protections in China. Do you seriously think this would fly in a western country? Do you think the Chinese government couldn't stop this if they wanted to? You said yourself they can just unilaterally force billionaires and corporations to do whatever, so why don't they?

Ah yes I'm sure it had nothing to do with members of the CCP having sizeable real estate investment

Again if you looked into the foxconn issue they did actually get in trouble due to Chinese labor laws. Clearly you just don't like China. Also again that was foxconn while this is a different company. You can't blame one company for the faults of another company. How about you actually look at the company rather than make a random comparison to faxconn. 

[StDragon]

China certainly has the capacity and talent to develop their own native CPU/GPUs. It's mainly off licensed IP and some not so much. However video gaming is highly regulated in China. It's difficult to see how far they can gain market-share with little freedom in creativity. Marketing?? API / Driver development? Tuning against the latest game engines...etc.

 

If anything, native developments within China will be relegated to industrial and state use. I don't see much within the entertainment sector.