The extent to which TPU architecture is built for the purpose also doesn't happen in a single design generation. Ironwood is the seventh generation of TPU, and that matters a lot.
This was a nice breakdown. I always feel most TPU articles skip over the practical parts. This one actually connects the concepts in a way that clicks.
I'm surprised the perspective of China making TPUs at scale in a couple of years is not bigger news. It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
Manufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans.
There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.
Lot of retired fab folks in the Austin area if you needed to spin up a local fab. It's really not a dark art, there are plenty of folks that have experience in the industry.
This is sort of like saying there are lots of kids in the local community college shop class if you want to spin up an F1 team.
The knowledge of making 2008 era chips is not a gating factor for getting a handful of atoms to function as a transistor in current SOTA chips. There are probably 100 people on earth who know how to do this, and the majority of them are in Taiwan.
Again, China has literally stolen the plans for EUV lithography, years ago, and still cannot get it to work. Even Samsung and Intel, using the same machines as TSMC, cannot match what they are doing.
It's a dark art in the most literal sense.
Nevermind that new these cutting edge fabs cost ~$50 Billion each.
I've always wondered. If you have fuck you money, wouldn't it be possible to build GPUs to do LLM matmul with 2008 technology. Again, assuming energy costs / cooling costs don't matter.
Energy, cooling, and how much of the building you're taking up do matter. They matter less and in a more manageable way for hyperscalers that have a long established resource management practice in lots of big data centers because they can phase in new technologies as they phase out the old. But it's a lot more daunting to think about building a data center big enough to compete with one full of Blackwell systems there are more than 10 times more performant per watt and per square foot.
Building the clean rooms at this scale is a limitation in itself. Just getting the factory setup to and the machines put in so they don't generate particulate matter in operation is an art that compares in difficulty to making the chips themselves.
The mask shops at TSMC and Samsung kind of are a dark art. It's one of the interesting things about the contract manufacturing business in chips. It's not just a matter of having access to state of the art equipment.
For China there is no plan B for semiconductor manufacturing. Invading Taiwan would be a dice roll and the consequences would be severe. They will create their own SOTA semiconductor industry. Same goes for their military.
The question is when? Does that come in time to deflate the US tech stock bubble? Or will the bubble start to level out and reality catch up, or will the market crash for another reason beforehand?
China has their own fabs. They are behind TSMC in terms of technology, but that doesn't mean they don't have fabs. They're currently ~7nm AFAIK. That's behind TSMC, but also not useless. They are obviously trying hard to catch up. I don't think we should just imagine that they never will. China has a lot of smart engineers and they know how strategically important chip manufacturing is.
This is like this funny idea people had in the early 2000s that China would continue to manufacture most US technology but they could never design their own competitive tech. Why would anyone think that?
Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact. If they do invade Taiwan (please God no), it would be a horrible bloodbath. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands and probably relentless bombing. Taiwan would likely destroy its own fabs to avoid them being taken. It would be sad and horrible.
>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans
I assume the nuclear reactors are to power the data centers using the new chips. There have been a few mentions on HN about the US being very behind in building enough power plants to run LLM workloads
Thankfully LLMs are a dead end, so nobody will make it to AGI by just throwing more electricity at the problem. Now if we could only have a new AI winter we could postpone the end of mankind as the dominant species on earth by another couple of decades.
I mean they have the power grid to run TPUs at 10x the scale of USA.
About students, have you seen the microelectronic labs in American universities lately? A huge chunk are Chinese already. Same with some of the top AI labs.
The extent to which TPU architecture is built for the purpose also doesn't happen in a single design generation. Ironwood is the seventh generation of TPU, and that matters a lot.
The Scaling ML textbook also has an excellent section on TPUs. https://jax-ml.github.io/scaling-book/tpus/
Are TPUs still stuck to their weird Google bucket thing when using GCP? I hated that.
This was a nice breakdown. I always feel most TPU articles skip over the practical parts. This one actually connects the concepts in a way that clicks.
I'm surprised the perspective of China making TPUs at scale in a couple of years is not bigger news. It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
The TPUv4 and TPUv6 docs were stolen by a Chinese national in 2022/2023: https://www.cyberhaven.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-the-goo... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/superseding-indictment-charge...
And that's just 1 guy that got caught. Who knows how many other cases were there.
A Chinese startup is already making clusters of TPUs and has revenue https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3334244/ai-start-...
Manufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans.
There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.
Lot of retired fab folks in the Austin area if you needed to spin up a local fab. It's really not a dark art, there are plenty of folks that have experience in the industry.
This is sort of like saying there are lots of kids in the local community college shop class if you want to spin up an F1 team.
The knowledge of making 2008 era chips is not a gating factor for getting a handful of atoms to function as a transistor in current SOTA chips. There are probably 100 people on earth who know how to do this, and the majority of them are in Taiwan.
Again, China has literally stolen the plans for EUV lithography, years ago, and still cannot get it to work. Even Samsung and Intel, using the same machines as TSMC, cannot match what they are doing.
It's a dark art in the most literal sense.
Nevermind that new these cutting edge fabs cost ~$50 Billion each.
I've always wondered. If you have fuck you money, wouldn't it be possible to build GPUs to do LLM matmul with 2008 technology. Again, assuming energy costs / cooling costs don't matter.
IIRC people have gotten LLMs to run on '80s hardware. Inference isn't overly compute heavy.
The killer really is training, which is insanely compute intensive and really only recently hardware practical on the scale needed.
Energy, cooling, and how much of the building you're taking up do matter. They matter less and in a more manageable way for hyperscalers that have a long established resource management practice in lots of big data centers because they can phase in new technologies as they phase out the old. But it's a lot more daunting to think about building a data center big enough to compete with one full of Blackwell systems there are more than 10 times more performant per watt and per square foot.
Building the clean rooms at this scale is a limitation in itself. Just getting the factory setup to and the machines put in so they don't generate particulate matter in operation is an art that compares in difficulty to making the chips themselves.
The mask shops at TSMC and Samsung kind of are a dark art. It's one of the interesting things about the contract manufacturing business in chips. It's not just a matter of having access to state of the art equipment.
For China there is no plan B for semiconductor manufacturing. Invading Taiwan would be a dice roll and the consequences would be severe. They will create their own SOTA semiconductor industry. Same goes for their military.
The question is when? Does that come in time to deflate the US tech stock bubble? Or will the bubble start to level out and reality catch up, or will the market crash for another reason beforehand?
China has their own fabs. They are behind TSMC in terms of technology, but that doesn't mean they don't have fabs. They're currently ~7nm AFAIK. That's behind TSMC, but also not useless. They are obviously trying hard to catch up. I don't think we should just imagine that they never will. China has a lot of smart engineers and they know how strategically important chip manufacturing is.
This is like this funny idea people had in the early 2000s that China would continue to manufacture most US technology but they could never design their own competitive tech. Why would anyone think that?
Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact. If they do invade Taiwan (please God no), it would be a horrible bloodbath. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands and probably relentless bombing. Taiwan would likely destroy its own fabs to avoid them being taken. It would be sad and horrible.
>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans
I assume the nuclear reactors are to power the data centers using the new chips. There have been a few mentions on HN about the US being very behind in building enough power plants to run LLM workloads
Thankfully LLMs are a dead end, so nobody will make it to AGI by just throwing more electricity at the problem. Now if we could only have a new AI winter we could postpone the end of mankind as the dominant species on earth by another couple of decades.
Nuclear power is what they are talking about, not weapons.
I mean they have the power grid to run TPUs at 10x the scale of USA.
About students, have you seen the microelectronic labs in American universities lately? A huge chunk are Chinese already. Same with some of the top AI labs.