
Japanese CPU threatens to make Nvidia, Intel and AMD obsolete in HPC market - fraqed
https://www.techradar.com/news/little-known-japanese-cpu-threatens-to-make-nvidia-intel-and-amd-obsolete-in-hpc-market
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m463
The headline reminds me of 5th generation computers, which were supposed to
supplant all current-generation computing of the time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer)

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ksec
I read the headline and I thought it is going to be Fujitsu A64FX. And it is,
but the article completely lack any detail info.

Anandtech [1] has a basic run down of features. The most important thing was
SVE 512bit SIMD, which I believe was developed together with ARM. And as far
as I am aware it seems to be the only commercial chip that has SVE.

Unfortunately knowing the Japanese culture and Fujitsu's intention with A64FX
I dont think it will bring any competition to Intel / AMD or Nvidia.

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15169/a-success-on-arm-for-
hp...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15169/a-success-on-arm-for-hpc-we-found-
a-fujitsu-a64fx-wafer)

~~~
saltedonion
So what did Fujitsu do to innovate here? Partner with arm on design? Who
manufactured it?

After the us tries to cut off Huaweis chip supplies, can Huawei come up with
something similar?

~~~
to11mtm
My guess would be that at minimum they were involved with the SIMD modules.

At most, they designed the entire CPU from the ground up. I'm guessing it's
somewhere in between; this CPU provides equivalent extensions to what Fujitsu
gave in their SPARC series. If other parts of ARM's core IP were suitable for
other pieces they probably used that.

> Who manufactured it?

Based on Wikipedia, probably TSMC.

> After the us tries to cut off Huaweis chip supplies, can Huawei come up with
> something similar?

(Short answer at the bottom, I went on quite the tangent here :)

Well let's talk about what that would mean right now.

HiSilicon is a fabless Semiconductor design company fully owned by Huawei. If
you look at the comparison of ARMv8-A cores out there [0], thankfully both
HiSilicon and Fujitsu's offerings are grouped together at the bottom (at least
for me as I write this.)

That said, what benchmarks I found indicated that HiSilicon's CPU doesn't seem
to compete, especially with wider workloads (Fujitsu can do 512-bit vectors, I
think HiSilicon is limited to 128 on these.)

I'm assuming that their setups are being pieced together more thoughtfully;
one should note HS also makes AI Processors that are tailored separately for
inference and training.

As far as making a more proper 'server' GP core, if they're not playing dirty
there's some catch-up to be done, but there's nothing stopping the State from
stepping in and throwing more resources at the problem. While having multiple
design teams working on the same parts of a CPU probably won't get an
implementation done any faster, having multiple designs in parallel when
you're trying to catch up to the latest tech may lead to better insight and
options down the road; case in point would be Netburst vs Evolved P6 arch.

Really, China's bigger problem at the moment is Fab technology; They have HSMC
which can do 7nm, but I don't know at what kind of volume, and whether it's a
bulk process or something with all the fancy tech you'd need to make a server
cpu at a fast clock rate.

There's a few things they're probably lacking in that area; just getting
started into process tech research (in the vein of SOI, copper interconnects,
etc.) but that will probably ramp up quickly.

Optics are another huge factor; I'm starting to realize that the increase in
higher-quality Camera glass from China in the last few years is no
coincidence. Let's look at the main Lithography EQ manufacturers out there:

\- Canon \- Nikon \- Ultratech \- ASML

You can see that two of ASMLs biggest competitors also happen to be the two
biggest/best mass producers of Glass out there. Notice Samsung isn't on the
list; AFAIK they still get their equipment from ASML, although my
understanding is it's some level of 'partnership.' I'm guessing they trade
glass, since Samsung is pretty good at that.

To wit: Samsung recently got caught with their hand in ASML's source code
cookie jar. I was immediately reminded of a post on HN [1] where ASML's
testing scheme is described; If someone has a spare machine and a copy of the
source code, they can start playing with it, possibly introducing their own
fixes to optimize yields, either for their use case or for more general cases
that for reasons described in aforementioned post aren't incorporated into
ASML's codebase.

Anywho, went on a tangent there, but it shows how competitive the industry is
even without political pressures at play. But it also shows that it's
-possible- that with the right pieces China could make incremental
improvements to what they already have while they work on the next big thing.

Short Answer:

I think China wants to be caught up sometime between 2023 and 2025 for fabs,
but everyone else is trying to push it back to 2025-2030.

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ARMv8-A_cores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ARMv8-A_cores)

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18463181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18463181)

~~~
saltedonion
The comment you referenced about ASML said they have no tests? Why would tests
not be possible?

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jacques_chester
Also of interest, they'll be running a specialised kernel:
[https://github.com/RIKEN-SysSoft/mckernel](https://github.com/RIKEN-
SysSoft/mckernel)

