[HN Gopher] New Chinese GPU Maker Moore Threads Unveils the MTT ...
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New Chinese GPU Maker Moore Threads Unveils the MTT S60 GPU
Author : lelf
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-04-10 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.geeks3d.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.geeks3d.com)
| kldx wrote:
| Can't find anything about opencl support
| edge17 wrote:
| Who manufactures it? I think TSMC and Global Foundries both do
| 12nm?
| AbuAssar wrote:
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| i don't think so. the gpu is based on ip from Imagination
| Technologies. the company is sold to China. unless MTT didn't
| licensed the tech from Imagination
| machinekob wrote:
| As it is in China you can bet on it. There were no major china
| tech company that product something and do not steal tech from
| "west" yet (maybe there are smaller companies but no big tech
| got it yet).
| jbay808 wrote:
| DJI seems pretty big. Whose tech are they stealing?
| chaboud wrote:
| They scuffed with Autel and initially lost (but then had
| that patent invalidated), and their currently brewing fight
| is with Bell Textron for camera control.
|
| (This is just a quick googling. I have no skin in this game
| either way, but I believe that the assertion that Chinese
| companies always steal is a bigoted position to take.
| Perhaps a more accurate description would be that IP is
| most commonly held by incumbent businesses, and businesses
| in China in new segments are, necessarily, new to market.)
| chrischen wrote:
| I think the last point you make is a big one, and
| partially used to justify the Chinese industry behavior.
| Basically China is late to the game and if they follow
| Western rules they will be perpetually behind, partially
| because such rules are obviously designed to preserve
| wealth.
|
| That being said, there is still plenty of legit
| innovation coming from China and Chinese
| founders/contributors: ant framework for react, vue,
| tiktok.
|
| I don't think it's a coincidence a lot of the innovation
| is in the software sector, especially ML, which has less
| incumbent IP protections.
| randyrand wrote:
| DJI is mostly an assembler.
| daneel_w wrote:
| That's a less interesting question on the whole. But, it quite
| likely does.
| ksec wrote:
| Depends on how you define _stolen_ in this context.
|
| It uses GPU IP from IMG commonly known as PowerVR, the same
| technology powering current Apple's GPU and some Mediatek SoC.
| And IMG the company is now wholly owned by Chinese Private
| Equity Fund. The fund acquired IMG when Apple claimed to no
| longer be using any of their IP and caused their market
| valuation to drop by more than 70%.
| StopDarkPattern wrote:
| And has 100% appropriated Western hero names.
| qiskit wrote:
| Hope so. IP is rent seeking and should be abolished. Or china
| might as well demand everyone pay IP for firecrackers or paper.
|
| India, middle east, ASENA, africa, etc should steal as much IP
| as they can and develop. Just like china did. Just like the US
| did. Just like everyone did.
| dataangel wrote:
| Time limited "rent seeking" that feeds the technologists
| necessary to develop the technology. In the absence of IP
| businesses just rely on obfuscation to try to get the same
| effect, except now you don't have a patent application to
| read and can't take someone to court for stealing your years
| of research.
| t0suj4 wrote:
| Except that it is used now to drive companies out of
| business. I honestly think that it has done more damage
| than benefit.
|
| IMO If the funds used to prevent people from applying
| technology would be used to fund research instead, the
| gains would net at least zero.
|
| Right now the benefits are localized to jurisdictions that
| don't care about IP. It is impossible to measure how much
| could have been gained from businesses that never existed
| due to uncertainty arising in the jungle of IPs.
| bsder wrote:
| > I honestly think that it has done more damage than
| benefit.
|
| Then you will wind up with the Chitu/Chitubox issue where
| everybody puts encryption chips into their stuff to lock
| it down.
|
| Moving everything to the cloud wasn't just about
| developer convenience. It had the side benefit for
| companies that their software couldn't be pirated
| anymore.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Should Russia also do the same? Going back a year, would a
| similar statement apply to Russia too?
| hulitu wrote:
| No Russia shall be better than US /s
| xtian wrote:
| Yes, they should, and there's good odds they will.
| WithinReason wrote:
| The bigger question is, does it violate any patents? Not
| necessarily intentionally, but because there's only so many
| ways you can build a GPU and (almost) all of them are patented
| already. Apple themselves failed to build a GPU from the ground
| up, so it's actually difficult.
| Retric wrote:
| Many of those core GPU patients must be expiring right now.
|
| The GeForce 4 is 20 years old at this point, and many newer
| technologies are going to have significantly older patents.
| WithinReason wrote:
| That's right, but then you're building a GPU with 20 year
| old tech
| speed_spread wrote:
| Even with 20 year old design, you'd be using modern
| process which in itself should make room for significant
| improvements in scaling, frequency and power usage.
| ac29 wrote:
| Yeah, but it would still be stuck at supporting something
| like DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.3 (like the GeForce4). It
| would certainly be faster and more efficient but modern
| games and other software wouldn't run on it.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| The hardware seems separate from the software interface.
| Projects like WINE can convert DirectX calls to OpenGL or
| Vulkan calls, so it seems like a driver update could
| support a newer interface if needed.
|
| For something that isn't supported at all like
| raytracing, those API calls would have to be dropped so
| you'd get a blank screen or only a UI. But something
| polygon-based, maybe you could drop the resolution and
| polygon count and that could be translated to the newer
| API.
| Retric wrote:
| It's a question of wiggle room. Foundational patents are
| generally a lot harder to work around.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _does it use any stolen ip?_
|
| > _The bigger question is, does it violate any patents?_
|
| The former implies the latter.
|
| On the other hand if the IP isn't stolen but would still fall
| afoul of the patent then I would argue that the patent is
| wrongly provided. Patents don't exist to protect _obvious_
| implementations.
|
| I'm not a lawyer but we all know patent law is all kinds of
| fucked up.
| jhgb wrote:
| > The former implies the latter.
|
| Isn't it the reverse? Patents are one of the several forms
| of IP that one can violate, so the latter should imply the
| former.
| nynx wrote:
| Who cares? Intellectual property frankly makes no sense if you
| don't worship money.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Should all software be licensed as public domain or the
| closes available to PD in countries that don't allow public
| domain software?
| nynx wrote:
| Software is a lot less important than patents. Patents
| should not be allowed or should expire in a year.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Licenses are intellectual property too so I am a bit
| confused why the difference? Was the first statement just
| over broad? Not trying to be argumentative, just trying
| to understand your position when I am a bit tired.
| nynx wrote:
| Yeah, too broad. Licenses and copyright are a net
| negative in my view, but patents are far worse.
| causality0 wrote:
| It makes sense if you have one scheme that creates that is
| choked out by a different scheme that copies instead.
| Eventually there is no creation.
| FpUser wrote:
| Yeah, it had taken me 10 years of heavy R&D investments to
| come up with this ingenious idea that the phone can have
| rounded corners. /s
|
| Sorry but the situation now it that one can not even fart
| without breaking some patent. It is ridiculous, serves only
| big corps and keeps smaller companies under constant threat
| of litigations they can not afford. And most of the patents
| are plain obvious.
|
| I was once asked to come up with the idea of how to
| implement some XXX feature. It had taken me about 10
| minutes to "invent" the main approach and then couple of
| days to spec it down to such form that it could be given to
| subcontractor. Upon checking however we've easily found at
| least 10 patents covering this exact XXX. And this is
| everywhere.
|
| From a tool to compensate the inventors the patents system
| has become a tool to serve fat cats.
| tovej wrote:
| Patents also choke creativity, and arguably in a worse way.
| If you can't remix existing ideas, how are you supposed to
| create anything useful if you need to come up with an
| alternative scheme to every component problem that has
| already been solved but is already patented.
| pfisherman wrote:
| > Intellectual property frankly makes no sense if you don't
| worship money.
|
| Patents incentivize inventors to publicly disclose how their
| inventions work. They publicly disclose how their invention
| works and in exchange are given exclusive rights to it for a
| limited period of time.
|
| This is predicated on the idea that in the absence of such a
| system, inventors have strong incentives to not disclose how
| their inventions work, which ultimately slows the spread of
| knowledge and puts a damper on innovation.
|
| What parts of this do not make sense? How else would you
| solve the problem of incentives around disclosing how
| technologies work?
| nynx wrote:
| I agree that was the original intention, but these days
| (and possibly the entire time) it just slows innovation by
| preventing people from using technologies.
| pfisherman wrote:
| Yes, patents do hamper innovation. But this does not
| acknowledge or address the counterfactual of whether not
| having a patent system would hamper innovation to a
| greater extent.
|
| Without this the argument rests on an unstated assumption
| / magical thinking, which is not borne out by historical
| data.
|
| It's like saying that traffic lights impede the flow of
| traffic (true), without acknowledging the fact that not
| having traffic lights would result in much greater
| congestion (also true).
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Open source licensing incentivizes inventors to release
| their creations to the world to benefit humanity. Their
| copyright is protected and depending on the license that
| picked can control redistribution. Their work is protected
| against people passing their work off as their own, which
| is the intention of the patent idea.
|
| Patents do nothing like this, in fact, they cause inventors
| to invent around "protected ideas". Technology history is
| littered with examples of inefficient implementations
| become standard to avoid patent infringement. We end up
| with negative-incentives with patented ideas. In
| technology, a patent is a sure way to ensure that an idea
| is never implemented.
|
| Nothing about patents, or the idea that an idea is
| exclusive and protection worth is worth salvaging. Patents
| do not achieve their stated goal.
|
| Closed source software is inherently untrustworthy. The
| incentive to disclose ideas protected against plagiarism
| can be achieved through both public trust in our free and
| open source ecosystem without the need to enforce state
| violence because some dude dreamed an idea once and wrote a
| paper.
| pfisherman wrote:
| > Patents do not achieve their stated goal.
|
| This assertion is being made without evidence.
|
| Can you point to any modern technologically advanced
| civilizations / nations that do not have something like a
| patent system? How did those without well developed legal
| frameworks for intellectual property perform over time
| relative to others in measures of scientific output and
| economic development?
|
| What is the alternative? Wouldn't open source have been
| the default prior to the invention of patent law?
|
| I am sorry, but if you are arguing for the abolition of
| the patent system, then you need to provide some
| alternative solution for the problem the patent system
| addresses along with some sort of data / evidence that
| your solution is not vastly inferior. Otherwise the
| argument is just not very persuasive.
| ris wrote:
| Except that's not how patents are used in the 21st century.
| Patents are generally written to be as broad in scope as
| possible while disclosing as little as possible information
| on how to get said invention to _work_ (if the grantee has
| actually figured out that part at all). Registering and
| successfully defending a patent is extremely expensive and
| patent lawsuits are usually won by the party with the most
| legal resources, so arguments that it protects small
| "garden shed" inventors are largely fantasy.
| curling_grad wrote:
| Is "Moore" of the company's name is the "Moore" of Moore's law?
|
| If so, I wonder why one would name his/her company after their
| competitor's founder.
| nomay wrote:
| Yes it is, the name is a stereotypical western name, which
| alone is preferred choice for Chinese brands hoping for the
| most hype and recognition, and the phrase Moore's law is pretty
| wellknown in China for geopolitial reasons, tho most of the
| people don't know and don't care about it's backstory.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I think it is kind of cheeky.
|
| You cannot use the progress in manufactoring technology if you
| insists on creating a single (or few) threaded computer like an
| x86-machine. To really progress computing your have to go
| massively parallel.
|
| In other words. Moore needs to quit his job at Intel, and go
| and make GPUs or AI-co processors, if he still wants to see
| computing power double every 18 months.
| wincy wrote:
| Wow I thought to myself "surely Moore is dead" but he's 93,
| worth 10 billion and still kicking.
| ant6n wrote:
| Intel is coming out with gpus.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Same reason I have a $25 pair of "Tesla" brand sneakers from
| Amazon. The Chinese are as obsessed with American brands as we
| are.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Yeah - because Tesla is a classic all-American name, right?!
| hulitu wrote:
| Yes, today Tesla is a classic all-American name. I really
| doubt that many people heard about this obscure guy called
| Nikola Tesla.
| spzb wrote:
| Depends on whether they've seen S12E04 of Doctor Who
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9354212/
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Even when he was working, the majority of his output was
| as a naturalized American Citizen, on American soil.
| Tesla is as classicly an American name as Edison,
| Eisenhower, Truman or Monroe - It's an immigrant name
| from a country of immigrants.
| ascendantlogic wrote:
| I feel like it has double meaning, both with "Moore's Law" and
| "More Threads".
| caslon wrote:
| Why not?
| qeternity wrote:
| > the "Moore" of Moore's law?
|
| I don't know why I find this so funny, but "Moore's Law" is
| Gordon Moore, founder of Intel...
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Ya know, my first thought was Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth,
| and I wondered whether the GPU used Forth cores (stack
| oriented) somehow. It wasn't THAT crazy a thought, given the
| GreenArrays GA144 chip from Chuck Moore's company, with 144
| tiny Forth cores running asynchronously. Moore threads, if
| you will.
| haunter wrote:
| So it's a card equal to the performance of the 2016 Nvidia cards
| (1060/70)
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| would it have any backdoor?
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2021-supermicro/
|
| https://www.phonearena.com/news/xiaomi-browsers-have-backdoo...
| DethNinja wrote:
| Probably, but I would imagine it would be a lower priority
| compared to NIC or CPU based backdoors.
|
| Considering that China controls most of the NIC supply, I doubt
| they would be too concerned about implementing a GPU based
| backdoor.
|
| I'm surprised that we still don't have a cheap domestic Data
| Diode option. It is clear that only way to be secure is to
| never directly connect to internet.
| userbinator wrote:
| _Considering that China controls most of the NIC supply_
|
| If you're referring to Realtek, that's Taiwanese.
| kjs3 wrote:
| And Intel might have have an opinion on the NIC supply
| numbers.
| pzduniak wrote:
| Wasn't the Bloomberg story debunked?
| kyralis wrote:
| Yes, there's been effectively no evidence for any of the
| claims.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| "Debunked" as in no conclusive evidence was confirmed by 3rd
| parties. It could just as equally mean that investigators
| might not have found the needle they're looking for in the
| supply chain haystack.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| If it performs similar to a 1060 or 1070 gpu from MVIDIA and has
| an appropriate price point people who want to create a budget
| gaming computer would be an appropriate target market.
| StopDarkPattern wrote:
| kidfiji wrote:
| Mind elaborating what you mean by this?
| hrrsn wrote:
| "Moore" feels like a very appropriate name for a
| semiconductor company?
| kjs3 wrote:
| The guy is still alive.
| linuxbo wrote:
| Why did you call if Mvidia?
|
| As a proud owner of a 1070ti, I don't think that's the budget
| gaming computer.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Probably because M and N are adjacent on most keyboards
| zokier wrote:
| 6TFLOPS would be competing against 3050 (9TFLOPS), lowest
| tier current-gen GPU from nvidia.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| Importantly, it appears some of their GPU comes from Imagination
| Technology. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinas-
| little-nvidia...
| userbinator wrote:
| That company's GPU was used in a few of Intel's early Atom
| SoCs, and infamously lacked documentation and source code,
| unlike other Intel GPUs of the time. It was also dismal in
| performance and efficiency, lacking a blitter and other
| acceleration for 2D unlike nearly all PC GPUs since the
| original 8514.
|
| Ironically the source and docs were leaked many years ago,
| causing a lot of commotion in the OSS community; and more
| relevantly to this article, a Chinese underground forums
| community managed to make a decent usable driver for Windows
| XP, something neither Intel nor Imagination had.
| muizelaar wrote:
| Do you have a link to more information on that XP driver?
| userbinator wrote:
| It's been quite a few years now, I tried looking for it
| again with no success (Google's increasingly worse results
| don't help either) and I'd have to dig out the Atom box to
| check what the files were called...
|
| There were plenty of these tiny Atom PCs sold cheaply and
| they ended up in lots of semi-embedded applications, which
| might be why the community was so motivated to make a
| driver, and possibly even the initial source leak was
| because of that.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Even if relies on TSMC and IP-blocks purchased from other
| companies - it is still cool that a 2-year old startup can
| create graphics card that appears to compete with what giants
| like NVDIA and AMD are offering.
| ferminaut wrote:
| there is no price, there is no power usage, the rated fp32 is
| roughly on par with a video card that is 6 years old now.
|
| unless it's crazy efficient (at 12nm I doubt it), I wouldnt
| say it's competing with the giants.
| nwatson wrote:
| But maybe it can be sold in Russia.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Doubt it. It's either manufactured in Taiwan or by a
| Taiwanese compant in China.
| [deleted]
| FpUser wrote:
| If available and priced attractively I would very much buy
| this card. I never buy top of the line graphics cards but
| the equivalent of 1060-1070 works just fine for my needs.
| And I bet that there are enough people all over the world
| in the same position. I think it is a competition assuming
| they do not fold.
|
| Also it is a startup. If they do not go down for one or
| another reason nothing precludes them from going higher end
| given a time and favorable market.
| tyrfing wrote:
| My guess from this press release is it'll be heavily
| focused on the China domestic market, since there are a
| lot of MIC 2025 related subsidies/incentives for that.
| Note the list of compatibility with various domestic
| architectures and software.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >If available and priced attractively
|
| i'm thinking the same. the game that i play now is either
| wow or hearthstone which isn't very graphic intensive. i
| think this card if price cheaply can be use for casual
| gaming and workstation (maybe?)
| FpUser wrote:
| It would run most of the games just fine. Sure heavy
| games would not be able to run at the highest settings
| but then again not that many people would care. And the
| ones who do can always splurge some megabucks on high end
| nVidia / AMD.
| wang_li wrote:
| Except it's three or four generations behind in performance.
| The article compares it to a 1060 from Nvidia.
| neogodless wrote:
| According to Steam Survey, the 1060 is the most popular GPU
| in use today.
| tromp wrote:
| to a GeForce GTX 1070 in fact, 2 generations behind the
| current RTX 3070. All 3 generations are compared in this
| video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Iq6pFUdvE
| epolanski wrote:
| A 1070 though was slower or on par to a 980ti which was
| released 7 years ago.
| phkahler wrote:
| Half of that is because it's on a 12nm node.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| > can create graphics card that appears to compete with what
| giants like NVDIA and AMD are offering.
|
| uh ... no. six teraflops is a card from 2017.
| nottorp wrote:
| But the market is how it is. I'm on an 1050Ti. Even this
| would be an upgrade if price/power consumption is right.
|
| I have strong doubts about power consumption though.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| well, if you want to say "competes with 2017 nvidia,"
| that i could agree with
|
| but i basically guarantee that they keep falling further
| and further behind.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| The entire GPU IP is licensed from Imagination. This is like
| Google making their Tensor phone chip and claiming it's novel
| when in reality everything is licensed from someone else and
| all they had to do was integrate it together.
| WithinReason wrote:
| There's another Chinese GPU coming based on that design:
|
| https://videocardz.com/newz/innosilicon-graphics-cards-based...
| ralph84 wrote:
| What rationale did the UK government use when approving
| Imagination being sold to a private equity firm controlled by
| the Chinese government?
| philjohn wrote:
| None whatsoever - they don't care.
| swarnie wrote:
| Oh trust me, they do care if your company is important
| enough.
|
| The sale of a company I'm deeply invested in has been
| dragging on through reviews from the UK MOD for most of a
| year.
|
| This place had revenues of 125m freedom bucks last year,
| its hardly a big player.
| WithinReason wrote:
| They do:
|
| https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-8196445
| /...
| stupidcar wrote:
| Supposedly because at the time of the acquisition, "Canyon
| Bridge was licensed and regulated by US law." but "Since then
| it has moved its headquarters to the Cayman Islands and as
| such is no longer a US-controlled entity." [1]. Although that
| sounds pretty flimsy. I suspect, given it happened in 2017,
| it was judged politically unwise to block a Chinese state
| investor when the UK was looking to increase global trade
| post-Brexit.
|
| Eventually it seems the UK gov woke up and blocked a Chinese
| attempt to take over the board and move the company to
| China[2]. Now it seems there's a plan to IPO again in London
| or Nasdaq[3] so the Chinese owners can exit.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52275201 [2] https://
| www.ft.com/content/654a6d68-ef26-47b2-9da5-9029c570f... [3] h
| ttps://www.ft.com/content/e0c48d30-866d-4efd-9d78-21e49d366..
| .
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| 6 teraflops is on par with the NVidia Titan V, from 2017
| calin2k wrote:
| can I has more threads for my gamez
| antattack wrote:
| MTT S60 has a 6-pin power connector so it's safe to assume that
| power consumption is under 150W (75W PCI + 75W connector). That
| would be on par with GTX 1070 but hopefully it's lower due to
| 12nm vs 16nm process.
| jonkoops wrote:
| Interesting, are the Linux drivers upstreamed or is this another
| proprietary GPU driver?
| casta wrote:
| It looks like Imagination is trying to land their user space
| drivers for Rogue GPUs in mesa3d:
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15...
|
| In parallel, they're working on upstreaming the kernel bits
| too:
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/frankbinns/powervr/-/tree/pow...
|
| Their ISA is here: http://cdn.imgtec.com/sdk-
| documentation/PowerVR+Instruction+...
| [deleted]
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