The US administration has introduced new restrictions on the sale to Russia and China of high-performance GPUs for supercomputing and artificial intelligence.
GPU makers Nvidia and AMD have said they are now required by the government to have export licenses to sell two types of high-performance chips for server systems. This requirement should limit the use of semiconductors for military purposes by China and Russia.
GPUs were originally developed for rendering images in video games, but they are used for the largest supercomputers, which are used to recognize speech and objects in photographs. Supercomputers are also being used to develop weapons and gather intelligence.
Other companies have received similar letters in recent weeks, informing them that high-tech exports to China have been restricted.
Nvidia no longer works with the Russian Federation, but supplies goods to the Chinese market. AMD announced that the new restrictions apply to sales in the Russian Federation and relate to one of the highest performance accelerators MI250. Nvidia announced that the measures will affect the supply of A100 and H100 accelerators. In April, the company introduced the next-generation Hopper architecture and computing platform based on the new NVIDIA H100 GPU with 80 billion transistors and tensor cores, Transformer Engine and NVLink interface for multiple performance boosts, as well as the enterprise-level DGX H100 system based on H100 chips and superchip Grace Hopper is a 144-core 500W processor with 1TB/s memory bandwidth for massive AI and HPC projects.
On July 1, Nvidia decided to stop renewing and selling licenses in the Russian Federation. The Nvidia Grid system is used to separate the cores on a server graphics card so that cloud gaming service providers can use one graphics card on multiple virtual machines at once.
The manufacturer's decision may lead to higher prices for the services of companies that use the Nvidia Grid system. Problems may also begin in the operation of supercomputers based on Nvidia components from Sberbank, Yandex and MTS.
In April, the Zelenograd enterprise Mikron announced that it plans to increase the production of silicon wafers for the production of 180–90 nm chips from 3,000 to 6,000 per month by 2025. However, this will require an investment of 10 billion rubles. This statement was made after the EU introduced a new package of sanctions that prohibit the supply of materials for the production of microcircuits, in particular silicon, to the Russian Federation.
Russia has its own silicon production, but it is suitable only for special-purpose technologies.
In May, it was reported that exports of Chinese technology to Russia had fallen sharply since March following the entry into force of US sanctions. Prior to this, the United States threatened Chinese Huawei with new sanctions for expanding cooperation with Russia.
bbabo.Net