Back in late 2019, China announced plans to go completely technologically independent by the end of 2022. In a nutshell, they aim to make all government-owned systems completely powered by hardware technology both designed and created in their own country. Namely to remove any sort of reliance they have on companies such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and many others.
While we have already seen indications that their processor development is coming along well, following a report via TechSpot, we now have images of what is claimed to be China’s first home-developers 7nm GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit).
China Unveils 7nm GPGPU
Now, as the name might’ve suggested, this GPGPU has not been designed with any focus on gaming. It is, instead, intended for use in data centres and is primarily being targeted as a replacement for the current Nvidia A100 and AMD Instinct MI100 models. In terms of performance, it is claimed that it is, at the very least, comparable to those two models while potentially offering a significantly better price-to-performance ratio. Therefore, ‘Big Island’ as it is known does look to be surprisingly potent for what is effectively one of their first official consumer(ish) releases.
What Do We Think?
It should be noted that China does have something of a tendency to err towards hyperbole when it comes to the performance potential of their home-developed technology. As such, while ‘Big Island’ certainly does sound impressive, it should be taken with a grain of salt until samples are more readily available. In that regard, however, we would suspect (if not guarantee) that this technology is not going to be made internationally available and, as such, the chances of us finding out just how good this really does seem, at least at the time of writing, a little unlikely.
If this is correct though, well, it may certainly give AMD and Nvidia something to think about!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
