China says its homegrown 14nm chips rival NVIDIA's 4nm chips

In a bid to reduce its reliance on chips made abroad, China has placed significant focus on developing processors domestically. While China remains quite far behind in performance from its homegrown chips, the vice chairman of the China Semiconductor Industry Association has given us a peek behind the curtain at where the country stands in terms of performance compared to the competition.

2

According to Wei Shaojun, a new domestically made processor using a 14nm process and 18nm DRAM nodes can match the performance of NVIDIA's 4nm chips. Shaojun pitched the design of this chip as a catalyst for China to reduce its dependence on NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem, and, more specifically, on US-made chips.

DigiTimes reports that Shaojun didn't reveal many technical specifications for the chip, but did say that the 14nm logic has been bonded directly to the 18nm DRAM, resulting in a substantial increase in memory bandwidth and a significant reduction in compute latency. Additionally, Shaojun states that the system achieved a total throughput of 120 TFLOPS and a power efficiency of 2 TFLOPS per watt.

Notably, those numbers outperform NVIDIA's A100 GPUs, with Shaojun saying that the new chip design gets around the "memory wall" that causes problems for large-scale GPU deployments.