00:00So Isaac, Chinese tech giant Huawei showcased its new SuperPod AI computing system at MWC
00:07in Barcelona this week, the first time that that system has been shown outside of China.
00:13How does it compare with, say, the current industry leader, NVIDIA's, offerings in that
00:18same space?
00:19So the most direct comparison that has been made between Huawei's SuperPod systems and
00:26an American competitor product is NVIDIA's NVL72, which essentially also aimed to integrate
00:36many of NVIDIA's chips together into a single rack that acts like a single computer.
00:42We're talking about 72 GPUs from NVIDIA versus 384 GPUs from Huawei.
00:49What's particularly interesting about this product is a technology called UB Mesh that
00:54they're advertising, which they say will allow all 8,000 of those chips to act like a single
00:59computer.
01:00If that works out, it would be a game changer.
01:03But I think this is something where we need to really see it in practice, see it in action
01:08before we can trust.
01:10I think it's very interesting that they are debuting SuperPod at MWC because it does signal
01:17that they intend to sell this product to a global audience.
01:20Well, given the big claims that Huawei is making about this system, does NVIDIA have anything
01:26to worry about?
01:27In the grand scheme of things, today, I don't think NVIDIA has much to worry about from the
01:33Atlas 950.
01:34The reason I'm skeptical is because companies make a lot of claims in this space, and I
01:39think you really need to validate them before trusting.
01:45You really need to look for evidence, for benchmarks, for customers who have used the system and
01:52said, yes, we agree with these marketing claims.
01:55This is actually how well it performs.
01:57The chips in this system are supposedly made by SMIC, or SMIC, which is China's leading chip
02:03maker.
02:04Based on what we know about these chips, how does SMIC's leading technology compare to, say,
02:10TSMC at this point?
02:11Yeah, so honestly, I think we're still really waiting to see the full results of these latest
02:18GPUs fabricated at SMIC, designed by Huawei Ascend.
02:22I don't think we have quite enough evidence yet to evaluate how good of a job Huawei and
02:30SMIC have done with this latest chip.
02:32Personally, I'm in a wait-to-see evidence before officially confirming that this is SMIC.
02:37One of the surprising stories of the past two years, essentially, was that it turned out
02:44that Huawei's last generation chip, the Ascend 910B and then Ascend 910C, those compute die
02:52were actually fabricated primarily, if not entirely, at TSMC through a shell company situation.
02:58While it's very likely the case that that is not an option for Huawei this time around,
03:05I think this is an area where we really want to see a teardown and confirm that this chip
03:12is, in fact, fabricated by SMIC, and if so, exactly which process node it's fabricated on.
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