They have done a bit of this. SMIC is basically operating off of a cloned TSMC N7 node that they have since iterated on to get to a 5nm class node.

But its still such a complex sort of beast.

Even if you had 'ai tools' guessing at component blocks on evaluation you would have to have some evaluation of the result.

And, thats assuming NVDA hasn't pulled a Masatoshi Shima type play on their designs (i.e. complex traps that could require lots of analysis to determine if they are real or fake)

Im not sure how much of a speedup even modern tooling/workflow could do reliably.

Even then,

The elephant in the room is that China is working on their own AI accelerators/etc, so while there can be benefit from -studying- the existing designs, however I think they do not want to clone regardless.

Oh, absolutely. Straight up soviet style cloning of masks makes no sense for multitude of reasons. In addition to what you've said, China isn't banned from N7 class Nvidia architectures so could just buy those on the open market.

They definitely are using Nvidia. Part of deepseek's special sauce was using an "undocumented" ptx instruction to get a cute microoptimization with the memory hierarchy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iEda8_Mvvo4

Did they originally say it was a grain of rice Ethernet module?

I thought it was supposed to be an incredibly tiny micro sitting on the bmc's boot flash to break inject vulnerabilities.

I recall, at the time Bloomberg and their source were taking about tiny chip on the bmc that was masking as a resistor.

However they did not produce any concrete evidence, citing NDA between that security company and their client.

Even that makes little sense.

A malicious modification to the flash content would leave no physical evidence…

I thought the point was an extra chip in the place of a pull up resistor or something that would edit the firmware image as it made its way across the bus, so you wouldn't see the modifications even if you pulled the flash chip and read it out manually, and would also be persistent across flash updates.

Well, also had other pen testers come forward saying that they had found implants on supermicro servers and had talked to federal authorities who had said it was a known relatively large issue they were trying to get a handle on while keeping it under wraps.

And if it were posted to move the market, that would have been about the most cut and dry SEC violation possible, posted at a time when the federal government still enforced such things.

They can given enough time.

But there's a distinct time/value of investment equation with the current AI boom. The jury is at best still out on what that equation is for the goals of capital (it's increasingly looking like there's no moat), but if you're a national government trying to encourage local bleeding edge expertise in new fields like this it's quite a bit more clear.

AMD has previously used neural net predictors.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~lin/papers/tocs02.pdf

Depends on the field. One of the most influential papers in economics was found to be incorrectly constructed with signs pointing to just straight up fraud. Basically it didn't include data that it said it did, which when included reverses the conclusion. Then when the authors were called out, they doubled down offering up the explanation that the conclusion again reverses if you add a third set of cherry picked data, followed by dragging the person calling them out through the mud in a NY Times opinion piece.

Those authors are still extremely prestigious professors in the field, and have suffered essentially no penalty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt

All due respect this is by no means one of the most influential papers in economics.

It literally crushed economies and guided international monetary policy for at least a decade.

There's a reason why it's one of the only economic papers that has its own wiki page.

When I point out that Apple listened to the Chinese government and removed apps that protestors were using to communicate during the Hong Kong protests, they seem to get it.

They removed VPNs at the request of the Russian government too (they have no operations in Russia). They are actively participating in government censorship.

Or diode matrix ROMs were pretty popular as well.

Electrically, essentially what happens in most mask ROMs, but as a circuit board that allowed you to solder in a diode or not in each bit location in order to specify a 1 or a 0.

That would be the "hardwired" option.

Eh, it was considered user programmable and generally came blank from the vendor.