Tech war: Nvidia’s move to curb use of CUDA exposes China’s weak link in chip software
- CUDA is a computing platform developed by Nvidia, which allows its GPU users to make best use of its chips in artificial intelligence (AI) and other applications
- The move may potentially affect some Chinese GPU makers’ ability to use CUDA code with their hardware, according to several Chinese developers
Nvidia’s recent warning to developers about running its CUDA software, a programming toolkit, on third-party graphic processing units (GPUs) has exposed another weak link in China’s quest for chip self-sufficiency: its dependence on the US chip giant’s software.
CUDA is a computing platform developed by Nvidia, which allows its GPU users to make best use of its chips in artificial intelligence (AI) and other applications.
Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the world’s leading developers of computer central processing units, have also supported an open-source software project that enables their GPUs to run on CUDA.
Nvidia recently added a warning to its end-user license agreement for CUDA 11.6, requesting developers not to run CUDA on third-party GPUs via “translation layers”- software that converts one set of codes into another - on non-Nvidia hardware systems. It was the first time Nvidia has included such an explicit warning in the downloaded version of CUDA, according to a report by Tom’s Hardware on Tuesday.
The move may potentially affect some Chinese GPU makers’ ability to use CUDA code in their hardware, according to several Chinese developers.
After Washington restricted exports of Nvidia’s advanced GPUs to China, Chinese GPU companies have been working to develop their own alternatives, relying on CUDA as one of the software tools to improve GPU performance.
