First gaming review of GeForce RTX 4080 - up to 19% faster than GeForce RTX 3090 Ti

Two days left before the sales of GeForce RTX 4080 graphics gas pedal on Ada Lovelace architecture, and Chinese enthusiasts already started to publish first reviews of novelty in circumvention of NVIDIA ban.
For example, performance data was shared by Big Hardware Player user on Bilibili platform.
Previously, he was one of the first to publish reviews GeForce RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti generation Ampere.Image source: NVIDIAChinese enthusiast did not specify the manufacturer tested GeForce RTX 4080, but pointed out that the graphics card is equipped with a dual BIOS.
In one case, the maximum TDP of the novelty is set at a nominal value of 320 watts.
The second firmware increases the maximum TDP of the graphics card to 450W.
The second BIOS the Chinese enthusiast used to test the power efficiency.
Source images here and below: Bilibili / Big Hardware PlayerThe GeForce RTX 4080's gaming tests used Forza Horizon 5, Cyberpunk 2077, Borderland 3, Total War Troy and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Below is the average performance of the new gas pedal against the GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 3090 Ti.
In gaming benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 4080 averaged 19% faster than the GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and about 23% slower than the GeForce RTX 4090.
Note that GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 3090 Ti were tested on a DDR5-6800 PC, whereas GeForce RTX 4080 were tested on a DDR5-6200 system.
However, in both cases the test platform was based on the flagship Intel Core i9-13900K processor.
GeForce RTX 4080 in Cyberpunk 2077 GeForce RTX 4080 in Forza Horizon 5 GeForce RTX 4080 in Shadow of the Tomb Raider In 3DMark the new GeForce RTX 4080 is 25% faster than GeForce RTX 3090 Ti and 21% slower than the new flagship GeForce RTX 40 series.
Performance of GeForce RTX 4080 in synthetic 3DMark testsThe most interesting detail of an early review of GeForce RTX 4080 graphics gas pedal were the results of energy efficiency measurements.
For this test Chinese reviewer used BIOS with inflated to 450W TDP value.
Power consumption of GeForce RTX 4080 in synthetic benchmarksTests showed that the card is close to its maximum performance already at 280W.
GeForce RTX 4080 gaming power consumptionGaming power consumption of GeForce RTX 4080 can be reduced even further, to nearly 260W.
Increased power consumption does not bring gas pedal significant performance boost, at least in tests in 4K resolution.Video review of GeForce RTX 4080 by Chinese enthusiast can be found here.
The video card will go on sale on November 16.

Chip imports to China fell markedly in 2022 amid US sanctions, especially in October

Chip imports to China fell by more than 13% from January to October, according to Chinese customs, as the world's largest semiconductor market is affected by the growing trade standoff between the US and the Middle Kingdom as well as a general economic slowdown.
Source image: TSMSZThe first 10 months of the year, China imported 458 billion integrated circuits, which is 13.2% less than the 527.9 billion chips imported into the country in the same period last year.
In October the decline in imports markedly accelerated - during the first 9 months of decline was an average of only 12.8%.Decrease in supply volumes is also due to the fact that in 2021 the import of integrated circuits took off - during the first 10 months of growth then was 21.2% year-on-year, so it is difficult to keep up with these figures now.
But despite the decline in the volume of imports, higher prices for chips led to an increase in the value of supplies during this period by 1.3%, leaving $351.2 billion.
In general, chips have long been a major item of imports to China, at one time by the value of purchases such imports overtook crude oil and consumer goods.
Nevertheless, it began to decline at the beginning of this year, the first year-on-year decline since 2020.
The drop in imports in October was 13.7% (to 41.1 billion) compared to October 2021.
By comparison, 47.6 billion chips were imported in September.
The accelerated decline in purchases comes amid Washington's strengthening of export controls and coincides with a global decline in demand for semiconductors as a whole.Source image: TSMC7 October, the Bureau of Industry and Security - a unit of the U.S.
Department of Commerce announced a series of measures to control technology exports to China aimed at weakening the Chinese high-performance semiconductor sector - not only exports to the Middle Kingdom chips themselves, but also equipment for their manufacture, special permits for the production of semiconductors, and a number of other measures.
At the same time, the value of sold year-on-year increased by 6.2%.
The problem may be partly related to the outbreak of coronavirus in the country - due to sanitary restrictions, the ability to fulfill orders was also affected.

Intel has released a special gold version of Arc A750 Limited Edition for China

Intel has introduced a special version of Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics card for Chinese market.
The new graphics card differs from the standard reference version Limited Edition only with minor cosmetic changes.
On the casing of its cooling system with gold paint added lion picture.Image source: IntelThe card comes in a slightly differently designed in the product packaging.
The general appearance is preserved, but different inscriptions and markings are applied to the package also painted in gold.Technically Arc A750 China Limited Edition from the normal version does not differ.
There is no additional overclocking of the graphics processor or memory.
At the heart of the gas pedal uses the ACM-G10 GPU with 28 Xe cores, 28 ray tracing blocks and 480 XMX matrix engines.
Claimed GPU frequency is 2050 MHz.
Intel Arc A750 has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory with 16 GHz 16Gb/s effective bandwidth, 256-bit bus bandwidth, and 512 GB/s throughput.
The power consumption index of the graphics card is 225 W.Soon the novelty will be available in Chinese retail, as well as at various online venues.
It is also important to note that the Arc A750 China Limited Edition is priced the same as the regular version - 2,499 yuan (about $344).

Taiwan is ready to assist in the implementation of U.S.sanctions against China

The specifics of U.S.
export control requirements are such that authorities may prohibit third countries to cooperate with undesirable counterparties, and in the case of new sanctions against China, U.S.
partners may once again drag Taiwan into the orbit of their interests.
The island's authorities have already expressed their willingness to help in every way possible to comply with the new U.S.
requirements.Source image: UMCWe remind that the U.S.
lawmakers ended the week by adopting a new package of sanctions against China.
It restricts the supply to China of components for supercomputers of certain performance, equipment for the production of a certain range of chips, as well as components for the creation of such equipment.
The list of contractors with dubious reputation includes 31 Chinese companies that the U.S.
suspects of using U.S.-origin technology and products for the needs of the Chinese defense industry.
Companies have 60 days to pass an audit by U.S.
inspectors, and if the latter are not admitted to the industrial facilities of interest, the company will finally be put on the sanctions list.Some market participants now express concern that the activities of major Chinese civilian sector companies - Alibaba and ByteDance, for example - may fall under restrictions by the supercomputer performance criterion.
The latter is the owner of the globally popular TikTok service, creating server systems that can approach the \"sanctioned\" ones in terms of their parameters.
In fact, the U.S.
authorities want to prevent the appearance in China of supercomputers capable of delivering more than 100 petaflops of computing power with a volume of less than 1178 cubic meters.
On the one hand, many civilian systems that will be created in China in the next couple of years can fall under this criterion.
On the other hand, designers will have an incentive to be flexible in the layout of such systems.
For example, the system could be broken down into several smaller nodes that would be separated geographically, but would communicate through a high-speed optical interface.Expressing solidarity with U.S.
authorities, Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs officials have shown a willingness to follow the legal requirements of those countries where the headquarters of foreign customers working with Taiwanese companies are located.
According to Taiwanese officials, following the law is very important.
The biggest contract manufacturers of semiconductor components in Taiwan are TSMC and UMC.
They are not able to make personal statements on this issue yet as they are preparing to publish their quarterly reports.
However, the example with the U.S.
sanctions against Huawei under President Donald Trump shows that TSMC will not hesitate to limit the access of Chinese customers to its services in accordance with the new U.S.
requirements.
Next week, Taiwan's Minister of Economy Wang Mei-hua will travel to the U.S.
to meet with major customers of Taiwanese companies and discuss, among other things, the impact of geopolitical processes on business.

Computing gpu ban could hurt China, but give local companies a chance

Shortly after it became known that the US had imposed restrictions on the supply of advanced AMD and NVIDIA computing gas pedals to China and Russia, NVIDIA reported that the US government has allowed it to continue developing H100 gas pedals in China and continue supplying A100 gas pedals to its US customers with data centers in China until 1 March 2023.
Still, the new restrictions have raised questions about the long-term prospects of the graphics chip industry in China.Image source: DigiTimesTalking about the prospects of the graphics processor market in China, Jing Zhu, vice president of the China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA), noted in an interview with Ijiwei that the latest restrictions imposed on graphics chip imports are an extension of earlier US attempts to hit the Chinese high performance computing industry.After the 2015 launch of Tianhe 1 and Tianhe supercomputer The sanctions also affected Intel, which was subsequently banned from supplying Xeon processors for the Tianhe 2 upgrade.
In subsequent years, the U.S.
continued to pursue sanctions policies against Chinese supercomputer companies, including other branches of the National Supercomputer Center.Zhu noted that sanctioned companies had to obtain chips capable of performing double-precision (FP64) calculations through other channels, such as front firms.
Zhu suggested that NVIDIA and AMD could have offered dedicated GPUs without FP64 support in the Chinese market to circumvent the ban, but they still would have faced additional costs.
Taiwanese and Chinese suppliers of data center peripherals, including motherboard controllers and power management chips, will also reportedly be affected by the new restrictions.China is making efforts to bridge the gap with leading firms in the GPU market.
Several new companies have emerged here in recent years, trying to compete with the leaders like AMD and NVIDIA.
Among them are Moore Threads and Biren Technology, created by former NVIDIA employees.Founded in 2016, Jingjia Microelectronics (Jingjia Micro) has developed its own MUSA architecture, which it uses in its MTT S60 desktop graphics cards and MTT S2000 server-focused gas pedals.
In 2021, Jingjia Micro was placed on the U.S.
Department of Commerce's Entity List, and in 2022 it released two versions of the JM9 GPUs, whose performance received mixed reviews from experts.In turn, Biren Technology has created the BR100 AI gas pedal, which is said to outperform NVIDIA A100 in several areas, from computer vision to natural language processing.

Semiconductor equipment shipments from South Korea to China fell by half

Compared with the same period last year, exports of South Korean microchip equipment to the Middle Kingdom in the first half of the year fell by 51.89%.
Experts do not rule out the possibility that sales will continue to fall, and at the initiative of China itself.Image source: L N/unsplash.comAccording to the Korean Customs Service, released on August 9, total exports of semiconductor equipment to China amounted to $694.8 million in the first half of the year - a 51.89% decrease compared with the first half of 2021.
According to Business Korea magazine, China is the most important market for South Korean producers of the equipment, which accounted for 60% of South Korea's exports of the relevant \"tools\", primarily sent to Samsung Electronics and SK hynix plants located in China.
In addition, Chinese companies such as YMTC, CXMT and SMIC are considering to buy South Korean solutions for the semiconductor industry in response to supply restrictions by the U.S.
Experts explain the drop in exports by increasing Chinese investment in its own semiconductor industry amid growing pressure from the United States.
Industry sources suggest that exports may drop even more due to Korea's joining the Chip 4 alliance, which consists mostly of states unfriendly to China.
It is expected that Chinese authorities themselves may limit export of equipment to South Korean memory chip plants in China by encouraging Chinese enterprises to stop using South Korean equipment for development and production of the equipment in the country itself.We know that the U.S.
has already introduced restrictions on cooperation with the Celestial Empire in the semiconductor industry, limiting inter alia access to subsidies for manufacturers planning to develop semiconductor production in the PRC.
China itself has initiated criminal proceedings against officials responsible for import substitution in the semiconductor industry - it remains to be seen how effectively the allocated funds were used.

ASML shares fell due to rumors that the U.S.is trying to cut off its supplies to China - shares of Chinese chipmakers on the contrary jumped

After the recent publication of Bloomberg about the pressure on the lithography equipment manufacturer ASML from the U.S.
authorities in order to cut off supplies to China, the company's shares immediately went down in price.
Paradoxically, the shares of Chinese semiconductor manufacturers after that began to rise in price.Image source: Laura Ockel/unsplash.comThe Dutch ASML, which is the largest supplier of advanced lithography equipment for chip production, some time ago already prohibited to supply its most advanced tools to China.
Nevertheless, Bloomberg reported on a possible complete ban on supplies, including mature process machines.
The source cited \"people familiar with the issue.\" ASML itself refused to comment on the rumors.After the publication Bloomberg share price ASML plummeted by 7.2%.
Valuations fell cheaper and securities of other equipment manufacturers for chip makers - the company Lam Research by 3.6% and Applied Materials by 2.4%.
Refusal to sell to China may be extremely unprofitable for the ASML - in 2021 about 16% of its sales accounted to the Celestial Empire for 2.1 billion euros.
Each sold machine is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
At the same time, an export license is required to supply such tools.
Since 2019, the Dutch government, under an agreement with the United States, denies ASML export licenses for sales of the most advanced machines for EUV lithography in the Middle Kingdom.
Only less advanced DUV variants have been sold there.That said, most chips are still produced using DUV lithography and limiting sales of the machines in question could have a devastating effect on the Chinese semiconductor industry, with it likely exacerbating the global semiconductor deficit.In 2021, the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, chaired by former Google head Eric Schmidt, recommended that the US State Department and Commerce Department pressure allies with Securities for various Chinese chip makers rose 10 percent or more.China's chip manufacturing industry is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, and after the U.S.
imposed sanctions on giants like Huawei and Hikvision, demand for locally made components only increased.
According to Chinese industry representatives, prices are rising on expectations of import substitution by Chinese companies of foreign solutions.The share price in the Chinese segment was also fueled by preliminary, extremely optimistic data on the revenues of local Advanced Micro-Fabrication, which produces equipment for semiconductor production.
In addition, fears that chipmaker revenues would be too low due to pandemic restrictions have not materialized to the extent expected.
Finally, there is still no reliable data on the discontinuation of ASML sales.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX has been retailed - more expensive than its predecessors and so far only in China

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX processors on Zen 3 architecture have been retailed.
True, AMD's next-generation HEDT chips are only available in China for now.
This information, as well as pictures of the new products in the product packaging, shared by one Twitter user.Image source: Twitter / @AnhPhoneThe 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX flagship model is offered for purchase for 47 thousand yuan or about $7029.
The mid-range 32-core Threadripper Pro 5975WX model is half the price at ¥24,000 ($3589).
The younger 24-core Threadripper Pro 5965W model is priced at 17,200 yuan (about $2572).Recall that the 16-core Threadripper Pro 5955WX and 12-core Threadripper Pro 5945WX, which are also part of the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX series, will not be available as retail products.
These chips will be offered exclusively by OEMs as part of off-the-shelf workstations.
The Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX chips are priced higher than the Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3000WX (Zen 2).
For example, the official price of the flagship 64-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX is $5849 and the 32-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975WX is $2749.
However, it should be noted that AMD itself has not announced the recommended price of the new processors.
The new Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX processors support up to 2TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory, have 64 to 128 MBytes of L3 cache, support for 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes and have 280W TDP.
In tests, they are up to 20% faster than their predecessors and up to 45% faster than competitors.