China is developing increasingly complex semiconductors, but in the GPU sector, it still has a long way to go.
It's no longer a secret that China is seeking to gain power in just about every sector of the economy, and the semiconductor market is clearly one of Beijing's priorities... especially since the USA imposed an embargo on the export of the most sensitive components to the Middle Kingdom. China must therefore find solutions to ensure that the growth of its national champions, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, is not held back. In the past, companies such as Moore Threads and Biren have made the headlines, but today it's a certain Lisuan that's pulling out all the stops by being the first Chinese company to design a graphics processor engraved in 6 nm.
The G100 - the name of this chip, which has been talked about for several months now, but which has recently been given a proper presentation - is undoubtedly produced on the lines of Chinese giant SMIC, one of the country's only companies capable of engraving so finely... even if we're still a long way from what Intel, Samsung and, even more so, TSMC can do. The G100 is therefore able to support the most popular APIs today. We're talking about DirectX 12, OpenGL 3.0/4.6 and Vulkan 1.3, but things don't seem quite so simple, and a recent leak reveals a definite lack of power for this chip, which Lisuan would like to see compete with the most modern GPUs designed in the USA.
With 15,524 points, the Lisuan G100 is on a par with a GeForce 660 Ti © Tom's Hardware
Measurements are still few and far between, but on Geekbench's database, we were able to see a G100 express itself in combination with a Ryzen 7 8700G and 64 GB DDR5-4800 on a configuration based on a Colorful Battle-AX B650M-Plus motherboard. The problem is that, under these conditions, the machine only scored 15,524 points in the OpenCL test. Doesn't that tell you something? Well, on Geekbench bases, this puts the machine at the same performance level as solutions based on GeForce GTX 660 Ti or Radeon R9 370... cards that have not been in the NVIDIA/AMD catalog for many years. China is on the rise, that's a fact. In some sectors, they largely dominate the world, but in the very specific field of GPUs, there's still work to be done. There's no doubt that Chinese companies are ready to rise to the challenge.
