As AI gets more expensive, popularity of Chinese AI models like DeepSeek is growing fast, even though these models are not as good as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Industry experts believe the cost pressure is real and most companies will move to a hybrid model for AI use.
Of what, though? Huawei NPUs are datacenter hardware.
As much as we hate it, Nvidia gaming GPUs are ultimately cheap consumer devices, and they’re very good at hybrid CPU+GPU inference.
I think Intel has the best chance of pulling a rabbit out of a hat with Arc. They have a usable platform already, hardware “close enough” to Nvidia that LLM compatibility isn’t a nightmare. And they have nothing to lose, no illusion of “protecting datacenter cards” like AMD has.
Chinese companies are very much ramping up production fo consumer devices right as we speak. I expect we’ll see the same thing we saw with stuff like solar panels and EVs in the coming years. https://www.techspot.com/news/112529-china-first-credible-gaming-gpu-sells-30000-units.html
Doesn’t matter(for this, specifically) if it’s not performant on LLM inference engines.
And I’m not just talking about CUDA. Even GGUF Vulkan (for example) has all sorts of vendor quirks that can absolutely trash performance. VLLM is often a joke on AMD, with certain models, on certain cards, even with dev support.
Sure, but try extrapolating 2 or 3 years into the future here. Models are going to become more efficient and hardware is going to improve. Right now Chinese companies are just starting to put out GPUs, but once that process is ironed out, I don’t see why they wouldn’t put out chips that work well with Chinese models. This kind of stuff is happening already, it’s only a matter of time till it makes it to consumer market. too https://lushbinary.com/blog/deepseek-v4-huawei-ascend-ai-infrastructure-strategy