A Chinese graphics card company, Lisuan Technology, recently announced on social media that it has successfully powered on its upcoming G100 GPU. It’s a major milestone, primarily because this is both the company’s and country’s first domestically made 6nm GPU.
Little is known about the G100. According to Tom’s Hardware, Lisuan made the GPU using its proprietary TrueGPU architecture but did not reveal the manufacturer responsible for taping out the node. Performance-wise, the company claims that it is on par with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060. There is some skepticism but ultimately, the takeaway is that the claim puts the Chinese company just a generation behind.
The achievement is tied to the ongoing US sanctions. Because of the restrictions, China is unable to access the 6nm process nodes, which means hardware and technology from companies like Samsung and TSMC are out of the question. There is a possibility that the G100’s process node was manufactured by Chinese foundry SMIC, seeing how it was responsible for making Huawei’s Ascend 920 AI chip.
The G100 also reportedly supports popular APIs including DX12, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenGL 3.0. However, because of how little information there is about it, it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing any performance metrics come out of it anytime soon.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
