Earlier this month, we reported on a new attempt by China to offer its own graphics cards. Lisuan Tech announced its G100, a graphics card engraved in 6 nm by SMIC, whose performance was to rival NVIDIA’s RTX 4060. A bold promise whose initial results seem disappointing. But there’s a “but”: the GPU is still in the early stages of development.
A very low score for China’s first 6nm GPU!
At present, the chip’s development seems to be going well, as it has reached a functional state. Indeed, if this weren’t the case, we wouldn’t have had a result on Geekbench. This means that the tape-out phase has gone well and that the first engineering samples are in circulation, to put it simply. We’re a long way from the final chips, which should go into mass production by the end of the year, or even early next year if all goes well. In any case, the first results are not to be taken at face value, since with a score of 15,524 pts, the card takes its place at the bottom of the Geekbench database. To put it simply, it’s up against GPUs that are almost thirteen years old, such as the GTX 660 Ti. Proof that the chip isn’t ready to be launched, hardware detection is far behind. Indeed, the software only recognizes 256 MB of VRAM, a frequency of 300 MHz and 32 compute units. Of course, the exact characteristics of the chip are still unknown. All we know is that it will be based on an in-house architecture called TrueGPU, while the etching is in 6 nm, presumably from SMIC, a Chinese foundry. In short, this is yet another attempt by China to gain its technological independence from the Americans. As you know, the USA is becoming increasingly restrictive when it comes to exporting high-performance graphics cards and semiconductor-related equipment. In this context, they have no choice but to develop their autonomy!
