The lands surrounding the Min River in southwest China’s Sichuan province are known as some of the most fertile agricultural regions in the country. The river itself has played a crucial role in spreading nutrient-rich sediment across the Sichuan Basin, making it closely intertwined with the province’s longstanding moniker as “The Land of Abundance”.
But it was not always so. Up until 256 BC, more than two millennia ago, the Min River was an unruly and untamed beast of nature, flooding the surrounding lands every spring and leaving them parched every winter. The cause was a perfect storm of geographical and geological factors: the rushing Min River water, crashing down from high above the mountains nearby, would lose momentum once it hit the flat Chengdu Plain, causing huge amounts of silt and debris to be deposited while the water itself had nowhere to go but over the banks.
The man who placed the wild forces of nature under human control was an engineer called Li Bing. His genius was in understanding that a standard dam would only postpone the inevitable burst of the banks once again. Instead, he proposed slicing through the solid rock of nearby Mount Yulei to split the stream, disabling the fearsome might of the rushing water while also harnessing its vitalising contents, which would go on to become the lifeblood of hundreds of millions of Sichuan's inhabitants from then on.
This irrigation system at Dujiangyan, now a UNESCO World Heritage site and the world’s oldest irrigation system still in use today, stands as a living testament to the precept, deeply rooted in traditional Chinese thought, that the wisest thing to do in the face of seemingly insurmountable forces is not to stand in their way but to harness them – through innovation, improvisation and ingenuity. For He Tingbo, head of Huawei Technologies’ semiconductor unit, Dujiangyan proved a key inspiration behind Huawei’s high-profile announcement last month of a new chip scaling paradigm called Tau. For years, sceptics have questioned whether Huawei will be able to keep up with US rivals such as Nvidia in the face of seemingly insurmountable sanctions placed on it by Washington, most notably restrictions on accessing cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing equipment such as EUV lithography machines made by Dutch firm ASML. Such doubts had also entered He’s mind as the weight of US sanctions seemed to suggest “no way out”, He said in frank remarks to reporters in Shanghai. But Dujiangyan, she said, provided her team with a template from ancient Chinese history to navigate the challenge they faced. Just as Li Bing flipped the difficult topographical conditions on their head, turning them into key features of a self-regulating irrigation system, He and her team spent six years experimenting with alternative approaches to scaling chip production that would not rely on the most cutting-edge EUV and chipmaking technology. The Tau scaling law was the result, which focuses on improving the speed at which data moves through advanced chips rather than the industry’s longstanding adherence to Moore’s Law – the practice of packing ever greater numbers of transistors into these chips. He said she was inspired by how Dujiangyan was achieved not with modern machinery but through the ingenuity of its engineers against the most improbable of odds, revealing that she even took members of her team to Dujiangyan to relax during the most challenging times. It must be said that it remains highly uncertain whether Huawei’s new strategy can propel it – and China’s broader chip ecosystem – to catch up with the US. The US still enjoys control over advanced EUV equipment and benefits from a world-beating advanced chip supply chain with TSMC at the centre. Analysts said that Huawei’s latest claims remain far from proven as a broad substitute for cutting-edge lithography, with the company still facing major challenges in manufacturing yield and supply chain depth. Still, the signal from He is certainly clear – Huawei no longer sees itself as a passive player in the global chip and AI race, one that is subject to the whims of US sanctions and ever-increasing restrictions. Instead of waiting for external conditions to improve, it is committed to making them redundant through innovation and ingenuity, just as Li Bing and his engineers did more than 2,000 years ago.
scmp.com/tech/article/335..
#🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖
