Nvidia New A800 GPU Now Available in China
Nvidia has shipped a new GPU in China that was specifically designed to meet recent rules enacted by the U.S. government prohibiting the export of sophisticated chips to China, just months after the requirements came into being.
As we reported earlier, U.S. government officials in August ordered Nvidia to stop exporting its A100 and its upcoming H100 GPUs to China.
The H100 is slated to compete directly with the new MI250X from AMD, while the older A100 is Nvidia’s mainstay of enterprise GPU and is commonly deployed in supercomputers today. For instance, Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency's (NSTDA) supercomputer uses 704 Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs.
According to a report by the Global Times, the A800 is currently available on Chinese e-commerce platforms. A report on Reuters also noted that at least two major server makers are offering the A800 in their products.
A tech analyst interviewed by Global Times claimed that Nvidia’s move is “within expectations” given how lucrative the huge Chinese market is, and to expect other chip makers to follow suit.
According to various reports, the A800 is a variant of the older A100 GPU, with a stripped-down chip-to-chip data transfer rate of 400 gigabytes (GB) a second, as opposed to the 600 GB on the A100. There appear to be no significant differences between the two GPUs, which makes sense considering how quickly it was shipped.
It is worth noting that the new sanctions on the A100 only come into effect in April of next year – it is still possible to export the more powerful GPU in the meantime. However, the need to furnish warranty and support probably made switching to the A800 now a better option for businesses.
Once lauded for their ability to enable graphic-heavy games on personal computers, the role of GPUs has morphed significantly in recent years. Today, GPUs are commonly used to train AI models, the A100 and H100 GPUs are specialized data center-optimized models that Nvidia produces and sells to cloud giants, universities, and technology firms.
The H100 is particularly advanced with 80 billion transistors that at 814 square millimeters stand at the edge of today’s chipmaking equipment. However, it remains out of reach for businesses in China.
While the U.S. banned the latest GPU chips and chip-making equipment on national security grounds, the likelier reason is to cripple or slow China’s progress in the AI and advanced technology space.
Image credit: iStockphoto/Nils Jacobi
