Nvidia Cripples A100 GPU Performance for Chinese Market

Nvidia has significantly downgraded the performance of its popular A100 graphical processing unit (GPU) for data centers so that it can still be sold in China.

As The Wall Street Journal(Opens in a new window) reports, the recent export restrictions imposed against China by the US government meant the A100 was blocked from sale to the Chinese market. It left Nvidia facing the prospect of losing hundreds of millions in sales to Chinese companies who use the A100 in servers, supercomputers, and for training artificial intelligence models.

So Nvidia came up with a solution: tweak the A100 to lower its performance below the limit set by the US Commerce Department. The end result is a new data center-grade GPU called the A800, which according to Nvidia, “meets the U.S. government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.”

The computational performance offered by the A800 is the same as the A100. However, Nvidia reduced the interconnect bandwidth from 600GB/s to 400GB/s, therefore limiting how much data can be sent to and received from other chips. By doing so, Chinese companies won’t be able to use the A800 for large-scale AI projects or constructing supercomputers that challenge those in the top 100 list.

With China effectively cut off from the latest generations of chip manufacturing technology, the A800 could prove to be a very popular GPU. Even US companies such as Dell are expected to place orders for products the company sells within China.

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