Two months after the US blocked China’s entry into Nvidia’s 2 high-end microchips, American Semiconductor Design unveiled an option with decreased processing velocity for its second-largest market.
The Nvidia A800 graphic processing unit is “another alternative product to the Nvidia A100 GPU for customers in China,” an Nvidia spokesperson noted in an announcement to Thealike on Monday. “The A800 meets the US government’s explicit test for reduced export controls and cannot be programmed to exceed.”
The A100 processor is understood to power supercomputers, synthetic intelligence and high-performance information facilities for industries ranging from biotech and finance to manufacturing. Alibaba’s cloud computing venture has certainly been one of its customers. The A100, along with Nvidia’s new enterprise AI chip H100, has been placed at the bottom of a US export management list to “address the risk that the covered products may be used in a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia. ”
Nvidia already reported that the US embargo could have an effect Up to $400 million in potential gross sales to China in the third quarter, so the new chip appears to be an attempt to remedy the monetary loss. In response to an Nvidia spokesperson, the A800 GPU went into manufacturing in Q3.
Actually, the chip distributor in China, like omnisky, are already advertising the A800 of their product catalogue. The chip appears to have been designed to evade US export guidelines, while still meeting various core computing capabilities. Most of the important specs of the A100 and A800 are equivalent apart from their interconnect speed: the A800 clocks in at 400 gigabytes per second while the A100 has a capacity of 600 gigabytes per second, which is performance limit determined by US sanctions.
according to a analysis From the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan suppose tank, “By targeting only chips with very high interconnect speeds, the White House is attempting to limit control to chips that can be networked together in data centers or supercomputing facilities.” She trains and runs large AI models.”
Nvidia isn’t going to slow down its chips as a way to evade US sanctions. Alibaba and Chinese chip design startup Biren, which are putting sources into making rival Nvidia processors, are modifying the efficiency of their latest semiconductors, according to the financial times, This is as a result of Alibaba and Biren, like various fabless semiconductor companies, contracting Taiwan’s TSMC to manufacture their goods. And US export controls could result in gross sales of cowl chips by companies using US applied sciences, deducting gross sales from TSMC fab to China.
