THE US GOVERNMENT has been restricting China’s access to certain US-based technology. China is notorious for ignoring intellectual property rights, and it came as something of a shock to regulators when China’s SMIC began mass production of 7nm ARM processors, with 5nm ones rumored to be not far behind. The focus of the ban is high-end AI processors, including GPUs. Last year’s ban on highend enterprise hardware such as Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips has been extended, with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 included.
Nvidia was hit on sales, and prepared cards to avoid the sanctions. It built new A800 and H800 AI cards, fitting the same hardware as the banned cards, but with the NVLink interconnect turned down from 600GB/s to 400GB/s, giving them about 70 percent of the original’s performance. The latest ruse is the RTX 4090D, which is designed to come in just under the sanctions limit by using a AD12-250 GPU, rather than the original A102-300.