NVIDIA announces A800 GPU to comply with latest sanctions on exporting advanced chips to China

[Inception_Bwah]

Summary

Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced a ban on exporting advanced chips and related manufacturing technologies to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was done out of concern particularly pertaining to the development of AI, hypersonic missiles, and advanced surveillance systems, and to capitalize on the PRC’s current disadvantage in manufacturing their own advanced chips (typically defined as anything with a lithography smaller than 10nm) and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

 

Last week, NVIDIA quietly announced a new product - the A800, which is essentially the same as their current A100 but “nerfed” such that it will comply with these sanctions (which take effect early next year) and will be able to be legally exported to China.

 

Quotes

Quote

“Most of the key specs of A100 and A800 are identical except for their interconnect speeds: A800 runs at 400 gigabytes per second while A100 functions at 600 gigabytes per second, which is the performance threshold set by the U.S. ban.” - Rita Liao, TechCrunch

 

My thoughts

I think that this is very important since this is the first product announced by a company that is designed specifically to comply with these sanctions. I know that these may be hard to come by outside of China, but if the lab could somehow get their hands on one, and get an a100 as well, then you could benchmark them side by side and directly test the effectiveness of these sanctions. It would be very cool to be able to see the exact performance impact on various AI/compute tasks that these sanctions are having.

 

Sources

HotHardware article about a800: https://hothardware.com/news/nvidias-a800-data-center-gpu-sidesteps-us-ban-on-chip-exports-to-china

VideoCardz article about a800: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-introduces-a800-data-center-gpu-for-china

The Verge article about a800: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23447886/nvidia-a800-china-chip-ai-research-slowed-down-restrictions

Tech Crunch article about a800: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/07/nvidia-us-china-ban-alternative/

 

The Diplomat article about Chinese weakness re: advanced lithography: https://thediplomat.com/2022/08/lithography-the-achilles-heel-of-chinas-semiconductor-industry/

 

Vox article about advanced chip embargo: https://www.vox.com/world/2022/11/5/23440525/biden-administration-semiconductor-export-ban-china

The Hill article about advanced chip embargo: https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3704850-is-bidens-chip-ban-a-tipping-point-in-us-china-relations/

NYT article about advanced chip embargo: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/economy/biden-chip-technology.html

Wayback link for NYT article: https://web.archive.org/web/20221112134025/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/economy/biden-chip-technology.html

Original source for chip embargo from Bureau of Industry and Security, US Commerce Department: 

US Federal Register document detailing specific export restrictions: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2022-10-13/pdf/2022-21658.pdf

[manikyath]

next week on the news: chinese overclockers made a bios hack to overclock the A800 to match the A100.

[Inception_Bwah]

2 hours ago, manikyath said:

next week on the news: chinese overclockers made a bios hack to overclock the A800 to match the A100.

That’s not something they would be able to do right? Can you overclock NVLink?

[manikyath]

35 minutes ago, Inception_Bwah said:

That’s not something they would be able to do right? Can you overclock NVLink?

if the limit is in software, the unlock is also in software. look at LHR....

[Inception_Bwah]

19 minutes ago, manikyath said:

if the limit is in software, the unlock is also in software. look at LHR....

I can’t imagine the Commerce Department would tolerate NVIDIA circumventing sanctions with a software limiter that can be disabled, especially given how much of a failure LHR was. It would have to be hardware.

[Salv8 (sam)]

this ain't gonna do shit.

you might as well just ban it and get it over and done with

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Inception_Bwah said:

I can’t imagine the Commerce Department would tolerate NVIDIA circumventing sanctions with a software limiter that can be disabled, especially given how much of a failure LHR was. It would have to be hardware.

If it ships with microcode that only allows a certain bandwidth and some highly talented smart people reverse engineer and load on their own microcode then that's got nothing to do with Nvidia. Unless Nvidia makes an entirely different silicon design and manufacturers GPU packages that are hardware incapable of more then someone at some point somewhere will figure out a way to unlock the hardware.

[Kisai]

17 hours ago, leadeater said:

If it ships with microcode that only allows a certain bandwidth and some highly talented smart people reverse engineer and load on their own microcode then that's got nothing to do with Nvidia. Unless Nvidia makes an entirely different silicon design and manufacturers GPU packages that are hardware incapable of more then someone at some point somewhere will figure out a way to unlock the hardware.

Well, they could do just that, but I think the more likely case is that they don't connect the pins on the package to utilize the full bandwidth. Like I imagine this is "lanes" as opposed to clock speed.

 

 

[thechinchinsong]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Well, they could do just that, but I think the more likely case is that they don't connect the pins on the package to utilize the full bandwidth. Like I imagine this is "lanes" as opposed to clock speed.

 

 

Is it possible some state sponsored company has the ability to just reconnect those pins? I imagine a better way to do things would be to physically fuse off a section of usable die or just use dies that have a sizable defective portion instead. Or does that not work with GPUs the way it can work with multicore CPUs? Maybe we're talking about the same thing?

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, thechinchinsong said:

Is it possible some state sponsored company has the ability to just reconnect those pins? I imagine a better way to do things would be to physically fuse off a section of usable die or just use dies that have a sizable defective portion instead. Or does that not work with GPUs the way it can work with multicore CPUs? Maybe we're talking about the same thing?

Well, I feel that nvidia wouldn't be so stupid to make it easily reversible, so if they "cut the pins" so to speak, they likely didn't even connect the wires inside the package to the pin. That's assuming that these cores are otherwise the same.

 

If they actually engineered the parts specificly for China... then why aren't they selling them in the broader market? Probably because these have been "binned" to meet the law, and it's the same core.

 

[GhostRoadieBL]

On 11/14/2022 at 1:53 PM, Inception_Bwah said:

I can’t imagine the Commerce Department would tolerate NVIDIA circumventing sanctions with a software limiter that can be disabled, especially given how much of a failure LHR was. It would have to be hardware.

I highly doubt the commerce department even knows the difference between software and hardware limiters based on the tech literacy of 99% of government agencies and regulatory bodies.