NVIDIA cuts performance of A800 GPUs for Chinese market by 30% to circumvent sanctions

US authorities last year imposed a ban on exports to China of GPUs with performance levels like the A100 and H100. NVIDIA has found a way around the sanctions. The "green" company has released the A800 and H800 chips with reduced performance.

Here's What We Know

You can tell from the names that the A800 is a slower version of the A100 and the H800 is a slower version of the H100. Demand for such chips has increased due to a surge of interest in generative models like the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT).

We found out that the performance of A800 dropped by 30% compared to A100. Check out the results below:

• FP64 is 6.8 TFLOPS versus 9.7 TFLOPS;
• FP64 using tensor cores - 13.7 TFLOPS versus 19.5 TFLOPS;
• FP16 and BF16 - 439 TFLOPS versus 624 TFLOPS.

The A800 will cost nearly $14,500 in China. As for the higher performance H800 chip, there is no word yet on how much NVIDIA has trimmed its performance compared to the H100.

Source: TechPowerUp