Nvidia’s A100 card, which is the basis for the A800 being sold in China. | Image: Nvidia
Nvidia has released a cut-down version of its high-end A100 GPU as a way to get around restrictions the US government recently imposed to limit how companies can sell AI training equipment to countries like China and Russia. The card, known as the A800, should have the same massive computing capabilities as the original but can only communicate with other cards in a computing cluster at 400 gigabytes per second instead of 600Gbps. According to The Wall Street Journal, that means the A800 should be just as good for simple tasks but will be significantly less effective when it’s part of something like a supercomputer.
An unnamed Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters that the card is an “alternative product to the Nvidia A100 GPU for customers…
