The US government has published an updated list of tech export controls that looks to be bad news for Nvidia as it now includes the company's "China special" RTX 4090D GPU in items that need an export license.
The White House has been playing cat and mouse with Nvidia over its GPU hardware, announcing increasingly tight restrictions on what can be exported to customers in China. The technology giant then proceeds to adapt its products or introduce new models that allow sales to continue.
Last October, the US announced restrictions that affected the majority of Nvidia's GPU products as the Biden administration clamps down on Chinese access to anything that could help Beijing develop advanced AI technology, under the justification that such technology could be used by China's military.
That list included the A100, A800, H100, H800, L40, L40S, and RTX 4090 products, the latter of which is a consumer card aimed at gamers, but was deemed too powerful under the formulas cooked up by Washington.
Nvidia then created the RTX 4090D, a slightly cut-down version of the 4090 with fewer CUDA cores, specially designed to squeeze past the restrictions and continue to be sold in China.
Now the US has published an updated rule list, effective April 4, which specifies additional export controls on advanced computing items, along with corrections, revisions, and clarifications.
The list states that computers or "electronic assemblies" with an "Adjusted Peak Performance" exceeding 70 "weighted teraFLOPS" cannot be exported to certain territories, including China, without an export license.
According to Tom's Hardware, this likely refers to performance in single precision 32-bit floating point (FP32) processing, at which the RTX 4090D comes in above the mark at 73.5 teraFLOPS, while the original RTX 4090 comfortably exceeds it with 82.6 teraFLOPS.
One possible reason for the change in rules is that Chinese customers were able to overclock the RTX 4090D to bring its performance back in line with the RTX 4090, as The Register reported last week. The "China special" was, in any case, only about 5 percent slower than the original, according to some benchmarks.
We asked Nvidia to comment on this latest development, but it is likely that the GPU giant would have to withdraw the RTX 4090D from sale in China if the implications of the updated export restrictions are correct. In that case, the card may simply be discontinued.
Earlier, Nvidia was said to be preparing to start mass production of its H20 GPU in the second quarter of 2024. This is one of three GPUs aimed at the Chinese market, the others being the L20 and L2. They are believed to have performance levels below that specified by the latest export restrictions, but those restrictions have proven to be a moving target.
Last year, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told a conference that the US would have to keep tightening restrictions to prevent China getting around them.
"If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day," she was quoted as saying at the time. ®
Source: The register