This is not the first time Nvidia has adjusted its products to meet US export controls. In 2022, it reduced the interconnect speed of its A100 units and relaunched it as the A800 following restrictions on AI accelerators' sale in China. Despite these adjustments, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has warned chipmakers against testing the bans, stating that any redesigned chip enabling AI would be controlled. However, she also noted that the Commerce Department was working with Nvidia to ensure that GPUs and AI accelerators posing a threat to US national security weren't sold to China.
Key takeaways:
- Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is back on sale in China in a less capable configuration, the RTX 4090D, to comply with US export restrictions.
- The RTX 4090D has a performance roughly 10.94 percent lower than the original model, with a lower core count and tensor core count.
- The original RTX 4090 exceeded the performance limits on consumer cards, requiring a US government-issued license to sell in China. The reduced performance of the 4090D brings it under these metrics.
- This is not the first time Nvidia has reduced the performance of its graphics cards to comply with US export controls, having done so previously in 2022 with its A100 units.