News Enhanced' Nvidia A100 GPUs appear in China's second-hand market — new cards surpass sanctioned counterparts with 7,936 CUDA cores and 96GB HBM2 memory

[Admin]

Beefed-up Nvidia A100 (Ampere) GPUs have emerged in the Chinese second-hand market. These GPUs include more memory and processing cores than the normal retail variants, and would also be subject to U.S. export restrictions if they weren't already in China.

Enhanced' Nvidia A100 GPUs appear in China's second-hand market — new cards surpass sanctioned counterparts with 7,936 CUDA cores and 96GB HBM2 memory : Read more

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

It's unknown if the accelerators are engineering samples that escaped Nvidia's lab, or if they're customized models that the chipmaker developed for a specific client.

These were early prototype/test samples made for NVIDIA's GRID platform. In fact similar to the A100B GPU to be specific, if we do some digging based on the leaked specs and GPU-Z screenshot.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/grid-a100b.c3578

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/grid-a100a.c3579

Although the specs of these early prototype samples may seem a bit off if we compare it with the A100B, the device ID is the same. Listed under the GPU section/box entry.

20BF and 20BE, as evident from the GPU-Z screen.

So these are some sort of variants of the A100B/A GPU.

https://devicehunt.com/view/type/pci/vendor/10DE/device/20BE

https://devicehunt.com/view/type/pci/vendor/10DE/device/20BF


Also, something seems a bit off in those GPU-Z specs, and the calculations mentioned in the article. The TMU count on the GPU-Z screenshot says 248 ! Should have been 432.

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

It says 20BE and 20BF under the "GPU" name entry which corresponds to the Device ID as used by Nvidia. Some entries in GPU-Z are missing though.

GRID A100B and GRID A100A.

https://devicehunt.com/view/type/pci/vendor/10DE/device/20BE

https://devicehunt.com/view/type/pci/vendor/10DE/device/20BF

 

[TechyIT223]

So I assume these are again sanction compliant chips for the Chinese market since based on specs these might be definitely banned for export to china.

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

Of course based on the upgraded specs, these are definitely on the 'blacklist' for export to China, but in case you missed it, these chips are already within the China mainland, and they are currently selling on local Chinese online marketplace- Goofish.

These are buggy prototype models though, and they don't support all versions of NVIDIA drivers (let alone the latest), and there is a driver bug which reports incorrect GPU TDP and clock speeds, among other things, but the GPU still does the job (based on a report from a user who bought it for his local AI startup).

That wouldn't be surprising, given these are early "validation" boards (judging from the exposed jumpers/voltage points), which have somehow managed to escape the labs, either legally or illegally.

 

[TechyIT223]

Wow...That' not entirely unexpected though. A lot of hardware do usually land up in china as always.,.. just wondering why would someone pay so much for a protocol model though...

 

[Deleted member 2731765]

Well, the reason might be simple. Since China is banned from accessing the latest and the most potent AI accelerators for AI/HPC and similar market segments (from Nvidia and AMD), they need to rely on existing tech, cut-down variants, and/or use whatever hardware they can get their hands on.

And this A100 GPU despite being a prototype board is still capable of doing the job, so the demand is quite high in China, regardless of the price tag.

The graphics processor might lack full software/driver support though, but they are already working on workarounds and fixes.