Export limits for graphics cards NVIDIA are each time circumvented by the American company. It doesn’t sit well with people in high places.
While tensions between the United States and China show no signs of abating, Washington has put in place new measures to take into account everything related to the power of GPUs.
More particularly in the crosshairs of the United States: the performance of the solutions that NVIDIA exports to China. So, the GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card can no longer be sold there, but NVIDIA has ideas.
NVIDIA launches several “Chinese” products
Only a few days after the announcement of the end of the GeForce RTX 4090 in China, it is indeed rumored that an RTX 4090D model is about to see the light of day.
A “D” model for “Dragon” which would target more specifically the Chinese market. The idea for NVIDIA would be to produce a card whose “Total Processing Performance” index would be lower than 4,800 points, the threshold set by Washington for the export limit.
To stay below this threshold, NVIDIA is forced to review certain technical elements (number of CUDA cores, operating frequencies), but in the opinion of several specialists, the impact on in-game performance would not necessarily be very significant.
The release of this RTX 4090D would therefore make it possible to circumvent Washington’s measures and this is not the first time that NVIDIA has done this. In November 2022, NVIDIA launched the A800/H800 solutions following the ban on exporting the A100/H100.
The game of cat and mouse
Last November, it released the HGX H20, L20 following the strengthening of sanctions which also block the A800/H800 and, in December, there is therefore talk of this RTX 4090D. A circumvention technique which is in no way illegal, but which quite annoys Gina Raimondo, the Secretary of Commerce in Joe Biden’s government.
“ We can’t let China get these chips. Point “, she declared at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, before adding ” We will deny them our most advanced technology “.
To be more effective in its sanctions, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security needs more funds from the US Congress. “ I have a budget of 200 million dollars. This is the cost of a few fighter jets […] To be serious, we need to finance this operation as it should be “.
Gina Raimondo then more directly targeted companies like NVIDIA by specifying that “ if you redesign chips around a particular constraint that allows them to do artificial intelligence, I will impose new controls the next day “. The tone is set.
Source : Fortune, WCCFTech
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