Due to restrictions that the United States is imposing on China, the Middle Kingdom is not entitled to the NVIDIA A100. No, for them, it will be the A800, a version limited in performance sold anyway 100 000 yuan.
A800: 30% less performance and a 100,000 yuan bill!
Just like the H800 this A800 is a limited version of the A100 that NVIDIA is forced to reserve for the Western market. The card would then offer up to 70% of the performance of the original card. However, these limitations are mainly on the number of cards that can be integrated into a system. Thus, this Chinese version is limited to eight cards per system against sixteen for the A100. The same applies to the speed of the NVLINK bridge, which is limited to 400 GB/s. Remember that the Western version has 600 GB/s.
Nevertheless, the raw performances do not show any difference with the original A100. Thus, the FP64 performance rises to 9.7 TFLOP and 19.5 TFLOP with the Tensor Core. The same goes for the memory side, where the chips are backed up by 40GB or 80GB of HBM2/HBM2e VRAM depending on the variant.
Finally, it only remains to talk about the selling price which reaches 100 000 yuan according to our colleague. In dollars, this gives us $14,462!
