NVIDIA Prepares H800 Adaptation of H100 GPU for the Chinese Market

[AleksandarK]

NVIDIA's H100 accelerator is one of the most powerful solutions for powering AI workloads. And, of course, every company and government wants to use it to power its AI workload. However, in countries like China, shipment of US-made goods is challenging. With export regulations in place, NVIDIA had to get creative and make a specific version of its H100 GPU for the Chinese market, labeled the H800 model. Late last year, NVIDIA also created a China-specific version of the A100 model called A800, with the only difference being the chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth being dropped from 600 GB/s to 400 GB/s.

This year's H800 SKU also features similar restrictions, and the company appears to have made similar sacrifices for shipping its chips to China. From the 600 GB/s bandwidth of the regular H100 PCIe model, the H800 is gutted to only 300 GB/s of bi-directional chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth speed. While we have no data if the CUDA or Tensor core count has been adjusted, the sacrifice of bandwidth to comply with export regulations will have consequences. As the communication speed is reduced, training large models will increase the latency and slow the workload compared to the regular H100 chip. This is due to the massive data size that needs to travel from one chip to another. According to Reuters, an NVIDIA spokesperson declined to discuss other differences, stating that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."



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[fynxer]

Same chip with half memory bandwidth will make no difference in the end.

The Chinese will just increase the chip count and consume more electricity to get the same result.

Big hand to Jensen Huang for doing anything to get richer even at the cost of our environment.

The best solution had been not to create the H800 abomination at all.

 

[Xaled]

Getting around serious sanctions shouldn't be as easy as renaming the 4080 12gb version to 4070 ti .
They are not export regulations, they are sanctions,! If Nvidia keeps helping Chinese government and companies backed by Chinese governments there will be no Nvidia nor Taiwan in the future.

 

[Chaitanya]

Getting around serious sanctions shouldn't be as easy as renaming the 4080 12gb version to 4070 ti .
They are not export regulations, they are sanctions,! If Nvidia keeps helping Chinese government and companies backed by Chinese governments there will be no Nvidia nor Taiwan in the future.

Chinese trying to help CCP nothing new to see here.

 

[leppie]

Same chip with half memory bandwidth will make no difference in the end.

Half the NVLink speed. Not on-card memory bandwidth.

 

[fynxer]

Half the NVLink speed. Not on-card memory bandwidth.

I was not referring to a one card computer where chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth does not matter

Building massive AI models with thousands of H800 units high chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth is very important BUT in this case the Chinese will have a simple solution with only increasing the H800 chip count to compensate for the lower bandwidth to get the same result within the same time frame.

The only thing the sanctions do in this instance is that it will cost Chinese companies more money since they have to buy more H800 units and consume more electricity to get to the same result as the US companies.

 

[kondamin]

And just label the H100 as being H800 and no one is the wiser.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

Yeah, this is ridiculous, but when have corporations cared about anything besides increasing short term profits and stock value....well, now the central committee can more efficiently keep track of Uyghar and political dissidents....maybe at the next conference Jensen can show some bar graphs about how Nvidia GPUs help the Chinese Authorities kick in the door on someone who was using a VPN 1.8x faster than on the previous architecture.

 

[john_]

As the communication speed is reduced, training large models will increase the latency and slow the workload compared to the regular H100 chip.

Sorry for my ignorance, but this looks to me like the perfect business opportunity for Nvidia. China does have money, they are not broke. So, if they can't buy 1000 H100s, maybe they will buy 5000 H800s and just split their workloads to more cards to compensate for the bandwidth restriction. In the end the Chinese see ZERO delay in their efforts to catch up with US, while Nvidia makes much more money.

 

[konga]

Getting around serious sanctions shouldn't be as easy as renaming the 4080 12gb version to 4070 ti .
They are not export regulations, they are sanctions,! If Nvidia keeps helping Chinese government and companies backed by Chinese governments there will be no Nvidia nor Taiwan in the future.

The sanctions clearly list what kinds of chips you are allowed to export to china and what kinds you are not. Companies toning down their chips to deliver inferior products to the chinese product is the entire intent behind these regulations, and Nvidia is following them exactly as they're meant to.