What do we think? The new AIB is offered as a gaming board and appears to be a cutdown 4090 designed to be just below the China export regulations. If power-capped, it can’t be overclocked to circumvent the sanctions. It’s very expensive, however. If it has 12% lower performance and used for AI training, data centers could presumably just add 12% more AIBs. Given the Chinese willingness to throw money and electricity at GPU crypto mining, why wouldn’t they do that?
Nvidia’s sanction-compliant RTX 4090D exclusive to Chinese market
Nvidia has introduced the GeForce RTX 4090D, based on the AD102-250 GPU, is an exclusive version of the AD102 designed for the Chinese market to comply with United States export regulations. Priced at ¥12,999 ($1,828 US), the RTX 4090D is very similar to Nvidia’s flagship RTX 4090, which has been in big demand in China.
The regulations specify a performance metric called total processing performance (TPP), with a maximum threshold of 4,800. The RTX 4090 exceeded this limit by 10%, resulting in its inclusion in the export ban.
The RTX 4090D has 14,592 CUDA cores, 24GB of GDDR6X memory, a 384-bit memory bus, and a 425W power rating. In comparison to the standard RTX 4090 specifications, the 4090D has 12.8% fewer CUDA cores (from 16,384 to 14,592) and a slight 5.9% decrease in power draw (from 450W to 425W). Presumably, the AIB can handle a clock boost of 2.52GHz to the base clock at 2.28GHz.
The RTX 4090D is not expected to be available in other countries and will clearly be the fastest consumer GPU, permitted by regulations, in China.