NVIDIA releases an RTX 4090D in China, a limited version to comply with restrictions
Due to the fear that he has use of AI, especially in the military field; The United States has imposed a blockade of China, which among its numerous points, limits the potential of its imports. This affects graphics cards, widely used GPUs due to its computing power in the field of artificial intelligence. This has affected NVIDIA, which has eliminated its possibilities of distributing its GPUs for AI, and even its RTX 4090, which could be used for AI. For this reason, they have launched the RTX 4090D commercial graphics card model exclusively for the Chinese market.
Its GPU includes 14.592 CUDA cores, 24 GB of GDDR6X memory, a 384-bit wide memory bus, and a power consumption of 425 W. The price is the same as its non-limited counterpart.
An RTX 4090 only for China, so they don't use it for use in AI
Compared to its original version, the RTX 4090D has reduced the number of CUDA cores and power consumption. The number of CUDA cores goes from 16.384 to 14.592, and power consumption is reduced by 5,9%, from 450 W to 425 W. The rest of the specifications are almost the same. This means that it has a 384-bit bus, 24 GB of GDDR6X memory and a boost clock of 2,52 GHz. Its base clock frequency has risen slightly from 2,23 GHz to 2,28 GHz.
These reductions are in response to the latest US export regulations. Nvidia is forced to stop selling the standard RTX 4090 and other Nvidia GPUs focused on AI and HPC to the Chinese market for geopolitical reasons. Therefore, chip manufacturers can only ship semiconductor processors that do not exceed specific performance metrics established by the United States. This metric is called Total Processing Power, calculated by the maximum count for a given bit length using TFLOPs or TOPS multiplied by the number of bits.
The maximum threshold allowed by US export regulations is 4.800. Since the performance level of the RTX 4090 is 5.286, this is what made them have to make this version for China. It is not expected to go on sale in other countries, unless they also have these types of sanctions from United States.
