News from March 6th reveals that, surprisingly, AMD has been discreetly developing a China-specific version of its AI GPU acceleration card. However, unlike NVIDIA's smoother experience, the US government has deemed it too powerful and has rejected it.
At the end of last year, AMD officially unveiled its new generation of acceleration cards, Instinct MI300A and MI300X, based on the brand-new CDNA3 GPU architecture. The latter even incorporates a Zen4 CPU, marking it as the first super APU.
Naturally, these were barred from being sold in mainland China, similar to other products like NVIDIA's A100/H100 and Intel's GPU Max/Gaudi2.
It's worth mentioning that alongside the release of the MI300 series, when AMD was asked about the possibility of a special edition for the Chinese market, the official response was, "The Chinese market is crucial for AMD. Today, we haven't announced any specific products tailored for the Chinese market."
This is undoubtedly hinting at the potential for future developments. In fact, AMD has indeed worked on a special version named "Instinct MI309," designed to comply with U.S. export control policies and facilitate smooth sales in the Chinese market.
Currently, the specific specifications and performance levels of the MI309 remain unclear. However, it is evident that it surpasses the restrictions set by the U.S. government—the total processing performance (TPP) must not exceed 4800, meaning the FP8 floating-point performance must be below 600 TFlops.
NVIDIA has previously developed several custom accelerator cards specifically for the Chinese market. The early models, such as A800 and H800, were banned after policy updates. Currently, they are pushing the H20, L20, and L2 models, with shipments either underway or about to commence.
Among them, the H20 is in high demand among Chinese customers for AI training purposes. It has started shipping in small quantities and is reportedly priced at only $12,000-15,000, significantly lower than Huawei's Ascend 910B, which is priced at $17,000.
