News from April 16th reveals that the A100, an NVIDIA GPU accelerator card originally banned from sale to China, has recently surfaced in a certain "seafood market" within the country. This particular A100 development sample boasts specifications vastly different from the official version.
As an engineering sample, its design stands out with numerous non-standard voltage measurement points, plenty of jumper wires, and two 8-pin power supply interfaces (along with one unpopulated solder pad).
It features the A100 20BF core, theoretically an upgraded version of the A100B, but never materialized.
Interestingly, it can flash the firmware of the A100 SXM version and function properly, albeit with abnormal power consumption, running constantly at the maximum 750W.
In terms of specifications, it boasts 7936 CUDA cores, 15% more than the retail version's 6912, yet still not fully unlocked, with 256 cores remaining disabled.
The HBM2E high-bandwidth memory has a capacity of 96GB, significantly more than the retail version's 40/80GB, and the bus width is fully unlocked at 6144-bit.
As a sample, the core and memory frequencies are even higher, with a base core clock of 1260MHz and the boost clock hidden, while the memory reaches 1404MHz.
The seller also casually displayed various versions of the A100 they've collected:
