Unique NVIDIA A100 GPUs with Increased Core Counts Surface in China

New variants of NVIDIA's A100 GPUs have been spotted on the Chinese market, featuring an increased number of CUDA cores compared to the original specifications. These GPUs boast 7936 cores, which is 15% more than the standard A100 models equipped with 6912 cores.

These enhanced GPUs also come with 96 GB of HBM2E memory, utilizing a 6144-bit bus interface distributed across six stacks with 16 GB each. The graphics cards are in PCIe form factor, appearing to be prototypes initially designed for GRID systems.

The listings specify that these GPUs have a base clock speed of 1260 MHz, although boost speeds were not mentioned. The performance is expected to reach around 20 TFLOPs for single-precision and 10 TFLOPs for double-precision computing, comparable or superior to the A100 PCIe 80 GB model, which delivers 19.5 TFLOPs and 9.74 TFLOPs, respectively.

The reason for these GPUs hitting the market remains unclear, but it's speculated that NVIDIA may have produced these units in 2020 for specific clients, and they have now surfaced in the marketplace. Some of these GPUs are also available on eBay, priced between $17,000 and $20,000.