NVIDIA H20 Chip Available for Pre-Orders Post-GTC 2024

In a recent update from the Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily, it has been disclosed by industry insiders that NVIDIA is set to make its "special edition" AI chip, H20, designed specifically for the Chinese market, available for pre-order immediately following the GTC 2024 conference (scheduled from March 18 to March 21). Deliveries are expected within a four-week timeframe.

Earlier this year, reports surfaced regarding NVIDIA's acceptance of pre-orders for a novel Chinese-specific Artificial Intelligence (AI) chip, H20, at pricing comparable to products offered by Chinese counterparts. Positioned as the most robust among three graphics cards tailored by NVIDIA for the Chinese market, H20, however, exhibits computational capabilities inherently inferior to NVIDIA's flagship H100 AI chip and the previously launched H800, both catered to the Chinese market.

Insiders indicate that H20's specifications suggest potential performance disparities with Chinese competitors in specific key areas, such as FP32 performance measuring chip processing speed for common tasks. Nevertheless, H20 appears to demonstrate superiority in interconnect speed. The pricing structure for orders from NVIDIA's H20 partners in China is established at $12,000 to $15,000 per unit.

Drawing from previously disclosed specifications, the NVIDIA H20 is part of the same series as H100 and H200, featuring the NVIDIA Hopper architecture. Noteworthy features include an expanded memory capacity of 96GB HBM3 and a GPU memory bandwidth of 4.0TB/s. In terms of computational power, the FP8 performance stands at 296 TFLOPS, and the FP16 performance is 148 TFLOPS, positioning it at 1/13th the power of the present "most potent" AI chip, H200.