Recently, I heard a piece of news, that is, Nvidia's special AI chip H20 for the Chinese market has been reduced in price, from the previous 12-130,000 yuan to about 10 yuan, a decrease of up to 20%+.
Why the price reduction? Because the market doesn't pay for it, why don't you buy it, the reason is that this chip has low performance, high price, and serious lack of cost performance.
So everyone is strange, isn't NVIDIA's AI chip unique in China, there is no cost-effective problem, what price to sell, don't you have to buy it? Like the previous H100, this chip sold for more than 200,000 pieces, and many people grabbed it, but now the H20 is only 100,000 yuan, half cheaper.
In fact, H20 is a castrated and castrated version of H100, with performance only about 20% of H100, and the price is half of H100.
If there is only H20 on the market to buy, then everyone has to pinch their noses and buy it, but now it is different, there is also Huawei AI chip Ascend series on the market, and compared with H20, Ascend 910B is really cost-effective.
First of all, in terms of performance, the performance of the Ascend 910B is about twice that of the H20, and the price is about 120,000 yuan, which is obviously more cost-effective than the H20.
Of course, H20 also has advantages, that is, there is the ecology of CUDA, and the other is that H20 has high flash memory and large bandwidth, which is incomparable to 910B.
But in the face of huge performance and price advantages, many people would rather buy Huawei's Ascend 910B instead of NVIDIA's H20, after all, the CUDA ecosystem can also be simulated and operated.
What's more, under the current tense external situation, many domestic companies need spare tires and need a second choice other than Nvidia chips, because maybe one day, even Nvidia's H20 will be gone, what should I do then?
Everyone must make more preparations, and the Huawei Ascend 910B is a better choice.
According to the data of the agency, this year, Huawei Ascend 910B, has been booked/sold tens of thousands of sets, so Nvidia will be nervous and have to reduce the price, after all, the market is so big, everyone is going to buy 910B, who will buy H20?
In addition, I would like to tell you an interesting thing.
The performance of H100 is about 4 times that of H20, and the price is more than 2 times that of H20, but the cost is actually lower than that of H20.
Although H20 is H100 castrated and castrated, but the hardware configuration is actually higher, NVIDIA has increased HBM video memory and NVLink interconnection module, HBM has been increased from H100's 80GB to 96GB, while NVlink has been increased from 400GB/s to 900GB/s, and the memory bandwidth has been increased from 3.4Tb/s to 4.0Tb/s.
So in fact, the cost of H20 is higher than that of H100, but now the price is half lower, and it is not easy to sell.
Of course, Nvidia doesn't want to do this, but the United States does not allow Nvidia to sell stronger chips to China, such as H100, H800, A100, A800 and other stronger chips to China.
So Nvidia had to castrate the H20 that met the requirements, in Nvidia's view, even after castration, the Chinese market has to pay, never thought that Huawei would come out to stir up the situation and launched the 910B, thus blocking Nvidia's H20 chip.