Once upon a time, countries protected their domestic industries with tariffs on imports. This gave the home side a price advantage over companies operating overseas, but the practice has somewhat fallen out of fashion in the past few decades.

These days, governments are altogether more creative, using fancy export controls to protect their interests. To that end, the United States enacted an export restriction on high-powered computing devices. In response, Chinese designers are attempting to artificially slow their hardware to dodge these rules.

I Got New Rules, I Count ‘Em

Companies like NVIDIA and AMD have had to rework certain products to comply with US regulations against Chinese exports. The A100 datacenter GPU was banned from export, so NVIDIA developed the lower-specced A800 instead. Credit: NVIDIA Press Site

The new export rules come as the US government grapples with the ascendance of China’s military, in both size and technological sophistication. The regulations restrict the export of advanced integrated circuits, but the regulations don’t stop there. The tooling, software, and other manufacturing equipment required to fabricate such hardware is also subject to the rules. The often-stated aim is to slow or halt the development of advanced military devices that could be used by the Chinese government or sold on to other countries. Alternatively, it could be painted as an attempt to safeguard the advantage of existing players in the semiconductor market.

Chips capable of an “aggregate bidirectional transfer rate over all inputs and outputs” exceeding 600 GB/s, not counting to volatile memory, may not be exported or re-exported to China, under the new rules. Advanced manufacturing tools used ..

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