Weaker RTX 4090 could be coming to China next month with fewer CUDA cores as NVIDIA's effort to bypass US sanctions

In a bid to curb the possibility of China developing advanced AI that could be used for military purposes, the U.S. restricted the exports of NVIDIA’s H100 chip to China last year. However, firms in China could still procure chips like the H800, A800, and the RTX 4090. Washington further tightened the GPU export ban to include the accelerators above in October of this year and NVIDIA can no longer directly sell even the consumer RTX 4090 to Chinese buyers.

To that end, rumors have emerged that Team Green is preparing a pared-back RTX 4090 SKU called the “RTX 4090D”. We reported previously that the RTX 4090D could be based on an AD102-250 GPU with reduced performance and is expected to debut early next year. Now, thanks to new leaks out of MEGAsizeGPU and Benchlife, we have some new RTX 4090D specifications.

First up, MEGAsizeGPU claims that the RTX 4090D base and boost clock frequencies will be 2,280 and 2,520 MHz respectively. As a reference, the vanilla RTX 4090 (Available on Amazon) has base and boost clocks of 2,235 and 2,520 MHz respectively. So, the RTX 4090D will have a 45 MHz higher base frequency while retaining the boost same frequency.

Moving on, MEGAsizeGPU alleges that the AD102-250 will feature fewer CUDA cores vs the AD102-300 of the RTX 4090. This is substantiated by Benchlife's report of fewer CUDA cores in addition to lack of overclocking support and reduced power limit. Per Benchlife, the RTX 4090D has a power limit of 425 W, a 25 W decrease vs the RTX 4090.

Finally, if the latest rumors turn out to be true, we’ll see what the RTX 4090D actually packs by the end of January 2024. Until then, take the information with a grain of salt.