Nvidia's Ampere A100 was previously one of the top AI accelerators, before being dethroned by the newer Hopper H100 — not to mention the H200 and upcoming Blackwell GB200. It looks like the chipmaker may have experimented with an enhanced version that never hit the market, or perhaps companies have clandestinely modified the A100 to make it even faster in the wake of U.S. sanctions against China. X user Jiacheng Liu recently discovered various A100 prototypes in the Chinese second-hand market that flaunt substantially higher specifications than Nvidia's 'regular' A100.
Despite the beefed-up attributes, the A100 7936SP (unofficial name, based on its having 7936 shader processors) shares the same GA100 Ampere die as the regular A100. However, the former has 124 enabled SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors) out of the possible 128 on the GA100 silicon. While it's not the maximum configuration, the A100 7936SP has 15% more CUDA cores than the standard A100, representing a significant performance uplift.
Tensor core counts likewise increase in proportion to the number of SMs. Having more enabled SMs thus means that the A100 7936SP also possesses more Tensor cores. Based on specs alone, the 15% increase in SM, CUDA, and Tensor core counts could similarly boost AI performance by 15%.
Nvidia offers the A100 in 40GB and 80GB configurations. The A100 7936SP likewise comes in two variants. The A100 7936SP 40GB model flaunts a 59% higher base clock than the A100 80GB while maintaining the same 1,410 MHz boost clock. On the other hand, the A100 7936SP 96GB shows an 18% faster base clock compared to the regular A100, and it also enables the sixth HBM2 stack to get to 96GB of total memory. Sadly, Chinese sellers have censored the boost clock speed from the GPU-Z screenshot.
