Isn’t this how these things are always done? Same with number of cores in a CPU, the higher core and lower core come from the same fabrication process, it’s just that the lower core CPU had more faulty cores that are disabled.
Testing hardware is a complicated matter (you can do a PhD on the topic), and nvidia probably does a better job at it than a hacker in their basement who thinks they can upgrade their GPU for free.
On the other hand ... perhaps a few bit errors is not a problem for AI workloads ... but they could also crash your system ...
The good news is that Nvidia did test the hardware, and left the "defective" masks right there in the fuses for us to read. If you have a card that has been fuse-segmented well below its defective part count, you have a product segmentation product on your hands.
Depends a lot on when its from in the product cycle, the yield at the end of production runs are usually so good that it turns into artificial product segmentation
There's an aspect of that, but the primary reason for differences between various CPUs and GPUs which have the same underlying chip is product segmentation.
Historically, there are products with high enough yield rates that it makes it irrelevant. See ATI Radeon 9500 Pro. A two byte patch in the firmware gives you an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.
Used to be now we have chiplets. The defective chips ship as some weird OEM part usually now with parts disabled. Example: Ryzen 5 3500
I don't know what Intel is doing as I quit keeping up with them. I do miss the core unlocked boards that you'd put a 2 core cpu and maybe win the lottery on and get all 4 cores.
They definitely did, but maybe you can get some good results running your own tests and determining if they really ARE bad or not, or they just overly tagged them out.
Some applications may be more fault-tolerant than others though. If an LLM glitches you can reinitialize it, maybe reshuffle the allocations a bit and it'll be fine?
I recently had a faulty A100, for some reason the provider turned off ECC on that card, so it silently failed and gave junk results... Took me a minute to figure out.
Before you get too excited about the CMP 170HX, the prices have already skyrocketed and that card doesn't have a cooler on it. It is designed for a server cooler that sounds like a jet engine. Also most of the 80GB vram unlocks have bad RAM and that is the reason they were locked in the first place, otherwise they would have became A100s.
Anyways, that's what I tell myself as I taste my bowl of sour grapes.
I'm not using octominer MB or CPU. That MB on my octominer case is running everything, it's an epyc cpu with 512gb of dram. octominer is also pcie limited, i get faster pcie lane with this.
I remember looking at research n thinking if they'd be useful for AI with their integer ops
I even looked into blog posts of using them or unlocking them somehow but I never thought to think that they actually had the full HBM memory and all just fused away??? wow
Here is where I get to smugpost about how I bought a ton for $800 each, against the disgresion of my friends and claude who did not believe in the exploit...
After which I sold most of them for $2000-$2600 (I believed the panic about the new mac studio launch) instead of holding them to sell for like $5k and making my annual income in a week. And also I failed to do the capacitor mod after buying a couple hundred in soldering equipment. But at least I sold most of them for monero, and that's gone up since and allowed me to avoid massive ebay fees.
The moral of the story here is that you can fantisize about getting in at the bottom, but even if you did you may not have rode it to the top. Plenty of people bought bitcoin when it was half a cent and sold at the local maxima to net $30k and spent it on a used corrolla.
I think my story may make your grapes less sour.
Edit: I knew at the time of purchase that the 10GB->80GB unlocks were problematic but the 8GB->64GB cards were solid. The pricing reflects this, so thats just skill issue.
I usually miss out on these things, but I'd been monitoring the eBay prices rising for inferior cards and figured this was a good bet.
Annoying thing is finding a good motherboard to put multiple blower cards in. Mining rigs are a steal but PCIe x1 limitation is annoying. Got a bunch of Volta cards too sitting around until I figure out where to put them (and the performance per watt sucks next to the 170).
> I told a friend about how I bet an unlock would come and decided to buy them when I heard about an unlock.
What an idiotic idea. The price was low because the unlock didn't exist. They won't be selling at the price you weren't buying at after the unlock was discovered! Even 8GB would have been useful if you wpuld only waited for Strata to become a thing.
I'm not saying this to you, I'm trying to punch myself in January knowing about possible 64GB rumor and just telling people about it just like you, into retroactively buying it all by posting it here. Just why, me. This has been a great way to be salty about it for a whole year...
That's why this works. The yield on those HBM stacks is excellent. The binned cards had failures in the logic die, and hyperscalers want uniformity in their clusters. That's why the mining market took the downbinned cards.
Some testing can be done with a wafer probe, but other tests require stressing the die -- high current, heat output -- so it has to be in-package to do those tests.
Mounting the HBM on the interposer has to happen before putting the interposer in the package.
So it's the "must be in-package" yield tests that drive this.
Anecdotically, 64GB works extremely reliably on 8GB cards after unlock.
It is much more of "let's sell cards to crypto people, but nerf them, to not harm our enterprise margins", not "we've got a ton of subpar hardware, let's to something with it".
crypto was a real boom... I could imagine these cards were already in production when the crypto guys came along willing to give lots of $$$ for them, but wanting really short lead times...
I have a grey market a100 that had hbm errors but the card used some of its spare rows to remap. I believe they introduced this with ampere, and I was a little annoyed that my “new” card had these but I got it so cheap I didn’t really care. It was 7k usd (vs 9k and 10k) and I remember being unsure if it was worth it… None of them needed to remap any more in they years I’ve had them but I think I got that one so cheap because of it. The most expensive one came from the best rated seller and appears to be an engineering sample but has passed every test I’ve thrown at it, the only thing “wrong” with it is that I can set the power limit to whatever I want? This was back when b100 was about to be formally announced and before the pricing so eBay sellers were trying to unload them.
> In one of the most extreme manifestations of product segmentation, the CMP 170HX, an Ethereum mining card with nominally 8 or 10 GB of application-exposed framebuffer capacity, actually comes with, respectively, ~80 and ~40 GB of HBM onboard!
wtf, it seems RAM truly was too cheap back then...
The card was initially priced at over 4 grand and it had its capabilities severely reduced to make it not compete with real GPUs.
Plus: most of those cards probably have broken RAM chips anyway. Throwing them out would be a waste, limiting trash chips to a small amount of RAM that does work turns recycling costs into a product that can be sold for money.
The marginal cost to fabricate the GPU die with the full ram allotment, and then disable a portion for 1) salvaging otherwise useless die's with partly bad ram for lower ram use cards; or 2) market segmentation; is tiny compared to the marginal cost of creating X different masks and fabricating X different die's, one specific to each market segment/ram size amount.
In addition, fabricating the same die for every SKU point in the product line means the maker does not have to guess how many version X vs. version Y vs. version Z dies to fabricate. The just have one fabricated. Then the dies become SKU version X, Y or Z as demand requires during the card assembly process.
Selling anything that has been purposely hamstrung to limit available capabilities for market reasons seems morally repugnant beyond words. I understand walling off die defects but if it is functional that is disgusting.
You’re going to be very disappointed to discover that this is common practice for many technology products. It’s cheaper and less risky to design a small number of things and then segment their capabilities than it is to make custom things for every different market segment.
It’s also useful for binning: These lower spec locked products can have defects in the unused parts, like flakey memory regions or channels. Not every CMP170 can be fully usable after unlocks.
The alternative to this market segmentation isn’t “Everyone gets the whole thing for the lowest price”. It’s that the lower price version doesn’t exist at all, or if it does it’s a lot more expensive.
With a bit of nuance of understanding it's not that wild or egregious, and no one is really getting cheated.
Basically the high price of the fully unlocked models is what makes it possible to sell artificially limited models at the lower price point (while also offering the ability to possibly sell lower binned units). Basically you can gas the profit on the high-end to drive down the cost on the low end, but obviously this only works if you have a distinct High and Low end.
People think that if we banned this practice it would lead to the top shelf models being sold at the bottom shelf price. But that's just naive market confusion. A ban would just mean that the top shelf unit at a higher price and the lower shelf unit at a higher price would be available.
There is no solve to the "problem" that results in "High shelf unit being sold at lower cost", in fact the thing you are complaining about is already the closest to that ideal, as the manufacturer can leverage economies of scale to drive down costs across the product line.
I understand your position, but as someone who prefers the lower end products (and the lower end prices!), this policy would be detrimental for me.
At the beginning of a product, when yields are bad, I could get a low tier chip at a good price, but then as yields get better, low tier chips wouldn't be available and I no longer have a low cost option. Presumably higher yields would lead to reduced prices on the higher tier chips, but I don't think they'd get down to where the low tier chips were.
Another alternative is that the maker only ever sells chips that test successfully as high tier, but I think it's repugnant to not make use of parts with defects if the defects can be gated off.
Its not economies of scale. Why or how would you even etch a worse pattern on the same fabrication node? They don’t even have a mask for the worse version its literally just the same pattern with more defects.
This wouldn't really work for AMD processors... They could design and fab a 6-core chiplet, but it would need to be the same size as the 8-core chiplets so it would interface to the same carriers. If the footprint is the same, the fab cost is roughly the same, so spending the design time on that doesn't make sense. If they build separate carriers, that's more design time and inventory management and it may well be more expensive than just building 8-cores and disabling two.
That said, with Zen6 having 12 cores per chiplet, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually end up designing a smaller chiplet with 6 cores and a dedicated small chiplet carrier. Or push 6 core SKUs to the APU side that doesn't use chiplets, Zen5 APUs already have specialized masks for some of their SKUs.
No, they can't. The lower tier chips exist pretty much entirely because they can be easily converted from the higher tier chips that are defective. Purpose-building a lower tier chip would be a ludicrously expensive thing to do, or else they'd already be doing that.
A fun example of this is Apple, who used to build three dies for each M-series generation (base, Pro, Max) but now build just two (base, Pro/Max). You'd think one of the most bespoke companies on the planet would not be moving to fewer dies unless there were very compelling reasons to do so.
I think the idea is that as technology improves, you can get better technology for the same price. That's what the system of capitalism promised to us.
That does tend to happen... an 8 core Zen 5 (9700X) costs about the same today as the 6 core Zen 5 (9600X) did two years ago. But even if AMD doesn't have any defective 9700X to disable cores and sell as 9600X, they still want to attract the value buyer and so they'll take some perfectly fine chips, disable two cores and sell them as 9600X for less than the 9700X. They lose some margin, but they make it up in volume as we were promised.
This is one of the reasons a market is superior to centralized taste-setters. Despite the fact that both a seller and buyer can agree on a price for a less capable product, taste-makers often have these strange neuroses about what they should be paying for.
All sorts of reasonable interactions are then policed by people with visceral reactions to normal activity.
Imagine a world without this, where nothing was hamstrung and there was only one price point instead of a hamstrung low price and a nonhamstrung high price.
That one price would be somewhere between the low price and the high price. So, the world you want to live in would be one where "the poor" who currently pay the low price would need to pay more. And "the rich" would get a discount from their high price they pay currently. That seems morally repugnant beyond words.
Best not to imagine because they're both sold way past the manufacturing cost and I'm not under the impression that nvidia puts all the money back into development.
The margins are irrelevant here. If Nvidia sold them for the exact cost of manufacturing, people would just scoop them up and re-sell them to the highest bidder. So in the case of 0% margin, some useless middle-man would get to profit.
It's really no different. They are selling you a product with X advertised specs, and indeed the specs you can access as the customer (at least out of the box) are those exact advertised specs.
There ought to be a law which stipulates that these segments are "soft," for the purpose of selling a working but partially defective product (and segmented due to that defect), and permit customers to undo the segmentation at their own risk. DMCA should not protect this practice IMO.
It's utterly crazy that anyone outside Nvidia knows any of this, much less all of it. Has there been a years long public reverse engineering effort that I didn't hear about until now?
Yes, there actually was a years long public reverse engineering effort; since 2023 there were some academic papers, solving parts of it. It has sped up a lot recently, probably due to accumulated knowledge, and due to AI use.
> In a properly secured design, a blown fuse should always induce a more restrictive state, because a blown fuse cannot be unblown in an economically feasible way.
I disagree: If there's any risk that the fuse will blow with normal usage, then a blown fuse means a defective product.
These are not safety fuses. They will never, in normal use, blow. These are fuses used only in a logic circuit. There is a way that the factory can make the fuse blow and then the circuit code or whatever can check is that fuse blowing and if so it will not do something.
This is great. I’m actually trying to unlock the 80G in a CMP 170HX the software way for the last 2 weeks (still no luck).
I just don’t know if I’m brave enough (and knowledgeable enough) to go this blown fuses way. Seems a lot more risky.
P.S. I now see this is for the 8GB model, which is insane. The 10G one is the one that until now was proven to have 80G, but never fully accessible through CUDA (it was accessible using CPU memory copy though - much slower).
Imagine if cars were like this: "We will sell you this Ferrari for $2K and it will perform like a Chevy Vega until you give us another $200K, which will unlock the hardware."
Swear to God, this is absolutely true. Had a friend who had a RAV4. No tow package for low end torq. So... waited a few months, spotted a programmer on Craigslist, said it had tow mode. It had 4 more models too. Super tow, super economy and stock. Buyer was beside themselves, learned how well they worked, and would switch to super eco on one ramps. ( really a bad idea, so they stopped...)
there are several functions where blowing a fuse on an NVIDIA die can grant you more access, not less. In a properly secured design, a blown fuse should always induce a more restrictive state, because a blown fuse cannot be unblown in an economically feasible way.
Not really.
If the fuses are for security, sure. But these aren't.
These fuses are for economic extraction. Doing it the way NVIDIA did it is a safety feature: it ensures that blowing a fuse will never destroy economic value -- it will never turn a card that was previously able to do something correctly into a card that can no longer do that thing correctly.
No, that's absolutely not the perspective of the bean counters at hardware companies. The fuses are also for economic security. If someone wants more features, you make sure that they paid for them. You don't give away higher tier SKU functionality for free. There was probably some cost/engineering justification for it, possibly like you say! Maybe too high of yield. This will almost certainly be removed in the next revision, as have all the many other similar cases before it.
For those unaware, product tiers come naturally with IC's, by disabling physical sections of the chip that can't work due to inevitable manufacturing defects. You don't throw defective chips away, you layout in a way where you can physically cut off those defective sections of the chip, with a saw and/or with a fuse, in a way that minimizes lost sales. This works great in the beginning, when your yields are low and you're still dialing in the manufacturing process. But, as yields increase, you might not have enough of the lower tier chips to meet demand. So you, just fuse otherwise good chips. Chips are cheap, after all! New revisions are not cheap, so features/bugs like this can remain around for a while.
In both IC companies I worked for, had around 6 ICs. If you opened any of them up, you would see the exact same die in every one. After a couple years of great yield, you would then find half missing in the lowest tier.
Considering how unobtainium GPUs have become nvidia could get a PR win by publishing unlocks for all their outdated hardware. ... people are figuring it out anyways, might as well embrace it.
Unlocks and VRam upgrades, like VRam sim slots, and a VRom slot that ran Linux, had its own GUI for reconfiguration. Like old 68k macs that have a selectable os in the boot roms.
Unlocking regular GPUs into Quadro GPUS via resoldering some resistors was a thing long ago, so I'm not surprised this is possible; but that didn't unlock any extra VRAM.
These findings were disclosed to NVIDIA’s product security team ahead of the publication of this article.
Why on earth would you disable so much HBM from the factory. That's incredibly wasteful. No wonder these things cost an arm and a leg. It was already clear the money was going to the HBM primarily. Either the post is wrong or this is actually rediculous.
Human psychology and money. If I offer a small, medium, and large of something, you're more likely to buy something rather than if I only offer one thing and you must like that one thing.
If someone wants to build a local AI GPU farm today, should they go out and buy a bunch of these? Or has the price already gone up too much to make it a good deal and is the "yield" you'd get (from things like bad segments of RAM, unreliability of the unlocks, SM lottery, etc.) too inconsistent?
A month or two back I saw available 5090s at 5k euro and thought that is robbery. Now there aren't any and third party sellers (none of the big chains have them) list at 10k plus
A "fuse" in this context are transistors and bit-addressable RAM with no erase lines in chip, not physical fuses. They can't be unblown without a Star Trek replicator, or at least like a high powered electron microscope or something.
efuses use electromigration whereby a higher than normal voltage causes metal to migrate away from the junction, not a wire getting burnt through like a regular sacrificial fuse.
If you wanted to patch a die the only real means is through a FIB (Focused Ion Beam) workstation, and even then you need the die structure to allow it (you have to mill your way into the chip and can't have any functional layers in between you and the patch you want to makey), and even when doable it would be an insanely expensive, time-consuming and likely fragile project.
amelius | a day ago
(which is the more likely scenario because they can make much more money on enterprise/datacenter products, see DRAM)
stingraycharles | a day ago
amelius | a day ago
Testing hardware is a complicated matter (you can do a PhD on the topic), and nvidia probably does a better job at it than a hacker in their basement who thinks they can upgrade their GPU for free.
On the other hand ... perhaps a few bit errors is not a problem for AI workloads ... but they could also crash your system ...
swiftcoder | 16 hours ago
jamesnorden | 21 minutes ago
Except he literally did.
mmo93 | a day ago
BeeOnRope | a day ago
amelius | 23 hours ago
Which is why I think these devices are more likely to be faulty.
lukan | 22 hours ago
gabrielhidasy | 19 hours ago
sidewndr46 | 22 hours ago
LoganDark | 15 hours ago
hypercube33 | 12 hours ago
I don't know what Intel is doing as I quit keeping up with them. I do miss the core unlocked boards that you'd put a 2 core cpu and maybe win the lottery on and get all 4 cores.
userbinator | 9 hours ago
phelix001 | a day ago
nom | a day ago
the8472 | 23 hours ago
b112 | 22 hours ago
wil421 | 2 hours ago
superxpro12 | 21 hours ago
sva_ | 22 hours ago
I recently had a faulty A100, for some reason the provider turned off ECC on that card, so it silently failed and gave junk results... Took me a minute to figure out.
fn-mote | 18 hours ago
sva_ | 18 hours ago
bob1029 | 21 hours ago
puzzlingcaptcha | 19 hours ago
samlinnfer | a day ago
Anyways, that's what I tell myself as I taste my bowl of sour grapes.
whizzter | a day ago
That said, 80G for something that you picked up for cheap could be an absolute steal these days.
roger_ | 23 hours ago
Currently listening to the soothing drone of my $200 Octominer cooling my cards while I'm fine tuning a model (almost makes a good space heater).
segmondy | 22 hours ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wjr59t/768gb_v...
roger_ | 21 hours ago
How are you dealing with the RAM limit (32GB)? I had upgraded mine to an i7 but it was unstable so I’m back to the stock Celeron class CPU.
segmondy | 16 hours ago
roger_ | 23 hours ago
Bad RAM isn't a huge issue as you can flag and ignore the relevant regions and be down a few MB.
r_lee | 23 hours ago
I even looked into blog posts of using them or unlocking them somehow but I never thought to think that they actually had the full HBM memory and all just fused away??? wow
NoidFonsense | 16 hours ago
After which I sold most of them for $2000-$2600 (I believed the panic about the new mac studio launch) instead of holding them to sell for like $5k and making my annual income in a week. And also I failed to do the capacitor mod after buying a couple hundred in soldering equipment. But at least I sold most of them for monero, and that's gone up since and allowed me to avoid massive ebay fees.
The moral of the story here is that you can fantisize about getting in at the bottom, but even if you did you may not have rode it to the top. Plenty of people bought bitcoin when it was half a cent and sold at the local maxima to net $30k and spent it on a used corrolla.
I think my story may make your grapes less sour.
Edit: I knew at the time of purchase that the 10GB->80GB unlocks were problematic but the 8GB->64GB cards were solid. The pricing reflects this, so thats just skill issue.
Foobar8568 | 16 hours ago
SillyUsername | a day ago
Maxious | 21 hours ago
roger_ | a day ago
Hard to believe $1k was a deal a few months ago (and $200 before then).
gravypod | a day ago
The highs and lows of my predictive capabilities
roger_ | 23 hours ago
Annoying thing is finding a good motherboard to put multiple blower cards in. Mining rigs are a steal but PCIe x1 limitation is annoying. Got a bunch of Volta cards too sitting around until I figure out where to put them (and the performance per watt sucks next to the 170).
octoberfranklin | 18 hours ago
ForOldHack | 17 hours ago
numpad0 | 16 hours ago
What an idiotic idea. The price was low because the unlock didn't exist. They won't be selling at the price you weren't buying at after the unlock was discovered! Even 8GB would have been useful if you wpuld only waited for Strata to become a thing.
I'm not saying this to you, I'm trying to punch myself in January knowing about possible 64GB rumor and just telling people about it just like you, into retroactively buying it all by posting it here. Just why, me. This has been a great way to be salty about it for a whole year...
Kevin_Flynn | 23 hours ago
htrp | 23 hours ago
cromka | 22 hours ago
octoberfranklin | 18 hours ago
That's why this works. The yield on those HBM stacks is excellent. The binned cards had failures in the logic die, and hyperscalers want uniformity in their clusters. That's why the mining market took the downbinned cards.
londons_explore | 15 hours ago
monster_truck | 11 hours ago
octoberfranklin | 8 hours ago
Mounting the HBM on the interposer has to happen before putting the interposer in the package.
So it's the "must be in-package" yield tests that drive this.
qurren | 21 hours ago
kmike84 | 20 hours ago
It is much more of "let's sell cards to crypto people, but nerf them, to not harm our enterprise margins", not "we've got a ton of subpar hardware, let's to something with it".
londons_explore | 15 hours ago
legitronics | 11 hours ago
tencentshill | 18 hours ago
mschuster91 | 23 hours ago
wtf, it seems RAM truly was too cheap back then...
throwaway_new_1 | 23 hours ago
mitxela | 22 hours ago
jeroenhd | 22 hours ago
Plus: most of those cards probably have broken RAM chips anyway. Throwing them out would be a waste, limiting trash chips to a small amount of RAM that does work turns recycling costs into a product that can be sold for money.
pwg | 22 hours ago
In addition, fabricating the same die for every SKU point in the product line means the maker does not have to guess how many version X vs. version Y vs. version Z dies to fabricate. The just have one fabricated. Then the dies become SKU version X, Y or Z as demand requires during the card assembly process.
ForHackernews | 23 hours ago
Wait, so does this unlock it to actually do something useful, or just "mine" marginally more shas?
coffeebeqn | 22 hours ago
ipsum2 | 17 hours ago
KiwiJohnno | 11 hours ago
mr_roboto | 22 hours ago
judge2020 | 22 hours ago
So I guess the next step is to stop selling the lower-binned card? https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-repor...
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50452839
gengelbro | 22 hours ago
Aurornis | 22 hours ago
It’s also useful for binning: These lower spec locked products can have defects in the unused parts, like flakey memory regions or channels. Not every CMP170 can be fully usable after unlocks.
The alternative to this market segmentation isn’t “Everyone gets the whole thing for the lowest price”. It’s that the lower price version doesn’t exist at all, or if it does it’s a lot more expensive.
WarmWash | 21 hours ago
Basically the high price of the fully unlocked models is what makes it possible to sell artificially limited models at the lower price point (while also offering the ability to possibly sell lower binned units). Basically you can gas the profit on the high-end to drive down the cost on the low end, but obviously this only works if you have a distinct High and Low end.
People think that if we banned this practice it would lead to the top shelf models being sold at the bottom shelf price. But that's just naive market confusion. A ban would just mean that the top shelf unit at a higher price and the lower shelf unit at a higher price would be available.
There is no solve to the "problem" that results in "High shelf unit being sold at lower cost", in fact the thing you are complaining about is already the closest to that ideal, as the manufacturer can leverage economies of scale to drive down costs across the product line.
toast0 | 21 hours ago
At the beginning of a product, when yields are bad, I could get a low tier chip at a good price, but then as yields get better, low tier chips wouldn't be available and I no longer have a low cost option. Presumably higher yields would lead to reduced prices on the higher tier chips, but I don't think they'd get down to where the low tier chips were.
Another alternative is that the maker only ever sells chips that test successfully as high tier, but I think it's repugnant to not make use of parts with defects if the defects can be gated off.
tintor | 21 hours ago
WarmWash | 21 hours ago
bethekidyouwant | 21 hours ago
WarmWash | 20 hours ago
cowlevel | 15 hours ago
bethekidyouwant | 13 hours ago
tintor | 14 hours ago
Each wafer is printed separately. They don't build new custom production line for each new design.
toast0 | 20 hours ago
That said, with Zen6 having 12 cores per chiplet, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually end up designing a smaller chiplet with 6 cores and a dedicated small chiplet carrier. Or push 6 core SKUs to the APU side that doesn't use chiplets, Zen5 APUs already have specialized masks for some of their SKUs.
deaton | 18 hours ago
LoganDark | 15 hours ago
cowlevel | 15 hours ago
toast0 | 12 hours ago
arjie | 21 hours ago
All sorts of reasonable interactions are then policed by people with visceral reactions to normal activity.
IncreasePosts | 20 hours ago
That one price would be somewhere between the low price and the high price. So, the world you want to live in would be one where "the poor" who currently pay the low price would need to pay more. And "the rich" would get a discount from their high price they pay currently. That seems morally repugnant beyond words.
Grimeton | 17 hours ago
At least not the development of GPUs.
IncreasePosts | 16 hours ago
deaton | 18 hours ago
rustcleaner | 11 hours ago
mitxela | 22 hours ago
kmike84 | 22 hours ago
userbinator | 9 hours ago
AnthonBerg | 2 hours ago
Klein-bottle-shaped leopard's eating face
octoberfranklin | 18 hours ago
Buy a shitton of these things, spend a year working on the unlock. If you find one, sell the shitton at 5x higher price (which is what happened).
gwbas1c | 22 hours ago
I disagree: If there's any risk that the fuse will blow with normal usage, then a blown fuse means a defective product.
bluGill | 22 hours ago
cowlevel | 15 hours ago
low_tech_punk | 22 hours ago
Joke aside, good investigation and blog debut, kate!
tintor | 21 hours ago
tclancy | 20 hours ago
ForOldHack | 17 hours ago
notenchange | 21 hours ago
I just don’t know if I’m brave enough (and knowledgeable enough) to go this blown fuses way. Seems a lot more risky.
P.S. I now see this is for the 8GB model, which is insane. The 10G one is the one that until now was proven to have 80G, but never fully accessible through CUDA (it was accessible using CPU memory copy though - much slower).
roger_ | 17 hours ago
dylanger | 19 hours ago
dreamcompiler | 19 hours ago
Oh wait, cars are like this now.
ForOldHack | 17 hours ago
Hacking is a good thing.
octoberfranklin | 19 hours ago
Not really.
If the fuses are for security, sure. But these aren't.
These fuses are for economic extraction. Doing it the way NVIDIA did it is a safety feature: it ensures that blowing a fuse will never destroy economic value -- it will never turn a card that was previously able to do something correctly into a card that can no longer do that thing correctly.
swinglock | 18 hours ago
nomel | 18 hours ago
For those unaware, product tiers come naturally with IC's, by disabling physical sections of the chip that can't work due to inevitable manufacturing defects. You don't throw defective chips away, you layout in a way where you can physically cut off those defective sections of the chip, with a saw and/or with a fuse, in a way that minimizes lost sales. This works great in the beginning, when your yields are low and you're still dialing in the manufacturing process. But, as yields increase, you might not have enough of the lower tier chips to meet demand. So you, just fuse otherwise good chips. Chips are cheap, after all! New revisions are not cheap, so features/bugs like this can remain around for a while.
In both IC companies I worked for, had around 6 ICs. If you opened any of them up, you would see the exact same die in every one. After a couple years of great yield, you would then find half missing in the lowest tier.
nullc | 17 hours ago
ForOldHack | 17 hours ago
moffkalast | 14 hours ago
userbinator | 9 hours ago
myself248 | 17 hours ago
Seems like that would considerably speed up the process, by letting the host continue to run while only the target cycles.
richlow | 15 hours ago
Secondly you never spoke about the squeaky bum moment of actually making the change. Crikey that would have been a long moment.
EmX_3000 | 14 hours ago
userbinator | 9 hours ago
These findings were disclosed to NVIDIA’s product security team ahead of the publication of this article.
WTF. Does the boot taste that good?
edg5000 | 8 hours ago
solyin | 8 hours ago
rkagerer | 2 hours ago
rootsudo | 2 hours ago
nomorewords | an hour ago
kmike84 | an hour ago
andai | 2 hours ago
Isn't it like a bit of solder? Or is the problem that the solder would have to be a nanometer across?
numpad0 | 2 hours ago
arghwhat | 2 hours ago
If you wanted to patch a die the only real means is through a FIB (Focused Ion Beam) workstation, and even then you need the die structure to allow it (you have to mill your way into the chip and can't have any functional layers in between you and the patch you want to makey), and even when doable it would be an insanely expensive, time-consuming and likely fragile project.