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Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

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Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#51
post #6

Skimming the readme this is p2p over PCIe and not NVLink in case anyone was wondering.

RTX 40 doesn’t have NVLink on the PCBs, though the silicon has to have it, since some sibling cards support it. I’d expect it to be fused off.

A cursory google search suggests that it's been removed at the silicon level.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#52
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the sense that any other government regulation is also ultimately backed by the state's monopoly on legal use of force when other measures have failed. Good point. He was only (“only”) really calling for international cooperation and literal air strikes against big datacenters that weren’t cooperating. This would presumably be more of a no-knock raid, breaching your door with a battering ram and throwing tear ga…

... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed. Which under the premise that AGI is an existential threat would be far more reasonable than many other reasons for raids. If the premise is wrong we won't need it. If society coordinates to not do the dangerous thing we won't need it. The argument is that only in the case where we find ourselves in the situation where other measures have failed such uses of fo…

> ... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed

One question for you. In this hypothetical where AGI is truly considered such a grave threat, do you believe the reaction to this threat will be similar to, or substantially gentler than, the reaction to threats we face today like “terrorism” and “drugs”? And, if similar: do you believe suspected drug labs get a court order before the state resorts to a police raid?

> I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal.

Well, as regards EliY and airstrikes, I’m more projecting my internal attitude that it is utterly unserious, rather than seriously engaging with whether or not it is odious. But in earnest: if you are proposing a policy that involves air strikes on data centers, you should understand what countries have data centers, and you should understand that this policy risks escalation into a much broader conflict. And if you’re proposing a policy in which conflict between nuclear superpowers is a very plausible outcome — potentially incurring the loss of billions of lives and degradation of the earth’s environment — you really should be able to reason about why people might reasonably think that your proposal is deranged, even if you happen to think it justified by an even greater threat. Failure to understand these concerns will not aid you in overcoming deep skepticism.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#53
post #48
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... after regulation, court orders and fines have failed. Which under the premise that AGI is an existential threat would be far more reasonable than many other reasons for raids. If the premise is wrong we won't need it. If society coordinates to not do the dangerous thing we won't need it. The argument is that only in the case where we find ourselves in the situation where other measures have failed such uses of fo…

> I'm not seeing the odiousness of the proposal. If bio research gets commodified and easy enough that every kid can build a new airborne virus in their basement we'd need raids on that too. Either you create even better bio research to neutralize said viruses... or you die trying... Like if you go with the raid strategy and fail to raid just one terrorist that's it, game over.

Those arguments do not transfer well to the AGI topic. You can't create counter-AGI, since that's also an intelligent agent which would be just as dangerous. And chips are more bottlenecked than biologics (... though gene synthesizing machines could be a similar bottleneck and raiding vendors which illegally sell those might be viable in such a scenario).

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to unfuse it?

I don't know about this particular scenario, but typically fuses are small wires or resistors that are overloaded so they irreversibly break the connection. Hence the name. Either done during manufacture or as a one-time programming[1][2]. Though sometimes reprogrammable configuration bits are sometimes also called fuse bits. The Atmega328P of Arduino fame uses flash[3] for its "fuses". [1]: https://www.nxp.com/docs/…

Wires, flash, and resistors can be replaced

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#57
And here I thought (PCIe) P2P was there since SLI dropped the bridge (for the unfamiliar, it looks and acts pretty much like an NVLink bridge for regular PCIe slot cards that have NVLink, and was used back in the day to share framebuffer and similar in high-end gaming setups).

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#58

I was always fascinated by George Hotz's hacking abilities. Inspired me a lot for my personal projects.

I agree, I feel so inspired with his streams. Focus and hard work, the key to good results. Add a clear vision and strategy, and you can also accomplish “success”.

Congratulations to him and all the tinygrad/comma contributors.

Re: Hacked Nvidia 4090 GPU driver to enable P2P

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about this particular scenario, but typically fuses are small wires or resistors that are overloaded so they irreversibly break the connection. Hence the name. Either done during manufacture or as a one-time programming[1][2]. Though sometimes reprogrammable configuration bits are sometimes also called fuse bits. The Atmega328P of Arduino fame uses flash[3] for its "fuses". [1]: https://www.nxp.com/docs/…

Wires, flash, and resistors can be replaced

Not at the scale we're talking about here. These structures are very thin, far thinner than bond wires which is about the largest structure size you can handle without a very, very specialized lab. And you'd need to unsolder the chip, de-cap it, hope the fuse wire you're trying to override is at the top layer, and that you can re-cap the chip afterwards and successfully solder it back on again.

This may be workable for a nation state or a billion dollar megacorp, but not for your average hobbyist hacker.

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