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Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

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Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#51

Post by [deleted] »

wtallis wrote: post #31
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, binning is good for the business AND for the consumer.

When "binning" refers to the practice of putting premium prices on parts that test as being capable of operating at higher clock speeds or lower voltages, that's good for the consumer. When it refers to die harvesting - selling the chip with a defective section disabled - that's also good for the consumer. When it refers to crippling a chip that has already passed QA, it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressu…

[deleted]

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#52

Post by scotty79 »

wtallis wrote: post #31
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, binning is good for the business AND for the consumer.

When "binning" refers to the practice of putting premium prices on parts that test as being capable of operating at higher clock speeds or lower voltages, that's good for the consumer. When it refers to die harvesting - selling the chip with a defective section disabled - that's also good for the consumer. When it refers to crippling a chip that has already passed QA, it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressu…

> it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressure

Exactly. That's as if fast food chain just before serving food to customer added ingredient that would made food taste worse (and or be less healthy) in order to be able to sell you same food without this ingredient at premium price.

We don't see such behavior because in fast food industry we have heavy competition. Not so much in GPU market where two companies have most of the market and entry barriers are high.

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#53

Post by gdsimoes »

memset wrote: post #23

The corresponding reddit thread is quite insightful: "It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets... Now, this is the part you hate: this is the only viable alternative. There's no point demanding different designs for different market segments as that would significantly increase the cost you, the consumer, pays. You can demand chips be sold at lo…

I think it's incredible how some people enjoy getting screwed over. I have a friend that actually thinks it's a good thing that iPhones break easily.

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#54

Post by sliverstorm »

wtallis wrote: post #31
sliverstorm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, binning is good for the business AND for the consumer.

When "binning" refers to the practice of putting premium prices on parts that test as being capable of operating at higher clock speeds or lower voltages, that's good for the consumer. When it refers to die harvesting - selling the chip with a defective section disabled - that's also good for the consumer. When it refers to crippling a chip that has already passed QA, it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressu…

When it refers to crippling a chip that has already passed QA, it's a symptom of insufficient competitive pressure.

I don't know, as I'm familiar with it early in the development of a process node they sell every top-bin-SKU they can make, and as the process matures they just have too many top-bin parts. I can only guess your argument is that in a competitive market they would start dropping the price of the top-bin SKU to move them, but that reduces the overall profit of the venture which may drive them to increase initial pricing, if profit margins are thin enough.

Basically what I'd argue is that the pricing is the symptom, not the down-binning. Down-binning exists to maintain & stabilize SKU distinction and pricing, as yields change over the life of a product.

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#55

Post by n3rdy »

eksith wrote: post #10

So this is basically a change of the PCI device ID. The capabilities are essentially the same; he just changed the device signature. A cool hack nonetheless. Edit: After looking at the screenshots closer, that seems to be the case. The device ID 0x11BA becomes 0x118F. Vendor ID remains 0x10DE on both. Memory, CPU and other important stuff are basically the same. Very cool!

Maybe the configuration is a little different too.

If the professional counterpart is actually worse for gaming, perhaps its because the resources are allocated to supporting multiple displays instead? In that case, is it reasonable to consider this crippling the device?

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#56

Post by seanp2k2 »

ippisl wrote: post #33
memset wrote: post #23

The corresponding reddit thread is quite insightful: "It is far cheaper to make one very good chip for the highest market, and modify it slightly for lower end markets... Now, this is the part you hate: this is the only viable alternative. There's no point demanding different designs for different market segments as that would significantly increase the cost you, the consumer, pays. You can demand chips be sold at lo…

It's possible for nvidia to replace the resistors with one-time-programable memory ,and program it at factory. And it's cheap, it's being used in $1 FPGA from silicon blue. And they'll probably do this in their next chip.

I don't even know if they'd bother to do this due to the handful of people who are actually going to buy the gaming card to make it into a pro card.

Most people who are probably doing this are hobbyists at best. Most professionals would probably just have their company buying the cards anyway, and this hack won't at all change that.

Actually, it being a hardware hack rather than a software hack makes it even less appealing even for small shops to try. "You want to take that new $400 video card that we just bought you and do /what/ to it?" vs. "ooh, it's just a software upgrade" (even though both have the very real chance of bricking the card in inexperienced hands).

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#57

Post by scotty79 »

That's funny how we feel about things:

FastFood monopolist adding too much salt to its cheapest food products so it can sell less salty versions of same products at premium prices ... seems severely pathological.

Hardware monopolist crippling cheapest products so it can sell non-crippled ones at premium prices ... sort of ambiguous. Legit market strategy or conning customers?

Graphic design software make selling crippled versions of their software cheaper so it can sell fully featured version at premium price. Totally legit.

What's the difference?

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#58

Post by wonginator1221 »

asveikau wrote: post #26

Wouldn't it be easier (and less risky to your hardware) to make the kernel lie about the device ID? Or modify the nvidia kernel blob to compare against another ID?

I suspect it might be possible by modifying the device field in the pci_dev struct [1] in include/linux/pci.h when the device is initialized.

[1] http://www.makelinux.net/ldd3/chp-14-sect-6

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#59

Post by sneak »

fosk wrote: post #6
sargun wrote: post #5

I don't entirely know how I feel about this hack. I feel like this is really similar to unlocking the "Professional" version of a piece of software with a serial key generator. Although, I understand hardware is dramatically different than software, it's using the same principal -- the same reusable bits to assemble many different products, and then just using tools to mask features unless a user pays for them. Then…

I think that if I own a piece of hardware, I am the sole owner of every single chip and screw on it, including every hardware hack that it may have. On the other side, usually you don't own the software but only a license that grants you permission to use it.

What about my laptop? Do I own the RAM? Can I put any bytes I want into it? How about the ones that cause software to skip a license check?

Re: Resistor hack turns a Nvidia GTX690 into a Quadro K5000 or Tesla K10

#60

Post by danilocampos »

GhotiFish wrote: post #49
danilocampos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about principles, it's about economics. This is a matter of price discrimination. Nvidia wants to be sure they have a chance to sell their gear to every single person who has money to spend on graphics cards at a range of price points. Consumers have smaller wallets than professionals, but both have similar needs. So the company performs a "hack" that allows them to extract maximum revenues from each segment…

Yes. That's a wonderful rhetoric, but really what it's saying is that the only people who don't deserve being screwed are the people that make it a hobby to tinker. There's many other areas of life to specialize in, not just technology/engineering side of things. I think general fair play trumps an incentive to learn and hack.

What makes price discrimination unfair? Nvidia needs to recover costs and earn a profit. They do so by segmenting the market. That they are able to do so in this way suggests that no one else is able to perform the R&D necessary to sell these tools at a lower cost.

Who's getting screwed? The gamers who lose out on pro features many don't even need?

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