Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

eevblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 196 posts

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

#161

Post by Retric »

martincmartin wrote: post #140
joelthelion wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a situation where capitalism doesn't lead to the most economically efficient solution. The company and the consumers are rational, yet for no additional cost, everyone could be benefiting from better hardware. Unfortunately I don't have a better system to propose :)

Why is that? The major cost is the one-time cost of designing the chip, not producing it. Software is even more extreme: the distribution costs are essentially zero. That doesn't mean the most economically efficient solution is for the software to sell for nothing.

That's not really true, for small runs design time is a significant cost, but at scale it's mostly a question of manufacturing and capital costs.

Consider, Intel produces a wide range of CPU designs specifically because production capacity is what is most expensive. Video cards are something of a special case because they are highly redundant so companies can sell highly damaged chips as slightly different models. However, demand rarely matches the rate of defects so often chips are sold below capacity.

What confuses the issue is 'pro' cards that may preform worse than 'gamer' cards, but cost a lot more. However, that's more a case of different needs. Consider, stability is a lot more important to the 'pro' market which down clocking provides. Toss in some driver tweaks and a small market and you end up with a high priced product that does not cost more to manufacture.

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

#162

Post by Goronmon »

chii wrote: post #124
sergiosgc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't about just being profitable, it's about extracting maximum value from every customer. Ideally, the company would haggle with each and every customer, and get each customer to pay the highest price he in particular accepts. Since haggling is not feasible in mass markets, customers get grouped in segments, where the price is set to the maximum the segment will accept. Clearly, if you misclassify a hacker into…

Yep. in my view, if the product is already profitable at a lower segment, and they manage to sell it to the pros for a higher price, then the company is making undeserved money, rightly so, bears the anger of their customers when found out.

Yep. in my view, if the product is already profitable at a lower segment, and they manage to sell it to the pros for a higher price, then the company is making undeserved money, rightly so, bears the anger of their customers when found out.

I completely disagree. Even if it was as simple as just charging "pros" more money (it's not), the idea that this is somehow "undeserved money" is pretty ridiculous in it's own right.

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

#163

Post by kale »

podperson wrote: post #152
joelthelion wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a situation where capitalism doesn't lead to the most economically efficient solution. The company and the consumers are rational, yet for no additional cost, everyone could be benefiting from better hardware. Unfortunately I don't have a better system to propose :)

There's a "law" somewhere that says if a vendor can segment a msrket easily it will. Hence academic software pricing, lunch menus, military discounts for movie tickets, and so on. If there's a simple way to segment a market it will always be profitable to do so (unless you somehow piss off one of your segments, I suppose).

Academic Software pricing and military/age discounts for tickets are direct price discrimination, where you can identify groups and prevent any arbitrage.

nVidia chips are a classic example of indirect price discrimination, where you can't prevent arbitrage. In tech this is common because both hardware and software have huge upfront costs (new fab design, coding and testing software), and it's cheaper to produce one and cripple than it is two different designs.

Without the "high- margin" fully unlocked segments, businesses might not pursue projects at all, or greatly reduce the scope and budget for R&D. It feels wrong because humans are much more wired to feel loss than unrealized gains, but it is the best solution for everyone.

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

#164

Post by SODaniel »

ck2 wrote: post #87

I repeat, this does NOT make your GTX 6XX card faster, nor does it make it slower. So what is the difference then?

As the article clearly states the function of the hack is to allow the card to run with alternative drivers, providing lacking functionality under Linux.

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

#165

Post by mseebach »

joelthelion wrote: post #123
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 just a situation where capitalism doesn't lead to the most economically efficient solution. The company and the consumers are rational, yet for no additional cost, everyone could be benefiting from better hardware. Unfortunately I don't have a better system to propose :)

The biggest problem with deciding whether a given system leads to "the most economically efficient solution" is in deciding what the most efficient solution is. Another way of viewing this is wealthy business users subsidising less wealthy gamers - which is a pretty good thing IMO.

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

#166

Post by bd_at_rivenhill »

druidsbane wrote: post #160

I don't understand why he can't just modify the driver if he's going to go through all that trouble. Also, NVidia does support 3 monitors under Linux which was the point of this hack so this is confusing on many levels!

This probably explains why Nvidia doesn't release open source versions of their drivers.

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

#167

Post by afreak »

canadev wrote: post #132
afreak wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference between the graphics card modification and the modification of those modems is that unlike the Internet connection, you're stealing from nobody when you modify the card. If you're going to spend the effort to modify the card to behave as what is described in the hack, then it is really no loss to the manufacturer as they had already made a sale to you and you're forgoing your warranty in the proces…

Tangent: To anyone wondering about the "RGB lines" comment, apparently it has something to do with SCART cables ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCART ). Here are some screenshots: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/mcmsz/my_sne... Found this out when I was wondering what he was talking about...

There's that and then there's this: http://www.made-by-bacteria.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=148

The SCART method is fairly straight forward, but getting at it on other non-SCART capable consoles is something else so hence "RGB lines". :)

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

#168

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

chii wrote: post #124
sergiosgc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't about just being profitable, it's about extracting maximum value from every customer. Ideally, the company would haggle with each and every customer, and get each customer to pay the highest price he in particular accepts. Since haggling is not feasible in mass markets, customers get grouped in segments, where the price is set to the maximum the segment will accept. Clearly, if you misclassify a hacker into…

Yep. in my view, if the product is already profitable at a lower segment, and they manage to sell it to the pros for a higher price, then the company is making undeserved money, rightly so, bears the anger of their customers when found out.

The product is not already profitable at the lower segment, unless the higher segment is there to help defray the capital costs of building the fab.

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

#169

Post by darkarmani »

scotty79 wrote: post #57

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 crip…

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

How is anyone conned if the specs are honest?

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

#170

Post by bjustin »

Sumaso wrote: post #147
Peaker wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you have 2 audiences: Gamers and professionals. For gamers, a low performance value yields a value of $10, and a high performance value yields a value of $12. For professionals, a low performance value yields a value of $5, and a high performance value yields a value of $20. If nVidia sold a single design to all of them, with a high performance value, then gamers would be willing to pay less than $12, and profess…

However in your latter scenario, the net loss is only 2$ versus your original scenario where the net loss is 8$. (lose 8$ per card to the perfessional, versus gamer losing 2$ of performance) So its socially optimum to continue to do what Nvidia is doing ;).

If they sell at a >4:1 ratio in favor of the gamer version, it is still suboptimal.

If I had to guess, I would say their gamer card prices are by and large good approximations of the value they provide. No idea about professional card prices.

Post reply on HN