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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

#151

Post by uchi »

youngerdryas wrote: post #120
mtgx wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the fact that they're selling the same chip for a lower price mean they are profitable with that low-end price, too? I doubt they are just dumping the leftovers for the low-end, and taking a loss. Also how is this any different from the Adobe scandal in Australia from a couple of months ago? I believe the Australian government even took them, Microsoft and Apple to court over charging Australians a lot more t…

Chips with more defects can be sold on the low end rather than scrapped, making production easier and more profitable.

Yeap. AMD did this with its Phenom II chips. Maintain the same fab process for a 4 core processor but sell it as dual or triple core if it was poor quality. AMD motherboards famously had the feature to enable the locked down processors. Obviously your mileage would vary but going from 3 cores to 4 was a pretty significant performance boost especially for the initial cost.

A while back there was a way to unlock an AMD 6950 GPU to a 6970 as well. Had something to do with unlocking some memory modules since the cards were identical.

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

#152

Post by podperson »

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 :)

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).

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

#153

Post by sp332 »

dhimes wrote: post #149
alpine01 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's many, many different things that can make the quality vary so much. From the purity and quality of the raw silicon itself, to the quality of the design of the chip itself, where some critical part of the chip architecture is incredibly hard to fabricate to the highest standard. Remember that the widths of the oxide tracks within the silicon is on average 40nm these days (that's only ~400 atoms across!) or even s…

It does make sense in that they are always pushing the edge as hard as they can, and it sounds like this process allows them to do just that. They get to sell the 'lucky' results for a premium, their 'average' for their bread and butter, and even the sub-par chips provide income. It seems like a really good idea. It also seems like it must be pretty hard to do in a way that gives you a reliable (say) 10% emerging as…

When the PS3 first came out, they were having really bad yield issues. The design of the chip is one slowish "normal" processor, plus 6 "synergistic processing elements" which were really fast little vector processors. Well, not exactly 6... If you look at the chip http://www.trustedreviews.com/Sony-PlayStation-3_Games_revie... you'll see 8! OK so one was reserved by the OS for a hypervisor that would run in the background all the time and was not available for mere mortals to access. But that still only explains 7. Turns out they just disabled one of the SPEs. They tested each of them and if one happened to be broken, they would pick that one to be disabled. This N+1 redundancy improved effective yields even though a lot of the chips were still broken!

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

#154

Post by admford »

Oh this is a classic move by Nvidia. I had a gaming PC with two GeForce 8800 GTX cards in it. I used a softmod to get them to be recognised as Quadro 4600's so I could work better in Solidworks.

NVidia makes decent video cards and such, but they're almost all based off a single reference design. It saves money on component costs and production time for third parties. Why make three different boards, using three different GPUs, when all you need to do is determine how much RAM you want to stick on it and choose the component layout for the specific product.

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

#156

Post by S_A_P »

exDM69 wrote: post #148
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…

Here's a key insight on this issue that the general public seems to be unaware about: the most expensive thing in workstation cards like Quadro and Tesla is warranty and support . This is also the reason that they are clocked down, they have to be more reliable than a gaming gpu. Gaming GPUs have some parts fused off. These parts are not essential for gaming performance, and powering them off with fuses gives better…

This is key- and I think that as long as you are just using it to get triple monitor support like this guy did you will likely be ok. However, if the software you work with is going to rely on some fused out feature of the Tesla or Quadro you are just risking frying your card unnecessarily.

I dont understand why users think that this is an evil practice. Its HARD to build hardware, and just like software engineers want to have reusable code, hardware manufacturers want to have reusable silicone. You are paying for the features you want. If you want a feature set that isn't mainstream and "workstation" capable, you are going to have to pay more. If you just want to push pixels quickly, then of course they will disable some high end functionality and sell it to you cheaper.

That said, I applaud the fact that they are digging in and learning to mod these things.

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

#157

Post by alpine01 »

dhimes wrote: post #149
alpine01 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's many, many different things that can make the quality vary so much. From the purity and quality of the raw silicon itself, to the quality of the design of the chip itself, where some critical part of the chip architecture is incredibly hard to fabricate to the highest standard. Remember that the widths of the oxide tracks within the silicon is on average 40nm these days (that's only ~400 atoms across!) or even s…

It does make sense in that they are always pushing the edge as hard as they can, and it sounds like this process allows them to do just that. They get to sell the 'lucky' results for a premium, their 'average' for their bread and butter, and even the sub-par chips provide income. It seems like a really good idea. It also seems like it must be pretty hard to do in a way that gives you a reliable (say) 10% emerging as…

To be fair, those percentages I gave, I made up for that example. Though I'd imagine they are something close to that. But it depends on the chip, the market and the company selling them.

You design those percentage bands, generally to the size of the market you're aiming the chip tiers at. The silicon will be as good as they can get it generally, nobody wants to push bad products out. Recalls and returns probably cost more in the long term than failing more chips and suffering a worse yield.

However if only 0.5% of your customer base is interested in paying more money for a faster chip, you only cream off the top 0.5% of chips.

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

#158

Post by brudgers »

Keyframe wrote: post #139
brudgers wrote: post #89

"the K5000 is only single GPU and clocked some 25-30% slower then the gaming card" Makes sense. Quadro cards are used for life critical visualizations, e.g. finite element analysis of a bridge. That's what justifies their expense. Rendering speed only needs to be "fast enough." The premium is on accuracy and reliability.

I thought the premium in quadros these days is in double operations speed. Since I need floats, not doubles I opted for two GTX 680s. They are screaming compared to Q6000, but I could always use more.

If an application uses floats in lieu of doubles might that be evidence that accuracy is not at a premium?

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

#159

Post by coldarchon »

exDM69 wrote: post #148
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…

Here's a key insight on this issue that the general public seems to be unaware about: the most expensive thing in workstation cards like Quadro and Tesla is warranty and support . This is also the reason that they are clocked down, they have to be more reliable than a gaming gpu. Gaming GPUs have some parts fused off. These parts are not essential for gaming performance, and powering them off with fuses gives better…

But why were these features disabled? To control a market they can't own?
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