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"Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

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Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#21

Post by modeless »

This is why Nvidia needs competition. I love the performance of their hardware and the quality of their drivers, but I don't love being their customer. They have a long, long history of price discrimination using techniques like this. Back in the day it was "workstation" graphics for CAD programs that they would nerf for consumer cards by downgrading various features of OpenGL.

Different markets, same techniques. It's in the company DNA. That and their aversion to open source drivers and various other bad decisions around open source support that make maintaining a working Linux GPU setup way harder than it should be even to this day.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#22

Post by dotancohen »

chillingeffect wrote: post #18
harshreality wrote: post #9

I'm ambivalent about this sort of thing (or, as another example, Intel's CPUs many years ago that offered paid firmware upgrades to enable higher performance). On one hand, it's very bad because it reduces economic output from the exact same input resources (materials and labor and r&d). On the other hand, allowing market segmentation, and more profits from the higher segments, allows more progress and scaling for th…

Interesting no one considers the environmental impact. This creates tonnes of e-waste with a shortened useful life. We should demand that it's unlockable after a certain time.

Maybe not demand that it be unlockable, but rather if Nvidia were to provide a paid upgrade path to unlock these features that would help. They would need some way to prevent the open source drivers from accessing the features, though.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#23

Post by MPSimmons »

tetrisgm wrote: post #20

Can this be fixed by removing the efuse or having a custom firmware?

e-fuses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse) are typically etched into the silicon as an exactly-once operation, meant to irrevocably set a configuration. Some devices, for instance, have an e-fuse that makes it impossible to change cryptographic trust signatures after the e-fuse has been blown.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#24

Post by sdwr »

kijin wrote: post #4

Binning and market segmentation are not mutually exclusive. Of course they're going to put their best-performing chips in the most expensive segment.

The difference is whether chips with no defects get artificially binned.

In a competitive market, if you have a surplus of top-tier chips, you lower prices and make a little more $$ selling more power.

With a monopoly (customers are still yours next upgrade cycle), giving customers more power now sabotages your future revenue.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#26

Post by mensetmanusman »

harshreality wrote: post #9

I'm ambivalent about this sort of thing (or, as another example, Intel's CPUs many years ago that offered paid firmware upgrades to enable higher performance). On one hand, it's very bad because it reduces economic output from the exact same input resources (materials and labor and r&d). On the other hand, allowing market segmentation, and more profits from the higher segments, allows more progress and scaling for th…

“On one hand, it's very bad because it reduces economic output from the exact same input resources (materials and labor and r&d).”

This is not true with the economies of scale in the semiconductor industry.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#27

Post by xvfLJfx9 »

tetrisgm wrote: post #20

Can this be fixed by removing the efuse or having a custom firmware?

You can't lol. How do you wanna restore a blown fuse on nanometer level INSIDE the GPU die. Its simply not possible.

By the way, AMD also uses fuse blowing if you e.g. overclock some of their CPUs to mark them as warranty voided. They give you a warning in the BIOS and if you resume a fuse inside the CPU gets blown that will permanently indicate that the CPU has been used for overclocking (and thus remove the warranty)

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#28

Post by sabareesh »

MPSimmons wrote: post #23
tetrisgm wrote: post #20

Can this be fixed by removing the efuse or having a custom firmware?

e-fuses ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse ) are typically etched into the silicon as an exactly-once operation, meant to irrevocably set a configuration. Some devices, for instance, have an e-fuse that makes it impossible to change cryptographic trust signatures after the e-fuse has been blown.

That's intriguing; one might assume that a key feature of eFuse would be the ability to reset easily. But I guess it could be implemented without it

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#29

Post by mensetmanusman »

chrsw wrote: post #10
jsiepkes wrote: post #6

There was a time when Intel seemed unbeatable. In 2000 they had a 500 billion USD valuation. That's almost a trillion dollars in today's (2024) USD. Today they are valued at 90 billion USD and Broadcom was thinking about buying them... My point is these things don't seem to last in tech.

Intel didn't have a software stack moat.

Nvidia is helping power the tool that destroys the software moat.

Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"

#30

Post by YetAnotherNick »

chrsw wrote: post #10
jsiepkes wrote: post #6

There was a time when Intel seemed unbeatable. In 2000 they had a 500 billion USD valuation. That's almost a trillion dollars in today's (2024) USD. Today they are valued at 90 billion USD and Broadcom was thinking about buying them... My point is these things don't seem to last in tech.

Intel didn't have a software stack moat.

NVidia has software moat for specialized applications but not for AI, which is responsible for most of their sales now. Almost everyone in AI uses pytorch/jax/triton/flash attention and not CUDA directly. And if Google can support pytorch for their TPU and Apple for their M1 GPU, surely others could.
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