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

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 186 posts

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

#51

Post by guerrilla »

xvfLJfx9 wrote: post #27
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 warrant…

> How do you wanna restore a blown fuse on nanometer level INSIDE the GPU die. Its simply not possible.

Bullshit. There will be hackers in the future who can do it in their garage. Just... not anytime soon.

> 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)

Emphasis on "some." You can buy plenty of CPUs from them made for overclocking.

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

#52

Post by creato »

NVIDIA is obviously not above market segmentation via dubious means (see: driver limitations for consumer GPUs), but I think binning due to silicon defects is a more likely explanation in this case.

Some 4090s have this extra fp16 -> fp32 ALU disabled because it's defective on that chip.

Other 4090s have it disabled because it failed as an Ada 6000 for some other reason, but NVIDIA didn't want to make a 4095 SKU to sell it under.

Or if you generalize this for every fusable part of the chip: NVIDIA didn't want to make a 4094.997 SKU that only one person gets to buy (at what price?)

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

#53

Post by wmf »

unethical_ban wrote: post #40

It's interesting how we the people (broadly) accept this practice in software and even some hardware, but not in other areas. Note how frustrated people are when you hear about "unlocking" sensors and services available on cars. If a product is made, and the cost to provide that product is the same one way or the other but you cripple it to create segmentation, then that is greed. Period. Objectively. And if you're o…

People have wrong intuitions about a lot of things and price discrimination is one of them. That's the modern world for you.

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

#54

Post by bjoli »

Insanity wrote: post #48
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #45

Between EVGA getting out of the Nvidia card business, Nvidia continuing to be problematic under Linux (even if that’s improving), all the nonsense with the new power connector, and the company’s general sliminess, I’m increasingly leaning towards an AMD (or potentially Intel) card for my next tower upgrade. AMD and Intel might only be competing in the entry-to-midrange market sector but my needs aren’t likely to exce…

I am tempted to try the new Intel GPU as an upgrade for my current ~5yo build. I don’t need something high end, and I don’t need any AI stuff. But I use a dual boot Windows/Linux, and I am a bit worried about how it will behave under Linux.

Intel is by far the best out of the box experience under linux. I have 3 cards. I will get one of the new battlmage cards for my gaming pc.

Edit: the only downside is that the hw h265 encoder is pretty bad. Av1 is fine though

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

#55

Post by wmf »

sabareesh wrote: post #28
MPSimmons wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, the essence of a fuse is that it can never be reset. A circuit breaker is different.

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

#56

Post by zeusk »

itsthecourier wrote: post #33
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…

I want to add nvidia sales are 90% data center and 10% gaming, and the author being part of the 10% who wasn't abandoned is complaining they got a product at half the speed, way lower price, instead of half the price same specs as the datacenter client man.

Or the 90% are charged absurd markup because clearly they can deliver the hardware for 10% use-case for 1000$ and still make money on top but they would rather charge the data centers 50k for the same product

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

#58

Post by wmf »

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.

E-waste is mostly a fake concept. By the time a 4090 has outlived its usefulness for gaming it's also likely that no one wants it for AI (if they ever did).

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

#59

Post by cosmic_cheese »

bjoli wrote: post #54
Insanity wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am tempted to try the new Intel GPU as an upgrade for my current ~5yo build. I don’t need something high end, and I don’t need any AI stuff. But I use a dual boot Windows/Linux, and I am a bit worried about how it will behave under Linux.

Intel is by far the best out of the box experience under linux. I have 3 cards. I will get one of the new battlmage cards for my gaming pc. Edit: the only downside is that the hw h265 encoder is pretty bad. Av1 is fine though

I don’t have any experience with discrete Intel cards, but yes their iGPUs have been flawless for me under Linux. Same for other components, to the point that I’d say a reasonable way of gauging how well a laptop will work with Linux is to look at how much of its hardware is Intel (CPU excluded). Intel wifi/bluetooth and ethernet are also great under Linux for example.

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

#60

Post by KennyBlanken »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #45

Between EVGA getting out of the Nvidia card business, Nvidia continuing to be problematic under Linux (even if that’s improving), all the nonsense with the new power connector, and the company’s general sliminess, I’m increasingly leaning towards an AMD (or potentially Intel) card for my next tower upgrade. AMD and Intel might only be competing in the entry-to-midrange market sector but my needs aren’t likely to exce…

AMD's 7xxx series cards were almost universally worse than their 6xxx equivalents. AMD cut memory bus width and reduced compute units, all in a quest to reduce power consumption because they're so power-hungry. They're still not as good as NVIDIA cards for power consumption.

The drivers are unreliable, Adrenalin is buggy, slow, and bloated; AMD's cards have poor raytracing, and AMD's compute is a dumpster fire, especially on Windows; ROCm is a joke.

None of the LLM or Stability Matrix stuff works on AMD GPUs under Windwos without substantial tweaking and even then it's unreliable garbage, whereas the NVIDIA stuff Just Works.

If you don't care about any of that and just want "better than integrated graphics", especially if you're on Linux where you don't need to worry about the shitshow that is AMD Windows drivers - then sure, go for AMD - especially the cards that have been put on sale (don't pay MSRP for any AMD GPU, ever. They almost always rapidly discount.)

AMD simply does not have the care to compete with NVIDIA for the desktop market. They have barely a few percent of the desktop GPU market; they're interested in stuff like gaming consoles.

Intel are the only ones who will push AMD - and it will push them to either compete or let their product line stagnate and milk as much profit out of the AMD fanboys as they can.

Post reply on HN