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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"

#71

Post by jeffbee »

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.

Let's don't ignore context. In 2000 JDS Uniphase was worth $125 billion. A lot of things were "worth" a lot of money in the year 2000. Anyway Intel got their ass handed back to them in 2003 with the AMD Opteron. Today is not Intel's first struggle.

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

#72

Post by Kirby64 »

bri3d wrote: post #61
xvfLJfx9 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You can't lol. How do you wanna restore a blown fuse on nanometer level INSIDE the GPU die. Its simply not possible. I wouldn't dismiss this so aggressively. Frequently (more frequently than not), efuses are simply used as configuration fields checked by firmware. If that firmware can be modified, the value of the efuse can be ignored. It's substantially easier to implement a fused feature as a bit in a big bitfiel…

NVidia is smarter than this - they sign all their firmware, so you can't just modify the firmware and bypass this. No signed firmware means no functioning card. The famous example of this was the 'reduced hash functionality' RTX 3060 cards that accidentally had the 'reduced hash' feature disabled in a signed copy of firmware that Nvidia released. If they hadn't accidently released this firmware, the reduced hash stuff would have worked forever.

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

#73

Post by beepbooptheory »

wmf wrote: post #58
chillingeffect wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Aren't you giving a good reason why its not a fake concept there?

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

#74

Post by danjl »

wmf wrote: post #62
creato wrote: post #52

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 s…

It's more likely that any defect in a core causes the whole core to be disabled. Especially in the this case where I assume the FP16 x FP16 -> FP32 path uses the same hardware as the FP16 x FP16 -> FP16 path.

Exactly. They can easily sell more Ada 6000s, and I'm pretty sure they would do so rather than sell them for much less as 4090s.

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

#75

Post by bri3d »

Kirby64 wrote: post #72
bri3d wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't lol. How do you wanna restore a blown fuse on nanometer level INSIDE the GPU die. Its simply not possible. I wouldn't dismiss this so aggressively. Frequently (more frequently than not), efuses are simply used as configuration fields checked by firmware. If that firmware can be modified, the value of the efuse can be ignored. It's substantially easier to implement a fused feature as a bit in a big bitfiel…

NVidia is smarter than this - they sign all their firmware, so you can't just modify the firmware and bypass this. No signed firmware means no functioning card. The famous example of this was the 'reduced hash functionality' RTX 3060 cards that accidentally had the 'reduced hash' feature disabled in a signed copy of firmware that Nvidia released. If they hadn't accidently released this firmware, the reduced hash stuf…

I am indeed well aware of how firmware validation works. Finding a vulnerability in firmware validation is however much more likely than reversing OTP for almost all varieties of OTP, even NVidia’s firmware validation which is generally regarded as pretty strong.

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

#76

Post by notreallyauser »

ryao wrote: post #11
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.

What made Intel seem unbeatable was its process node advantage. Nvidia does not have fabrication plants, so it is able to get the best process node from whoever has it. Nvidia is therefore not vulnerable to what befell Intel. What makes Nvidia seem unbeatable is that Nvidia does the best job on hardware design, does a good job on the software for the hardware and gets its designs out quickly such that they can charge…

> What made Intel seem unbeatable was its process node advantage. Nvidia does not have fabrication plants, so it is able to get the best process node from whoever has it. Nvidia is therefore not vulnerable to what befell Intel.

It's able to get the best process node from /whoever is willing to sell it to Nvidia/: it's vulnerable (however unlikely) to something very similar -- a competitor with a process advantage.

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

#77

Post by evoke4908 »

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 made that choice several years ago. All new PCs I buy/build are AMD only.

The hardware is a bit finnicky, but honestly I prefer a thing to just be broken and tricky as opposed to nvidia intentionally making my life hard.

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

#79

Post by Kirby64 »

guerrilla wrote: post #51
xvfLJfx9 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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

I'll take your bet on this. Silicon designers aren't unaware of this potential vulnerability, and if you want to prevent eFuses from being un-blown, you can design for that. I would place money on there not being any commercially viable way to restore an eFuse in a 4090 die at any point in the future. You can probably do it, but it would require millions of dollars in FIB and SEM equipment and likely would destroy the chip for any useful purpose.

Usually the only useful reason to attempt to recover/read/unblown fuses is to read out private keys built into chips.

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

#80

Post by loa_in_ »

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.

Over 23 years almost every person working there probably either moved on or changed roles. Corporations are made of people. It lasted as long as it should.
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