"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"
#2Halving the clock also reduces heat dissipation and extends component life.
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#3Halving the clock also reduces heat dissipation and extends component life.
Yeah, this is far from new too
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#4Binning and market segmentation are not mutually exclusive. Of course they're going to put their best-performing chips in the most expensive segment.
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#5[deleted]
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#6There 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.
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#7Did they do this to the 3090 Ti too?
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#8Halving the clock also reduces heat dissipation and extends component life.
In this case, the 2-slot RTX 6000 consumes 300 W whereas the "nerfed" 3.5-slot 4090 can draw 450 W.
So I don't think the nerfing here was to lower power consumption. It's just market segmentation to extract maximum $$$$ from ML workloads.
nvidia have always been pretty open about this stuff - they have EULA terms saying the GeForce drivers can't be used in data centres, software features like virtual GPUs that are only available on certain cards, difficult cooling that makes it hard to put several cards into the same case, awkward product lifecycles, contracts with server builders not to put gaming GPUs into workstations or servers, removal of nvlink, and so on.
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#9I'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 the next generation of parts (smaller process nodes aren't cheap, and neither is chip R&D).
Re: "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
#10There 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.