4 ms·

I wish more hardware companies would publish more documentation and let the community figure out the rest, sort of like what happened to the original IBM VGA (l

I wish more hardware companies would publish more documentation and let the community figure out the rest, sort of like what happened to the original IBM VGA (look up "Mode X" and the other non-BIOS modes the hardware is actually capable of - even 800x600x16!) Sadly it seems the majority of them would rather tightly control every aspect of their products' usage since they can then milk the userbase for more $$$, but IMHO the most productive era of the PC was also when it was the most open.

rplnt 3y ago
Then they couldn't charge different customers different amounts for the same HW. It's not a win for everyone.
- axus 3y ago
  The price of 4090 may increase now, in theory locking out some features might have been a favor for some of the customers.
  - Sayrus 3y ago
    But it wouldn't if all cards supporting this were "unlocked" by default and thus the other "enterprise-grade" cards weren't that much more expensive. Of course that'd reduce profits by a lot.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      it probably would - you saw exactly that outcome with mining. for a lot of these demand bursts, demand is so high it cannot be sated even consuming 100% or 200% of typical GPU production. cards like RX 6500XT that simply don't have the RAM to participate were less affected, but even then you've got enough cross-elasticity (demand from people being crowded out of other product segments) that tends to pump prices to 2-3x the "normal" clearance prices we see today. And yes, absolutely anything that can mine in any capacity will get pulled in during that sort of boom/bubble, not just "high-end"/"enterprise".
- greggsy 3y ago
  Which (as controversial as it sounds in this kind of forum) is a sensible pricing model to recover and fund R&D and finance operations.
mhh__ 3y ago
nvidia's software is their moat
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  That's a huge overstatement, it's a big part of the moat for sure, but there are other significant components (hardware, ecosystem lock-in, heavy academic incentives)
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    No software -> hardware is massively hobbled. Evidence: AMD. Ecosystem -> Software. At the moment especially people are looking for arbitrages everywhere i.e. inference costs / being able to inference at all (llama.cpp) Academics -> Also software but easily fiddled with a bit of spending as you say.
golergka 3y ago
If I'm a hardware manufacturer and my soft lock on product feature doesn't work, I'll switch to a hardware lock instead, and the product will just cost more.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> the most productive era of the PC was also when it was the most open The openness certainly was great but it's not actually required. People can figure out how to work with closed systems. Adversarial interoperability was common. People would reverse engineer things and make the software work whether or not the manufacturer wanted it. It's the software and hardware locks that used to be rare and are now common. Cryptography was supposed to be something that would empower us but it ended up being used against us to lock us out of our own machines. We're no longer in the driver's seat. Our operating systems don't even operate the system anymore. Our free Linux systems are just the "user OS" in the manufacturer's unknowable amalgamation of silicon running proprietary firmware, just a little component to be sandboxed away from the real action.

rplnt 3y ago

Then they couldn't charge different customers different amounts for the same HW. It's not a win for everyone.

axus 3y ago
The price of 4090 may increase now, in theory locking out some features might have been a favor for some of the customers.
- Sayrus 3y ago
  But it wouldn't if all cards supporting this were "unlocked" by default and thus the other "enterprise-grade" cards weren't that much more expensive. Of course that'd reduce profits by a lot.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    it probably would - you saw exactly that outcome with mining. for a lot of these demand bursts, demand is so high it cannot be sated even consuming 100% or 200% of typical GPU production. cards like RX 6500XT that simply don't have the RAM to participate were less affected, but even then you've got enough cross-elasticity (demand from people being crowded out of other product segments) that tends to pump prices to 2-3x the "normal" clearance prices we see today. And yes, absolutely anything that can mine in any capacity will get pulled in during that sort of boom/bubble, not just "high-end"/"enterprise".
greggsy 3y ago
Which (as controversial as it sounds in this kind of forum) is a sensible pricing model to recover and fund R&D and finance operations.

mhh__ 3y ago

nvidia's software is their moat

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thot_experiment 3y ago
That's a huge overstatement, it's a big part of the moat for sure, but there are other significant components (hardware, ecosystem lock-in, heavy academic incentives)
- mhh__ 3y ago
  No software -> hardware is massively hobbled. Evidence: AMD. Ecosystem -> Software. At the moment especially people are looking for arbitrages everywhere i.e. inference costs / being able to inference at all (llama.cpp) Academics -> Also software but easily fiddled with a bit of spending as you say.

golergka 3y ago

If I'm a hardware manufacturer and my soft lock on product feature doesn't work, I'll switch to a hardware lock instead, and the product will just cost more.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> the most productive era of the PC was also when it was the most open The openness certainly was great but it's not actually required. People can figure out how to work with closed systems. Adversarial interoperability was common. People would reverse engineer things and make the software work whether or not the manufacturer wanted it. It's the software and hardware locks that used to be rare and are now common. Cryptography was supposed to be something that would empower us but it ended up being used against us to lock us out of our own machines. We're no longer in the driver's seat. Our operating systems don't even operate the system anymore. Our free Linux systems are just the "user OS" in the manufacturer's unknowable amalgamation of silicon running proprietary firmware, just a little component to be sandboxed away from the real action.