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"Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed"
- akasya_lisse 2y ago[dead]
- devops99 2y agohttps://xcancel.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1868356459542770087
- rbanffy 2y agoHalving the clock also reduces heat dissipation and extends component life.
- chrsw 2y agoYeah, this is far from new too
- michaelt 2y agoIn 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 $$$$ from ML workloads. nvidia have always been pretty open about this stuff - they have EULA terms saying the GeForce drivers can't be used in data centres, software features like virtual GPUs that are only available on certain cards, difficult cooling that makes it hard to put several cards into the same case, awkward product lifecycles, contracts with server builders not to put gaming GPUs into workstations or servers, removal of nvlink, and so on.
- rbanffy 2y agoI didn’t say they don’t do artificial segmentation. I just noted that, in this case, it might have an upside for the user. There might also be some binning involved- maybe the parts failed as A300 parts.
- beefnugs 2y agoYeah, somebody knew the new power connectors were going to be sus, so halving the power was at least somewhat safe thing to do
- kijin 2y agoBinning and market segmentation are not mutually exclusive. Of course they're going to put their best-performing chips in the most expensive segment.
- sdwr 2y agoThe difference is whether chips with no defects get artificially binned. In a competitive market, if you have a surplus of top-tier chips, you lower prices and make a little more $$ selling more power. With a monopoly (customers are still yours next upgrade cycle), giving customers more power now sabotages your future revenue.
- kube-system 2y agoI don't think anyone has ever gone to TSMC and said "hey we're short on our low end chips, can you lower your yields for a bit?"
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- jsiepkes 2y agoThere 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.
- chrsw 2y agoIntel didn't have a software stack moat.
- acdha 2y agoOther than the huge amount of enterprise software which was only supported on Intel, most of the high-end server business below the mainframe level after the mid-90s, and the huge install base of x86 software keeping everyone but AMD out? Even their own Itanium crashed and burned on x86 compatibility.
- ryao 2y agoThen there were software libraries and the Intel C/C++ Compiler that favored Intel. They would place optimized code paths that only ran on Intel hardware in third party software. Intel has stopped doing that in recent years as far as I know (the MKL has Zen specific code paths), but that is a fairly recent change (maybe the past 5 years). There were also ISA extensions. Even if Intel had trouble competing on existing code, they would often extend the ISA to gain a temporary advantage over their competitors by enabling developers to write more optimal code paths that would run only on Intel’s most recent CPUs. They have done less of that ever since the AVX-512 disaster, but Intel still is the one defining ISA extensions and it historically gained a short term advantage whenever it did. Interestingly, the situation is somewhat inverted as of late given Intel’s failure to implement the AVX-512 family of extensions in consumer CPUs in a sane way, when AMD succeeded. Intel now is at a disadvantage to AMD because od its own ISA extension. They recently made AVX-10 to try to fix that, but it adds nothing that was not already in AVX-512, so AMD CPUs after Zen 3 would have equivalent code paths from AVX-512, even without implementing AVX-10.
- ryao 2y agoDid they do this to the 3090 Ti too?
- harshreality 2y agoI'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).
- chillingeffect 2y agoInteresting 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.
- dotancohen 2y agoMaybe 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.
- fransje26 2y ago> but rather if Nvidia were to provide a paid upgrade path to unlock these features that would help. You do not revert a blown e-fuse with a software update.
- dotancohen 2y agoYes, but an e-fuse would not be the only way to lock the feature if Nvidia were to want to unlock it later.
- fransje26 2y agoThe point being that they knowingly went down the e-fuse route to make sure nobody could unlock it later. They probably learnt their lesson in the early 2000s, when users could do a bit of soldering and apply a patch to unlock more performance on cards that had been artificially throttled.
- sitzkrieg 2y agostock must go up
- tetrisgm 2y agoCan this be fixed by removing the efuse or having a custom firmware?
- MPSimmons 2y agoe-fuses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse 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.
- sabareesh 2y agoThat'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
- wmf 2y agoNo, the essence of a fuse is that it can never be reset. A circuit breaker is different.
- bri3d 2y agoThere are two kinds of thing that are both called eFuse: current-limiting devices which are almost always resettable, and one-time programmed bits which are intentionally one-time programmable (some are implemented as physical fuses which are blown by overcurrent, others are implemented using various other types of write-once nonvolatile memory, and some bad ones are implemented by making normal flash pretend to be write-once using firmware-level protections). Professionally I usually see OTP referred to as "fuses," "OTP," "straps," or "chicken bits," with the specific word "eFuse" reserved for the current-limiting device. But in popular media the trend seems the opposite.
- ChrisClark 2y agoWhy would that be the assumption? An eFuse is a literal trace that gets burnt up, you can't connect it back again.
- modeless 2y agoThis 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.
- ksec 2y ago>They have a long, long history of price discrimination using techniques like this. Had AI and Crypto not been a thing. These so called price discrimination was what kept the company afloat and continue to spend stupid money ( according to many ) on CUDA rather than making gaming better. And when often people say "X" needs competition. What they really want is just cheaper price for the same thing. Would it be great if Nvidia had more competition? Absolutely, but is Nvidia not making progress and milking everything they have? Absolutely not. They invested even more in CUDA, Large Die Size Correction Tooling, Assisted EDA Design and many more to their arsenal to built their moat. I also often found when a successful founder is still working at a company, that company is often pushed far harder by its founder than whatever market force is driving them. So we need competition for Intel 2009 - 2021, Microsoft in 2000, Any company who just sit there and no longer improves or failed to execute. Nvidia? They are doing fine if not better than I could imagine. ( I just wished they spend a little more money to compete in the Mobile and Desktop Consumer SoC space. I guess that is coming soon. )
- musicale 2y ago> What they really want is just cheaper price for the same thing They'd probably be happy with competitive market pricing, which is unlikely to happen without a competitive market. Nvidia's gross margins are extraordinary vs. AMD or intel margins (or even "overpriced" Apple.) There is competition of a sort - for example at the low end with intel ARC and at the high end with AMD Instinct based supercomputers. However, competitors don't seem to be able to match the CUDA software platform, particularly for AI/ML. The deepening CUDA moat is hard for competitors to cross and for customers to escape. In the cloud space it seems that Nvidia may face more competition with platforms like GCP/Cloud TPU and AWS/Trainium.
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- tayo42 2y agoHow do you go to from that screen shot to this conclusion?
- zamadatix 2y agoYou go from the eFuse mentioned at the beginning to the conclusion in the screenshot at the end, not the other way around.
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- tayo42 2y agoAm I missing something then? Is there some context to the linked tweet and screen shot that didn't come up?
- zamadatix 2y agoPerhaps this part isn't appearing above the image for you? "NVIDIA is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed. There's an eFuse blown on the AD102 die to halve the perf of FP16 with FP32 accumulate. RTX 6000 Ada is the same die w/o the blown fuse. This is not binning, it's segmentation. Wish there was competition."
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- unethical_ban 2y agoIt'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 okay with that, then fine, no problem. Just don't try to tell me it isn't maximization of profit. There are no heroes in the megacorp space, but it would be nice for AMD and Intel to bring Nvidia to heel.
- wmf 2y agoPeople have wrong intuitions about a lot of things and price discrimination is one of them. That's the modern world for you.
- stuckkeys 2y agoHow is this modern world? LOL
- GuB-42 2y agoMaximization of profit is what all companies do. For publicly traded companies, it is considered a duty to their shareholders and not doing so will result in executives getting booted out and even lawsuits. With that out of the way, market segmentation is often good for budget customers, who, in the case of Nvidia GPUs, are gamers. They get GPUs that run their games just as well as the uncrippled model, for a much lower price. Without market segmentation, all the GPUs would go to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc... since they are the ones with the big budget, gamers will be left with GPUs they can't afford, and Nvidia with less profits as they will lose most of the market for gamers. With market segmentation, Nvidia wins, gamers win, AI companies and miners lose. And I don't know about you, but I think that AI companies and miners deserve the premiums they pay. It sounds stupid to pay for crippled hardware, but when buying a GPU, the silicon is only a small part of the price, the expensive part is all the R&D, and that cost is the same no matter how many chips they sell, and it makes sense to maximize these sales, and segmentation is how they do it without sacrificing their profits. Of course, should AMD or Intel come back, they would do their own market segmentation too, in fact, they already do.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoBetween 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 exceed what RX 8000 or next-gen Intel cards are capable of anyway.
- Insanity 2y agoI 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.
- bjoli 2y agoIntel 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
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoI 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.
- Uw5ssYPc 2y agoI was reading that Intel GPU firmware cannot be upgraded under Linux, only Windows, is that still the case?
- aqfamnzc 2y agoWhat does a "pretty bad" h265 implementation look like? Buggy? Inefficient or what?
- creato 2y agoNVIDIA 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?)
- ashoeafoot 2y agoThere must be a whole layer of reroute if defective plumbing in drivers.
- wmf 2y agoIt'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.
- danjl 2y agoExactly. 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.
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- deaddodo 2y agoI don't even understand why binning non-defect cards is dubious. It's like the logic people have on /r/pcmasterrace is that if they didn't bin, they would just release all 4090s at 4080 prices. No, there would just be less 4080s for people to buy. No chip maker is going to sell their chips at sub-market rates just because they engineered them to/have a fab that can produce them at very low defect rates. Now, Nvidia certainly has done dubious things. They've hurt their partners (EVGA, you're missed), and skyrocketing the baseline GPU prices is scummy as hell. But binning isn't anything I necessarily consider dubious.
- Uw5ssYPc 2y agoImagine running this card at full speed, with fully unlocked potential. What would happen to new tiny power connectors? I am betting insta-fire.
- knowitnone 2y agoso the next questions, how to deposit a small bit of metal to fix the fuse?
- h_tbob 2y agoI wonder why everyone on here isn’t saying “copyright is stupid”. You know it grants a monopoly?
- throwaway314155 2y agoWhat?
- daxfohl 2y agoYeah but we can only use 10% of our brain too, so.
- stuckkeys 2y agoThis is so sketch. Although, I have not seen any reports of misrepresentation, but I hope EU looks into this.
- NoPicklez 2y agoThere is competition, but the competition isn't winning 1st, 2nd or 3rd. There was a day in which Intel was top dog and for a long time, now AMD are competing in 1st place. AMD and/or other competitors will have their day, but today its Nvidia.