But what if nvidia used those fuses because an A100 had too many fabrication faults so it could only be a cheaper mining card?
(which is the more likely scenario because they can make much more money on enterprise/datacenter products, see DRAM)
it appears the opposite is true and that's why it's faster than an A100, which is optimized for yield and allows more defects
They definitely did, but maybe you can get some good results running your own tests and determining if they really ARE bad or not, or they just overly tagged them out.
Isn’t this how these things are always done? Same with number of cores in a CPU, the higher core and lower core come from the same fabrication process, it’s just that the lower core CPU had more faulty cores that are disabled.
There's an aspect of that, but the primary reason for differences between various CPUs and GPUs which have the same underlying chip is product segmentation.
Depends a lot on when its from in the product cycle, the yield at the end of production runs are usually so good that it turns into artificial product segmentation
Yes, that's why I question the approach here.
Testing hardware is a complicated matter (you can do a PhD on the topic), and nvidia probably does a better job at it than a hacker in their basement who thinks they can upgrade their GPU for free.
On the other hand ... perhaps a few bit errors is not a problem for AI workloads ... but they could also crash your system ...
Glad I jumped on these cards, excited to give this a try!
Hard to believe $1k was a deal a few months ago (and $200 before then).
I really wish I did. I told a friend about how I bet an unlock would come and decided to buy them when I heard about an unlock.
The highs and lows of my predictive capabilities
I just wish they had something like this for older Tesla p100s, p4s...
Before you get too excited about the CMP 170HX, the prices had already skyrocketed and that card doesn't a cooler on it and is designed for a server cooler that sounds like a jet engine. Also most of the 80GB vram unlocks have bad RAM and that is the reason they were locked in the first place, otherwise they would have became A100s.
Anyways, that's what I tell myself as I taste my bowl of sour grapes.