[HN Gopher] "Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfe...
___________________________________________________________________
"Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half
speed"
Author : BIackSwan
Score : 151 points
Date : 2024-12-16 11:45 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| rbanffy wrote:
| Halving the clock also reduces heat dissipation and extends
| component life.
| chrsw wrote:
| Yeah, this is far from new too
| michaelt wrote:
| 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
| $$$$ from ML workloads.
|
| nvidia have always been pretty open about this stuff - they
| have EULA terms saying the GeForce drivers can't be used in
| data centres, software features like virtual GPUs that are only
| available on certain cards, difficult cooling that makes it
| hard to put several cards into the same case, awkward product
| lifecycles, contracts with server builders not to put gaming
| GPUs into workstations or servers, removal of nvlink, and so
| on.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I didn't say they don't do artificial segmentation. I just
| noted that, in this case, it might have an upside for the
| user. There might also be some binning involved- maybe the
| parts failed as A300 parts.
| beefnugs wrote:
| Yeah, somebody knew the new power connectors were going to be
| sus, so halving the power was at least somewhat safe thing to
| do
| kijin wrote:
| Binning and market segmentation are not mutually exclusive. Of
| course they're going to put their best-performing chips in the
| most expensive segment.
| sdwr wrote:
| The difference is whether chips with no defects get
| artificially binned.
|
| In a competitive market, if you have a surplus of top-tier
| chips, you lower prices and make a little more $$ selling more
| power.
|
| With a monopoly (customers are still yours next upgrade cycle),
| giving customers more power now sabotages your future revenue.
| kube-system wrote:
| I 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?"
| jsiepkes wrote:
| 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.
| chrsw wrote:
| Intel didn't have a software stack moat.
| acdha wrote:
| Other 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 wrote:
| Then 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.
| rasz wrote:
| >Intel C/C++ Compiler that favored Intel
|
| Thats where Nvidia learned to "optimize" Cuda software
| path. Single threaded x87 FPU on SSE2 capable CPUs.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/07/did-nvidia-
| cripple-it...
|
| https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/3/ "For Nvidia,
| decreasing the baseline CPU performance by using x87
| instructions and a single thread makes GPUs look better."
|
| They doubled down that approach with 'GameWorks'
| crippling performance on non Nvidia GPUs, Nvidia paid
| studios for including GameWorks in their games.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Nvidia is helping power the tool that destroys the software
| moat.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Interesting that it's entirely failed to do that so far.
|
| Nvidia is helping power the next generation of big brother
| government programs.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Aren't we like 0.000001% in the journey?
| akira2501 wrote:
| That is the largest goalpost move I've ever seen, but
| sure, at that order of magnitude anything is plausible.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| NVidia has software moat for specialized applications but not
| for AI, which is responsible for most of their sales now.
| Almost everyone in AI uses pytorch/jax/triton/flash attention
| and not CUDA directly. And if Google can support pytorch for
| their TPU and Apple for their M1 GPU, surely others could.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> NVidia has software moat for specialized applications
| but not for AI, which is responsible for most of their
| sales now. Almost everyone in AI uses pytorch
| /jax/triton/flash attention and not CUDA directly_
|
| And what does pytorch et al. use under the hood? cuBLAS and
| cuDNN, proprietary libraries written by NVidia. _That_ is
| where most of the heavy lifting is done. If you think that
| replicating the functionality and performance that these
| libraries provide is easy, feel free to apply for a job at
| NVidia or their competitors. It is pretty well paid.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Did you read the last part? Pytorch uses drivers, and
| drivers exists for Google's TPU and Apple's M1 GPU as
| well and both works pretty well. I have tested both and
| it reaches similar MFU as Nvidia.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Are M1 GPUs available for data center deployment at
| scale? Are Google TPUs available outside of Google? Can
| Amazon or Microsoft or other third parties deploy them?
|
| Anyone that wants off the shelf parts at scale is going
| to turn to Nvidia.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| That's the point I am making. And the reason Amazon or
| Microsoft can't deploy them is the hardware, not CUDA.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| Yeah, and if you're using Nvidia, you're using CUDA.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| So Nvidia's moat is mainly hardware and not software?
| caycep wrote:
| Intel didn't do a lot of things...
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The Pentium math bug, Puma cablemodems, their shitty
| cellular modems that are far worse than Qualcomm's, gigabit
| chipset issues, 2.5GB chipset issues, and now the 13th/14th
| gen CPUs that destroy themselves.
|
| And we just gave them billions in tax dollars. Failing
| upwards...
| rasz wrote:
| Atom C2000 waves from behind all this crowd!
| brirec wrote:
| I still have five C2758 nodes running just fine, though!
| michaelt wrote:
| In 2000 Intel had a huge software moat: Microsoft Windows,
| and the large install base of x86-only software.
|
| Rich webapps hadn't been invented. Smartphones? If you're
| lucky your flip phone might have a colour screen. If you've
| got money to burn, you can insert a PCMCIA card into your
| Compaq iPAQ and try out this new "802.11b" thing. Java was...
| being Java.
|
| Almost all the software out there - especially if it had a
| GUI, and a lot of it did - was distributed as binaries that
| only ran on x86.
| gary_0 wrote:
| So many devs are too young to remember a time before you
| would expect to just download some open source and compile
| it for x86/amd64/arm/emscripten/etc and be good to go. In
| the old days, if you didn't want to write that library code
| yourself, chances are all your AltaVista search would turn
| up was a guy selling a header file and a DLL and OCX[0] for
| $25. If you were lucky!
|
| A vast amount of code was only intended to compile and run
| on a single OS and architecture (circa 2000, that was
| usually x86 Win32; Unix was dying and Wintel had taken over
| the world). If some code needed to be ported to another
| platform, it was as good as a from-scratch re-write.
|
| [0] in case you wanted to use the thing in Visual Basic,
| which you very well might.
| ryao wrote:
| 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 a premium. By the time the competition makes a
| competitive design, Nvidia has the next generation ready to go.
| They seem to be trying to accelerate their pace to kill
| attempts to compete with them and so far, it is working.
|
| Nvidia just does not do the same thing better in a new
| generation, but tries to fundamentally change the paradigm to
| obtain better than generational improvements across
| generations. That is how they introduced SIMT, tensor cores,
| FP8 and more recently FP4, just to name a few. While their
| competitors are still implementing the last round of
| improvements Nvidia made to the state of the art, Nvidia
| launches yet another round of improvements.
|
| For example, Nvidia has had GPUs on the market with FP8 for two
| years. Intel just launched their B580 discrete GPUs and Lunar
| Lake CPUs with Xe2 cores. There is no FP8 support to be seen as
| far as I have been able to gather. Meanwhile, Nvidia will soon
| be launching its 50 series GPUs with FP4 support. AMD's RDNA
| GPUs are not poised to gain FP8 until the yet to be released
| RDNA 4 and I have no idea when Intel's ARC graphics will gain
| FP8. Apple's recent M4 series does have FP8, but no FP4
| support.
|
| Things look look less bad for Nvidia's competitors in the
| enterprise market, CDNA 3 launched with FP8 support last year.
| Intel had Gaudi 2 with FP8 support around the same time as
| Nvidia, and even launched Gaudi 3. Then there is tenstorrent
| with FP8 on the wormhole processors that they released 6 months
| ago. However, FP4 support is no where to be seen with any of
| them and they will likely not release it until well after
| Nvidia, just like nearly all of them did with FP8. This is only
| naming a few companies too. There are many others in this
| sector that have not even touched FP8 yet.
|
| In any case, I am sure that in a generation or two after
| Blackwell, Nvidia will have some other bright idea for changing
| the paradigm and its competition will lag behind in adopting
| it.
|
| So far, I have only discussed compute. I have not even touched
| on graphics, where Nvidia has had many more innovations, on top
| of some of the compute oriented changes being beneficial to
| graphics too. Off the top of my head, Nvidia has had variable
| rate shading to improve rendering performance, ray tracing
| cores to reinvent rendering, tensor cores to enable upscaling
| (I did mention overlap between compute and graphics), optical
| flow accelerators to enable frame generation and likely others
| that I do not recall offhand. These are some of the
| improvements of the past 10 years and I am sure that the next
| 10 years will have more.
|
| We do not see Nvidia's competition put forward nearly as many
| paradigm changing ideas. For example, AMD did "smart access
| memory" more than a decade after it had been standardized as
| resizeable bar, which was definitely a contribution, but not
| one they invented. For something that they actually did invent,
| we need to look at HBM. I am not sure if they or anyone else I
| mentioned has done much else. Beyond the companies I mentioned,
| there are Groq and Cerebras (maybe Google too, but I am not
| sure) with their SRAM architectures, but that is about it as
| far as I know of companies implementing paradigm changing ideas
| in the same space.
|
| I do not expect Nvidia to stop being a juggernaut until they
| run out of fresh ideas. They have produced so many ideas that I
| would not bet on them running out of new ideas any time soon.
| If I were to bet against them, I would have expected them to
| run out of ideas years ago, yet here we are.
|
| Going back to the discussion of Intel seeming to be unbeatable
| in the past, they largely did the same thing better in each
| generation (with occasional ISA extensions), which was enough
| when they had a process advantage, but it was not enough when
| they lost their process advantage. The last time Intel tried to
| do something innovative in its core market, they gave us
| Itanium, and it was such a flop that they kept doing the same
| thing incrementally better ever since then. Losing their
| process advantage took away what put them on top.
| baal80spam wrote:
| > In any case, I am sure that in a generation or two after
| Blackwell, Nvidia will have some other bright idea for
| changing the paradigm and its competition will lag behind in
| adopting it.
|
| This is the most important point. Everyone seems to think
| that Nvidia just rests on its laurels while everyone and
| their dog tries to catch up with it. This is just not how
| (good) business works.
| xnx wrote:
| Nvidia has been very smart to be well prepared, but the
| emergency of Bitcoin and AI were two huge bits of good luck
| for them. It's very unlikely that there is another once-in-
| a-lifetime event that will also benefit Nvidia in that way.
| Nvidia will be successful in the future, but it will be
| through more normal, smart business, means.
| ryao wrote:
| Those are both computational challenges. Nvidia is well
| positioned for those due to their push into HPC with
| GPGPU. If there is another "once-in-a-lifetime"
| computational challenge, it will likely benefit Nvidia
| too.
| bfrog wrote:
| Exactly this, hard to grok why people think somehow the fab
| is the boat anchor around Intel's neck. No, it was the golden
| goose that kept Intel ahead until it didn't.
|
| BK failed to understand the moat Intel had was the Fab. The
| moat is now gone and so is the value.
| notreallyauser wrote:
| > 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| 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.
| ryao wrote:
| Did they do this to the 3090 Ti too?
| harshreality wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Maybe 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Yes, but an e-fuse would not be the only way to lock the
| feature if Nvidia were to want to unlock it later.
| wmf wrote:
| 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).
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Aren't you giving a good reason why its _not_ a fake
| concept there?
| wmf wrote:
| Nope. Putting electronics in landfills simply isn't that
| harmful.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Okdokie well not really going touch that bit, but just
| still want to point out that the way you have it written
| it sounds like the second claim is an argument for the
| first and it makes it a little confusing.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "On one hand, it's very bad because it reduces economic output
| from the exact same input resources (materials and labor and
| r&d)."
|
| This is not true with the economies of scale in the
| semiconductor industry.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| I want to add nvidia sales are 90% data center and 10% gaming,
| and the author being part of the 10% who wasn't abandoned is
| complaining they got a product at half the speed, way lower
| price, instead of half the price same specs as the datacenter
| client
|
| man.
| zeusk wrote:
| Or the 90% are charged absurd markup because clearly they can
| deliver the hardware for 10% use-case for 1000$ and still
| make money on top but they would rather charge the data
| centers 50k for the same product
| evoke4908 wrote:
| Or they _can 't_ afford to sell the cards at consumer
| prices. If they take a loss in the consumer segmet, they
| can recoup by overcharging the datacenter customers.
|
| That's how this scheme works. The card is most likely _not_
| profitable at consumer price points. Without this
| segmentation, consumer cards would trail many years behind
| the performance of datacenter cards.
| zeusk wrote:
| You can theorize a million scenarios, but clearly no one
| here will know what really transpired for Nvidia to
| hobble their consumer chips. I really don't think
| consumer is loss leading, GPUs for AI is a fairly recent
| market while Nvidia has existed churning out consumer
| GPUs since 90s.
|
| But clearly, lack of competition is one thing that
| supports whatever rent Nvidia seeks.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| There are companies lined up around the block to hand over
| $$$$$ for the only competitive GPUs on the market. Is the
| markup actually absurd?
| zeusk wrote:
| There are investors lined up around the block to hand
| over $$$$$ for SFHs on the market while people delay
| family making because they cannot afford housing or end
| up on the streets.
|
| So, is the market really absurd?
|
| Just because some billionaires are desperate for growth
| to grow their hundred billions into trillions outbidding
| each other does not mean that 90% of humanity cannot make
| use of ML running locally on cheaper GPUs.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I consider those two very different problems. One is a
| supply problem, the other is a competition problem.
|
| Also, housing is a basic human right, whereas fast GPUs
| probably are not.
| zeusk wrote:
| Different markets, similar semantics. Both are
| artificially supply restricted.
|
| Infact you can argue that something is really wrong in
| our governance if housing is human right and yet there
| are people profiteering from how unaffordable it has
| become.
|
| I am more appalled at how long it has taken for the big
| tech other than Google to standardized ML workload and
| not be bound by CUDA.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| stock must go up
| leshokunin wrote:
| Can this be fixed by removing the efuse or having a custom
| firmware?
| MPSimmons wrote:
| e-fuses (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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| No, the essence of a fuse is that it can never be reset. A
| circuit breaker is different.
| bri3d wrote:
| There 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.
| xvfLJfx9 wrote:
| 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 warranty)
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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 permanently indicate that
| the CPU has been used for overclocking (and thus remove the
| warranty)
|
| Emphasis on "some." You can buy plenty of CPUs from them made
| for overclocking.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| > 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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.
|
| The price tag and size of these things are what I'm
| talking about. SOME day it will get much cheaper and
| smaller. A 4090 will be useless at that point, but I
| still play with 8086s and vacuum tubes, so...
|
| No point in betting though. We'll both be dead by then.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| I'd still take the bet. FIB and SEM stuff is highly
| specialized and miniaturizing it to be obtainable by a
| garage user seems unlikely even in the distant future.
| Either way, you still couldn't take a 4090 and make it
| functional as a 6000 series. You'd destroy it in the
| process if it was even possible at all.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Nah, it's going to become democratized. It's already
| started.
|
| There's been a few different stories like this lately:
|
| https://interestingengineering.com/videos/guy-builds-
| integra...
|
| People said the same thing you're saying now about
| computers. You're just being silly and forgetting
| history.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Making a hobby etching thing that isn't anywhere close to
| the state of the art is cool, but not exactly anywhere
| close to what is needed to look at a modern chip.
|
| You're trivializing the challenge of modifying something
| that is on the order of 50nm wide and specifically
| designed to not be able to be tampered with.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I feel like you don't understand how time works. ;) We've
| barely had any of this technology 50 years. Give me 500
| years and I absolutely guarantee you that I'll fuck up
| some 4090s with some gadget the size of a mobile phone
| that costs the 10 cents and it'll work perfectly fine.
| rasz wrote:
| Not anytime soon as in 50? 100 years? 4090 is on 5nm node,
| how about you first demonstrate its possible on something
| 100x bigger? For example Intel started locking CPU
| multipliers in Pentium manufactured in 0.8 mm (800 nm),
| unlock that fuse :)
| bri3d wrote:
| > 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 bitfield of "chicken bits" in one-time programmable
| memory than to try to physically fuse off an entire power or
| clock domain, which would border on physically irreversible
| (this is done sometimes, but only where strictly necessary
| and not often).
| wmf wrote:
| This is true but that's why the firmware is signed so you
| can't patch it.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| 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.
| bri3d wrote:
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| This 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.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| they have to do that to server different segments. how would
| you price a 4090 that can be used for crypto, gaming, ai, cad,
| video editing if you were to discover that is cheaper to create
| the same chips for all of them, but the segments are really
| different, 90% coming from datacenter and 10% from gaming
|
| we're lucky they still do gaming by limiting the datacenter
| chips
|
| it's like getting a ferrari speed limited for usd20,000 and
| then I complain I don't get the acceleration of a usd100,000
| model. they sold the product cheaper, they cared, they adapted.
| I'm happy they are still improving year after year for the same
| dollar value
| Xymist wrote:
| They just shouldn't do that. If they can afford to sell the
| Ferrari for $20k, they should do so. To everyone who wants
| one, for whatever reason.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Nah, no thanks. I prefer this because I now have some
| damned fast GPUs in a rig on the cheap. I'm happy to have
| my $20k acceleration limited Ferrari.
| danbruc wrote:
| That is why we need competition, to drive the price down
| towards the costs. And you must be able to provide enough
| volume to meet demand.
| jtbayly wrote:
| They would _not_ be able to afford to sell them at that
| price if they sold all of them at that price. (Or at least,
| I doubt they would.)
| bilbo0s wrote:
| The danger, of course, is that they decide that they don't
| believe they can sell a single sku at USD20000 and make the
| same money they're making now. So then, the price goes up
| 2.5x to 10x depending on how greedy they want to be.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I disagree, and this line of thinking is positively
| dangerous.
|
| Just because Ferrari might be capable of making that car
| for $20k, I don't have a fundamental right to demand it
| from them any more than I have a fundamental right to
| demand that you make me a sandwich right now for $5.
|
| > they can afford
|
| Before using the word "they" in a prescriptive sentence,
| think about whether you could substitute "I" and you would
| still be happy with it.
| Retric wrote:
| The goal isn't to directly force them, but to create a
| market competitive enough that the only way to compete is
| to sell the best product they can with a minimal markup.
|
| I have no issue selling into a competitive market, that's
| just how things work for individuals. It's only at the
| scale of countries and giant companies that the ability
| for anti competitive behavior really shows up.
| modeless wrote:
| There's no fundamental right. But wishing for competition
| is certainly reasonable! We should all be rooting for
| competition to improve the efficiency of our markets.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| So company profit margins should be capped? At what level
| and how would that work exactly?
|
| What about all other stuff? i.e. maybe you or somebody else
| can "afford" to sell their labour at 10-80% of what they
| are paid?
| Sabinus wrote:
| If NVIDIA had real competition they would do this
| naturally to gain market share. The GP saying they
| 'should' do x isn't something we can expect companies to
| do out of the goodness of their hearts, it's what the
| market should force them to do.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| I'm not sure if everything turning into a commodity and
| no companies having any surpluses would be ideal either.
| That would probably significantly slow down innovation in
| some ways.
| caycep wrote:
| speaking of driver quality...my pc has been regularly blue
| screening after the latest release and the transition from the
| Experience app to the Nvidia app...
| daxfohl wrote:
| Oh, right, the CAD thing was sketchier. IIRC there wasn't any
| feature of OpenGL/DirectX that was nerfed, it was just an
| agreement with CAD companies to reject the GPUs that didn't
| have the workstation bit fused.
|
| For this performance nerf, IDK, seems fine to me. Software
| companies do this all the time. Same piece of software but you
| have to pay to unlock features. I don't see why hardware should
| be any different.
|
| Granted, even for the CAD nerf, it's a gray area. You pay for
| features, not for silicon, and NVidia is clear about what you
| have to pay for what features, so. But I'm a bit more biased on
| that one because my 10-person HW company had to spring for
| several of those workstation cards.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| That sounds like a classic Anti-trust suit waiting to happen.
| CAD company and NVIDIA colluding to drive sales exclusively
| to each other. That's illegal and exploitative.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Their former competition wasn't any different. I still remember
| ATI/AMD pencil mods to unlock things they disabled.
| tayo42 wrote:
| How do you go to from that screen shot to this conclusion?
| zamadatix wrote:
| You go from the eFuse mentioned at the beginning to the
| conclusion in the screenshot at the end, not the other way
| around.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Am I missing something then? Is there some context to the
| linked tweet and screen shot that didn't come up?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| People have wrong intuitions about a lot of things and price
| discrimination is one of them. That's the modern world for you.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Maximization 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Aside from possible technical explanations (e.g., the binning
| of products based on defects which permit sub-optimal
| performance as creato describes:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435397>), there's
| market segmentation.
|
| French polymath (economist, engineer, bureaucrat) Jules Dupuit
| famously described this concerning railway carriage
| accomodations and the parlous state of third-class carriages:
|
| _It is not because of the several thousand francs which they
| would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to
| upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this
| [expense] for the sake of its popularity._
|
| _Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second
| class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not
| because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the
| rich._
|
| <https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-
| suck-...>
|
| More on Dupuit:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Dupuit>
|
| Market segmentation by performance is a long-standing practice
| in the information technology world. IBM would degrade
| performance of its mainframes by ensuring that a certain
| fraction of CPU operations were no-ops (NOPs), meaning that for
| those clock cycles the system was not processing data. A
| service engineer would remove those limits on a higher lease
| fee (IBM _leased_ rather than _sold_ machines, ensuring a
| constant revenue stream). It 's common practice in other areas
| to ship products with features _installed_ but _disabled_ and
| activated for only some paying customers.
|
| Another classic example: the difference between Microsoft
| Windows NT server and workstation was the restriction of two
| registry keys:
|
| _We have found that NTS and NTW have identical kernels; in
| fact, NT is a single operating system with two modes. Only two
| registry settings are needed to switch between these two modes
| in NT 4.0, and only one setting in NT 3.51. This is extremely
| significant, and calls into question the related legal
| limitations and costly upgrades that currently face NTW users._
|
| <https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html>
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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 exceed what RX 8000
| or next-gen Intel cards are capable of anyway.
| Insanity wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Intel 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I was reading that Intel GPU firmware cannot be upgraded
| under Linux, only Windows, is that still the case?
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| What does a "pretty bad" h265 implementation look like?
| Buggy? Inefficient or what?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| AMD's 7xxx series cards were almost universally worse than
| their 6xxx equivalents. AMD cut memory bus width and reduced
| compute units, all in a quest to reduce power consumption
| because they're so power-hungry. They're still not as good as
| NVIDIA cards for power consumption.
|
| The drivers are unreliable, Adrenalin is buggy, slow, and
| bloated; AMD's cards have poor raytracing, and AMD's compute is
| a dumpster fire, especially on Windows; ROCm is a joke.
|
| None of the LLM or Stability Matrix stuff works on AMD GPUs
| under Windwos without substantial tweaking and even then it's
| unreliable garbage, whereas the NVIDIA stuff Just Works.
|
| If you don't care about any of that and just want "better than
| integrated graphics", especially if you're on Linux where you
| don't need to worry about the shitshow that is AMD Windows
| drivers - then sure, go for AMD - especially the cards that
| have been put on sale (don't pay MSRP for any AMD GPU, ever.
| They almost always rapidly discount.)
|
| AMD simply does not have the care to compete with NVIDIA for
| the desktop market. They have barely _a few percent_ of the
| desktop GPU market; they 're interested in stuff like gaming
| consoles.
|
| Intel are the only ones who will push AMD - and it will push
| them to either compete or let their product line stagnate and
| milk as much profit out of the AMD fanboys as they can.
| evoke4908 wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| I wish I could say that was a realistic alternative for compute
| work (and on workstations and servers rather than consumer
| PCs). Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it - both in terms of
| the hardware offering (AFAICT), and ecosystem richness. Which
| is really a shame; not because AMD are saintly, but because
| NVIDIA have indeed indeed been slimey and non-forthcoming about
| so much, for so long.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| AMD has inexplicably decided not to invest in software. Just
| like car manufacturers don't realize that a shitty infotainment
| system can keep people from buying the $100k car, AMD doesn't
| seem to realize that people aren't buying a GPU for ML if their
| ML framework doesn't run on it...
|
| And this goes down to consumer drivers too. I've sworn to
| myself that I'm not buying AMD for my next laptop, after
| endless instability issues with the graphics driver. I don't
| care how great and cheap and performant and whatever it is when
| I'm afraid to open Google Maps because it might kernel panic my
| machine.
| freedomben wrote:
| I have AMD in my desktop and my laptop and it has been pretty
| good under Linux (I use Fedora) the past year or two. AMD
| definitely was late to the game, and I still don't think they
| care _as much as they should_ , but they are definitely
| working on it. I've been easily running GPU accelerated
| Ollama on my desktop and laptop through ROCm.
|
| AMD is definitely not perfect but I don't think it's fair to
| say they decided not to invest in software. Better late than
| never, and I'm hoping AMD learned their lesson.
| ramon156 wrote:
| How long ago was this? I bought an AMD laptop this year and
| it's been great with both windows and Linux. I can't say the
| same for my Nvidia pc ...
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| EVGA also significantly reduced warranty on their PSUs. Changed
| PSU components without changing model number.
| creato wrote:
| 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
| 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?)
| wmf wrote:
| 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.
| danjl wrote:
| 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.
| deaddodo wrote:
| I 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.
| revnode wrote:
| > No, there would just be less 4080s for people to buy.
|
| Sure, and more 4090s at a lower price.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Depending on who you ask, binning _is_ segmentation. Generally
| demand isn 't going to exactly match how the yields work out,
| so companies often take a bunch of perfectly good high-end
| chips, nerf them, and throw them in the cheapo version. You
| used to be able to (and still can, in some cases) take a low-
| end device and, if you'd won the chip lottery, "undo" the
| binning and have a perfectly functional high-end version. For
| some chips, almost all the nerfed ones had no defects. But
| manufacturers like nVidia _hated_ it when customers pulled that
| trick, so they started making sure it was impossible.
| creato wrote:
| > You used to be able to (and still can, in some cases) take
| a low-end device and, if you'd won the chip lottery, "undo"
| the binning and have a perfectly functional high-end version.
|
| For the purposes you tested it, sure. Maybe some esoteric
| feature you don't use is broken. NVIDIA still can't sell it
| as the higher end SKU. The tests a chip maker runs to bin
| their chips are not the same tests you might run.
|
| I'm sure chip makers make small adjustments to supply via
| binning to satisfy market demand, but if the "technical
| binning" is too far out of line from the "market binning",
| that's a lot of money left on the table that will get
| corrected sooner or later.
|
| edit: And that correction might be in the form of removing
| redundancies from the chip design, rather than increasing the
| supply/lowering the price of higher end SKUs. The whole point
| here is, that's two sides of the same coin.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| This starts as binning and ends up at down binning :)
| Uw5ssYPc wrote:
| Imagine running this card at full speed, with fully unlocked
| potential. What would happen to new tiny power connectors? I am
| betting insta-fire.
| wmf wrote:
| It would just throttle like it already does.
| knowitnone wrote:
| so the next questions, how to deposit a small bit of metal to fix
| the fuse?
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