"Nvidia is so far ahead that all the 4090s are nerfed to half speed" (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

I think this is just like intel does.

Runs fast? i9. slower? i7. missing cores? i5 slowest? i3

perfect chips probably not only have all the cores working, they also run at low voltages so don't get as hot.

I wonder if they can figure out what parts of the chip run at what speeds, and disable the ones that run slow/hot

I'm pretty sure gpus are overclocked by vendors, so there must be some sort of binning either by the vendors or they buy binned parts. I'll bet if parts could go faster, you would have an ASUS/MSI/etc 4090-2x-max-$$$$

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/glossary-binning-defini...

I'm not sure that it's completed as a separate fp16 ALU. There's cute ways to share logic between a dual fp16 alu and a single fp32 ALU such that it's really just one ALU with those being different ops.

There must be a whole layer of reroute if defective plumbing in drivers.

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.

This starts as binning and ends up at down binning :)

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.

>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. )

Their former competition wasn't any different. I still remember ATI/AMD pencil mods to unlock things they disabled.

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

It's a protected company...

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...

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.

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.

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.

Intel didn't have a software stack moat.

> and Broadcom was thinking about buying them...

I'm thinking about buying Nvidia

(this is bullshit)

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.

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.

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.

EVGA also significantly reduced warranty on their PSUs. Changed PSU components without changing model number.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Yeah, somebody knew the new power connectors were going to be sus, so halving the power was at least somewhat safe thing to do

Yeah, this is far from new too

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.

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)

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.

You go from the eFuse mentioned at the beginning to the conclusion in the screenshot at the end, not the other way around.

What?

It would just throttle like it already does.

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.

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>

People have wrong intuitions about a lot of things and price discrimination is one of them. That's the modern world for you.