Using voltage glitching to unleash the A100 in my mining card

amelius

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)

samlinnfer

Before you get too excited about the CMP 170HX, the prices have already skyrocketed and that card doesn't have a cooler on it. It 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.

SillyUsername

I just wish they had something like this for older Tesla p100s, p4s...

roger_

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).

Kevin_Flynn

The ebay auction headlines have already rewritten themselves.

htrp

amazing to think there was a time (literally not too long ago) where you would throw 80 GB of HBM onto a chip and turn 90% of it off

mschuster91

> In one of the most extreme manifestations of product segmentation, the CMP 170HX, an Ethereum mining card with nominally 8 or 10 GB of application-exposed framebuffer capacity, actually comes with, respectively, ~80 and ~40 GB of HBM onboard! wtf, it seems RAM truly was too cheap back then...

ForHackernews

>an Ethereum mining card Wait, so does this unlock it to actually do something useful, or just "mine" marginally more shas?

mr_roboto

Selling anything that has been purposely hamstrung to limit available capabilities for market reasons seems morally repugnant beyond words. I understand walling off die defects but if it is functional that is disgusting.

mitxela

It's utterly crazy that anyone outside Nvidia knows any of this, much less all of it. Has there been a years long public reverse engineering effort that I didn't hear about until now?

gwbas1c

> In a properly secured design, a blown fuse should always induce a more restrictive state, because a blown fuse cannot be unblown in an economically feasible way. I disagree: If there's any risk that the fuse will blow with normal usage, then a blown fuse means a defective product.

low_tech_punk

What if the author turn out to be Alice Huang? Joke aside, good investigation and blog debut, kate!

tintor

Finally, I can download more VRAM!

notenchange

This is great. I’m actually trying to unlock the 80G in a CMP 170HX the software way for the last 2 weeks (still no luck). I just don’t know if I’m brave enough (and knowledgeable enough) to go this blown fuses way. Seems a lot more risky. P.S. I now see this is for the 8GB model, which is insane. The 10G one is the one that until now was proven to have 80G, but never fully accessible through CUDA (it was accessible using CPU memory copy though - much slower).

dylanger

Great usage of glitching!

dreamcompiler

Imagine if cars were like this: "We will sell you this Ferrari for $2K and it will perform like a Chevy Vega until you give us another $200K, which will unlock the hardware." Oh wait, cars are like this now.

octoberfranklin

there are several functions where blowing a fuse on an NVIDIA die can grant you more access, not less. In a properly secured design, a blown fuse should always induce a more restrictive state, because a blown fuse cannot be unblown in an economically feasible way. Not really. If the fuses are for security, sure. But these aren't. These fuses are for economic extraction. Doing it the way NVIDIA did it is a safety feature: it ensures that blowing a fuse will never destroy economic value -- it will never turn a card that was previously able to do something correctly into a card that can no longer do that thing correctly.

nullc

Considering how unobtainium GPUs have become nvidia could get a PR win by publishing unlocks for all their outdated hardware. ... people are figuring it out anyways, might as well embrace it.

myself248

Instead of putting the host to ACPI S3 state, could an external PCIe riser be used with a separate power supply? Seems like that would considerably speed up the process, by letting the host continue to run while only the target cycles.

richlow

Firstly; this is awesome! Secondly you never spoke about the squeaky bum moment of actually making the change. Crikey that would have been a long moment.