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
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 ...
Some applications may be more fault-tolerant than others though. If an LLM glitches you can reinitialize it, maybe reshuffle the allocations a bit and it'll be fine?
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.
I usually miss out on these things, but I'd been monitoring the eBay prices rising for inferior cards and figured this was a good bet.
Annoying thing is finding a good motherboard to put multiple blower cards in. Mining rigs are a steal but PCIe x1 limitation is annoying. Got a bunch of Volta cards too sitting around until I figure out where to put them (and the performance per watt sucks next to the 170).
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.
(which is the more likely scenario because they can make much more money on enterprise/datacenter products, see DRAM)
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 ...
Hard to believe $1k was a deal a few months ago (and $200 before then).
The highs and lows of my predictive capabilities
Annoying thing is finding a good motherboard to put multiple blower cards in. Mining rigs are a steal but PCIe x1 limitation is annoying. Got a bunch of Volta cards too sitting around until I figure out where to put them (and the performance per watt sucks next to the 170).
Anyways, that's what I tell myself as I taste my bowl of sour grapes.
That said, 80G for something that you picked up for cheap could be an absolute steal these days.
Currently listening to the soothing drone of my $200 Octominer cooling my cards while I'm fine tuning a model (almost makes a good space heater).
Bad RAM isn't a huge issue as you can flag and ignore the relevant regions and be down a few MB.