this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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Keep in mind that doing so would be in the same vain as Volkswagen emissions scandal. Nvidia could end up in Court trying to justify why their products can easily bypass sanctions and they can be hit hard by fines, billions of dollars hard. A special mode used to complay with the law that is not going to be used in reality still got Volkswagen in hot water and with more stringent testing that costed them more on the long run.
Nvidia can't afford to mess around as making an enemy of us lawmakers on matter national security if a sure fire way for the US to release new requirements that would cripple next gen Nvidia cards
Are there any regulations about how hard you have to "lock down" your product ?. Or do they just "fuck around and find out" ?
It's in Nvidia's legal team hands what path to take. Likely they would do anything to avoid us lawmakers ire.
I imagine The bar they must clear in the case of a court case is if Nvidia took all reasonable precautions to stop the cards performance from exceeding the limit.
If you read this thread everyones reaction to the idea of software lockdown was ridicule, and there are professionals out there that think the same,there are always bugs and workarounds, it's just for most secure software the holes aren't worth the time and effort to look for them ,in AI space however I think the rewards would be worth it to try and crack a software lock .
For example intel has one of the best software lockdown in the industry for their locked CPUs and then those CPUs got a de facto overclock from a motherboard beta bios. The failure here was on intels partners not their software but the overclock happened. If the same where to happen to an Nvidia card any half decent lawyer would ask why didn't you fuse off the SMs, even if there were legitimate reason for a software lock. The fact there is a sure fire way to stay within the limit is what could damn Nvidia.
The fear here is the us government losses trust in Nvidia and their willingness to play ball if they get up to some shenanigans and make an outright gpu ban.
The regulations specify the performance ceiling. Nvidia just ships products slower than that
There is no point fusing off 4090 permanently down to 100CU, that is just wastage of silicon. At that point Nvidia might as well save the trouble, just ship a fully enabled super clock AD103 which is at 84CU, the performance is already very close.
The full ad103 is still far from the limit. And Nvidia is trying to give china the most powerful gpu they can make. Though if the cut is truly at 100 SMs then Nvidia wants to stay within the limit even if the card is overclocked as 100 SMs still feels too step a cut.
Also Ad102 is what allows you 24gb of vram I imagine the extra 14 SMs is iceing on the cake in that case