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THE NVIDIA AI GPU BLACK MARKET | Investigating Smuggling, Corruption, & Governments (europe.pub)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/post/152656

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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

Yes... for an individual, those are the prices (if only there was some 3 hour youtube video about adding more memory to cards...).

The issue is that even a downstream isn't buying 100 dollars of VRAM. They need to buy that in bulk. And then they need to retool their factories to support that configuration. And if they can't sell enough of those units to justify the retooling and the purchases?

I mean... look at EVGA

And then you have the marketing/brand implications which I already spoke to.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    That's what I'm saying, there is no retooling. Some of AMD's existing OEMs are already making W7900s.

    Here's the bulk of the process on the OEM side, other than maybe leaving an ECC chip off:

    • Take finished W7900.

    • Change ID in firmware (so the CAD drivers don't recognize it)

    • Apply a different sticker, put it in a different box

    • Do the paperwork of making a new SKU, like they make for overclocked cards

    That's not that expensive. If it doesn't sell a lot, well, not much skin off thier back. And it would make AMD boatloads by seeding development for their server cards (which the workstation cards to not do because they are utterly pointless at those prices).

    This is all kind of a moot point though, as the 7900 series is basically sunsetted, and AMD doesn't have a 384 bit consumer card anymore (nor a GDDR7 one to use the new, huge GDDR7 ICs).

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