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Comment by riku_iki | Hacker News Reader

> gimped ML functionality

curious what is that?

The 3090 supports but doesn't let you enable the titan driver paths, SR-IOV, NGX, and critically, is capped to half-rate tensor operations with FP32 accumulate.

An official firmware release could change this but they're likely saving it for the Titan cards down the road.

Where do you see that this is artificial (i.e. in software/firmware) rather than just missing some hardware that's present on the Titan/Quadro cards?

The same thing happened with the 2080 / Titan and looks to be confirmed for the 3000 series by AnandTech. https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1301996479448457216

The Reddit AMA implies the Ampere architecture supports this configuration but is software limited under the FP32 section: https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/ilhao8/nvidia_rtx_3...

To epistemologically correct, I don't believe one will ever see a statement from NVIDIA confirming that this is a software limitation. I believe it's just inferred.

edit: This is close to confirmation: https://imgur.com/a/RH8vyz9 -though I may suspect there are non reversible hardware fuses at play too.

They also did this with the TITAN in the past, I think, so it's not entirely unprecedented.

TITAN X got access to pro drivers shortly after AMD announced the Vega Frontier Edition.

Maybe it is a type of binning. Maybe the machine learning specific hardware is more prone to errors so they just disable that on subpar chips and sell them for use in graphics cards?

The AMA section on FP32 seems to imply it's in hardware though, unless I'm missing something – datapath is a hardware term, at least.

I mean, I really hope that it's just in the driver so that an enterprising reverse engineer can hack the driver and re-enable full FP16/FP32 accumulate :)

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