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Comment by moyix | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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 :)

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?

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