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Comment by Varloom | Hacker News Reader

Why is the card has NOT been recalled already by now?

Are they waiting for some major house fire news to break out before doing something.

The formula A x B x C = X, where A is the number of vehicles in the field, B is the probable rate of failure, and C is the cost of out-of-court settlement for that failure

s/vehicles/GPUs/

That line from Fight Club really needs a whole lotta asterisks and qualifications. There are plenty of forced-recall scenarios where the manufacturer would prefer to use the ABC<=X approach but are not allowed or simply over-ruled by government. Safety of life being the primary over-riding concern, for good reason.

I'm pretty surprised this issue has gotten as long in the tooth time wise as it has. I remember seeing a story about this ticking-timebomb power connector like 1.5 months ago and then heard nothing. I'm guessing there is scurrying behind the scenes between then and now, but you never know.

>I'm pretty surprised this issue has gotten as long in the tooth time wise as it has.

Just to remove ambiguity, are you saying that the ABC<=X is long in the tooth or that the Nvidia connector is?

"Good" stories like ABC<=X, McDonald's coffee too hot, etc are infamous for a reason lest someone forget and repeat.

The Nvidia 4090 power connector story is what I'm referring to.

Safety of life is not a boundless good. All of the good things around us come at some risk to life. Of course, the government's liability to overvalue safety (or to be more neutral, to inconsistently determine the value of safety) in a particular proceeding (be it before a court in a lawsuit or before a regulatory agency that might order a recall), is just another part of the calculation.

Ok, and? Aside from the pure theory banter, I expect the government to come down hard on a manufacturer when they knowingly ship a device with a sustained heat/power issue resulting in fires.

I'm pretty certain that safety of life is not the primary over-riding concern (also for good reason) - modern vehicles can be made much safer by requiring advanced safety features (see: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/cars-with-advance...) - but these aren't mandatory because there is a cost associated with each life saved, and, at some point, we as a society don't value human life as much as $$$ - so that's the line we draw.

The fight club reference is to internal information and decision making processes, it doesn’t imply that the company is the only thing that can decide to do a recall.

Nvidia would be wise to push a patch limiting the power consumption to safe levels, and offer a "hot-rod mode" as a kernel parameter or something.

Benchmarks (and therefore profits) would probably take a hit if so, hence they are not doing it.

Which cards are even competitive with the 3090, much less the 4080? It's perfectly acceptable for Nvidia to admit they were wrong about power scaling if they offer an unlocked mode for idiots in fireproof houses.

The RX 7900 XT should be fairly close and at a lower wattage.

I got a nice settlement check from AMD who had to admit that their 8 core CPUs were actually 4 core CPUs with dual parallel math units. I'm pretty sure a post-launch reduction in power and performance of these cards would qualify any current owners for a refund.

Nvidia are doing something like this now advertising their CUDA TOPS as double their actual value but with a footnote telling you this is for "sparse" multiplications. Here "sparse" means each dot-product can assume half of each input vector is zero.

The thing is, the 4090 is the pushed-past-the-limit supercar of the generation, these things always have issues. It's just due to market conditions that they didn't release all the somewhat reasonable cards (4070, 4080) yet. They don't want to cannibalize 30xx series sales, they don't want to delay 40xx series, they want the top of the charts. shrug

Just don't buy a 4090. The technology is incredible, the model is stupid. Buy a 3080 Ti, or wait for a 4080. Like, don't buy a $1 million Bugatti, you could get a $250k supercar and it would probably be better for any real-world use. (But do people buying $50k BMWs complain about these things?)

It's far from certain that would fix the issue, though. If the problem is some edge case problem with the connection, what's to say it couldn't happen under standard load?

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