Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 22GB Memory Appears on eBay for USD500
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Isn't that exactly what's happening? From OP:
> The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22GB has found its way outside China. eBay seller customgpu_official, an upgrade and repair store in Palo Alto, California, sells a similar MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Aero with 22GB for $499. The store is touting the graphics card as a budget alternative for students and startups that want to get their feet wet in AI workloads. The graphics card is allegedly stable in Stable diffusion, large language models (LLMs), and Llama 2. According to the merchant's website, it has sold over 500 units of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 22GB.
The China stuff is just background story I think.
> Nvidia's continuing refusal to put higher amounts of VRAM into its "affordable" cards [...] leaves average consumers who want to run bigger models locally with very few options.
That's market segmentation and product differentiation for you. You want that much VRAM you're doing ML; you want to do ML you can pay us ML prices.
What 'average consumer' wants to 'run bigger models locally' anyway!
If they made the 'affordable' cards with VRAM ranging from say 8GB to 80GB, it would be only gamers buying at the bottom end and only MLers at the top. And they can charge the latter a lot more - so even if they did what you want, you'd end up with Applesque pricing bumps for beefier/more GDDR chips.
Boards from different OEMs were different in meaningful ways and OEMs had the chance to differentiate themselves from the competition with some actual engineering. More RAM, multiple GPUs per board, AGP to PCIe chips, you name it.
Nowadays Nvidia restricts is partners from all that fun and undercuts them with their own models. No wonder EVGA quit this game.
Usually by the time you could buy a high-end CPU replacement, it was a "better deal" to just replace the entire motherboard/CPU combo and get a whole new computer. But a second video card, some more RAM, additional SSDs, those made sense.
Games are just going to use temporal accumulation now. There is too much signal to be gained from re-using past samples. It makes things way cheaper and opens the door to extrapolation and non-uniform sampling etc. It's the least bad of all the options, and DLSS actually is quite good at weighting samples pretty reasonably. DLSS 2.5, 3.0, 3.5 and upwards are actually significantly better and that can be injected back into (non-anticheat) games and the bar will likely continue to be raised. It is a signal processing technique that recovers a lot of signal with very low "noise factor".
A few generations ago (1080/2080) there was no mainstream ML. Products change, product lines change.
Care to elaborate?
The RTX 4090 is so huge and power-hungry you can barely fit two into a case, let alone any more than that.
And even if you replace your case, and your power supply (and maybe your motherboard and CPU too, gotta have enough PCIe lanes) you'll still only have 48GB of vram.
OK, so we can't use an RTX GPU. Good luck even understanding the rest of nvidia's product range. The A40? "The World’s Most Powerful Data Center GPU for Visual Computing". V100? "The most advanced data center GPU ever built". H100? "Unprecedented performance, scalability, and security for every data center". A100? "Unprecedented acceleration at every scale to power the world’s highest-performing elastic data centers". H200? "The world’s most powerful GPU" L4? "The breakthrough universal accelerator".
Good luck figuring out who sells them in your country, or if they're in stock.
Oh, and remember to read the entire spec in excruciating detail. That $2700 L4 24GB is slower than an RTX 4090.
Think you'll launch something in the cloud? With Google Cloud half the cards are only available in some regions - and even if you're in a region that offers a given GPU, maybe there's a shortage and support tells you to just keep requesting GPUs repeatedly until you get lucky.
I had to upgrade to a 1000W PSU for the 3090 because the 3090s will occasionally voltage spike and trigger OCP on power supplies. TDP is supposed to be like 350W but for a slip second it might pull around 600-700W. Plenty of complaints about it on Reddit and elsewhere. It’s a beast but it cooks my home office when I use it. Cest la vie.
* Is the product actually available for purchase today, and at what price?
* In what form factors - Full height? Half height? Two slots? Three? SXM? Does it have a fan built in?
* What is the relative performance? Half the time the specs all quote different numbers. Why does one product quote 'single precision performance' and 'rt core performance' and 'tensor performance' while another quotes the 'tensor cores' and 'shader cores' and another quotes the 'FP64', 'FP32', 'FP16', 'BFLOAT16', 'TF32' and 'INT8'?
And don't imagine you're going to get away with ignoring those specs. A $2700 L4 24GB is slower than an RTX 4090, for example, because it's for power-efficient servers or something.
Like I said Nvidia themselves indicate whether it’s suitable.
And if your still confused or doubt the accuracy, or don’t want to spend any time reading spec sheets, I imagine the sales channel folks will be able to guarantee it in writing for a fee.
You'd think so, wouldn't you?
But nvidia is not that smart. They have decided that the GPUs should be split over at least three different pages, and those pages should be camouflaged.
I can only assume the marketing team are judged based on time spent on site or number of pages viewed, rather than on sales made.
When you go to the home page, point to products and click on "NVIDIA RTX / Quadro" you might expect to find the RTX 4090 and some Quadro products. You will in fact find neither - the RTX 4090 is under 'GeForce' and the 'Quadro' brand is no longer used.
Maybe on the home page you choose "NVIDIA RTX-Powered AI Workstations" - that'll give you a list of their workstation-suitable cards for ML, right? No, that page contains no products at all. The only option is to Find A Partner which links you to a bunch of partners - several of whom do not in fact sell AI Workstations.
Other partners sell AI workstations... without GPUs. As far as HP is concerned, $4000 only gets you the base model workstation, with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk. If you want GPUs with that, you'll need to call the sales team, who might perhaps deign to sell you one.
Or perhaps you're at nvidia's home page, and you're looking for data centre grade GPUs? For that product page, simply choose whether you mean the DGX, EGX, IGX, HGX, MGX or OVX platform?
But they make it very easy to find the keynote speech by His Excellency Omar Sultan Al Olama on the latest breakthroughs in AI. He does, in fairness, have a very appropriate surname.
What, exactly, is your expectation here? If you want the simple Apple model where you don't need to look at the spec, do the Apple think and pay up for the pricy GPU.
That seems very surprising. Bet Nvidia will push out an emergency update soon, and then you'll have bricked and unbricked cards.
The attempt on their profits has left them scarred and deformed
The crazy potential for that backfiring is, IMHO, reason alone for them to not even try.
There is no competition. There's no choice for the consumer. You buy nvidia or you don't get to play.
Nvidia's reputation is already in the toilet. They have literally nothing to lose. There's no consequences for their actions.
And (sadly) how long will that take, if it happens at all?
People can "start to call" all they want, but it won't matter unless NVIDIA has something to fear.
Or scalpers stop their business after 3 months?
It's a similar issue with EVs, the market they were trying to sell to didn't really exist. They wanted people with enough money to buy an expensive car, but also people who are not expecting oodles of luxury features which would normally come on a car that expensive. So now they are having to lower their EV prices in general because inflation kind of murdered any market they may have had. Add on the EV growing pains of battery tech still being susceptible to reduced range in the cold, increased tire wear, and defects...I don't know many people who will take such a risk for such a price.
I think some games like the modern iterations of CP2077 are just mind blowing - all gameplay aside. But it's a shame that it costs basically north of $1000 to play it the way its developers hope you will.
So instead most games just target whatever modern consoles are which aside from right after a new release is usually relatively old for a PC.. which then makes it hard for PC gamers to justify spending that $1000+ when few games utilize it.
Minecraft and Skyrim have been my two constant companions for years now.
It may have been a defective core, but when they make these cut-down SKUs they need to meet a quota of units regardless of whether that many salvagable defective chips roll off the line, so it's not uncommon for them to disable perfectly functional hardware. Especially as the process matures and yields improve.
Good times.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7pipjq/just_got_a_ryze...
I was thinking the hardware is not there but the bios is modified to falsely report it is.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-demos-meteor-lake-cp...
For this same reason (timing precision) you see that soldered DDR5 memory often reaches way higher speeds than what's available in DIMM or SODIMM form.
Or would the cost of the extra complexity of the memory controller likely not be worth it ever?
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13560/amd-unveils-chiplet-des...
[2]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/how...
Intel's already doing that with Xeon Max, it has both onboard HBM and an outboard DDR5 interface. It can be configured to run entirely from HBM with no DDR5 installed at all, or use the HBM as a huge cache in front of the DDR5, or to map the HBM and DDR5 into different memory regions to let software decide how to use each. I don't think there's been any indication of that approach filtering down to consumer architectures though, Intel is talking about doing RAM-on-package there but without any outboard memory interface alongside it.
Most software isn't even NUMA aware, and would completely fail to take advantage of a tiered memory hierarchy if it was given the option. But if we make the fast memory a big cache and let the CPU worry about it it's a "cheap" win.
Though there is the Xeon Phi which has about 16GB of on-package memory that can either be configured as cache or as "scratchpad" memory. But of course that's not meant for general-purpose software
AMD 7950X3D, a desktop CPU, has 144 MB of L2+L3 cache memory on-chip.
the reason to separate all the components are to ensure high percentage of functional pieces
I wonder how they will do this in the workstation and server space, I don't really see how they can do away with socketed CPUs.
I wonder if we will go back to slotted CPUs, with a SOM style board with CPU and memory being plugged into a motherboard/chassis that's really just an I/O back plane. How will multi Cpu communication look then?
I guess we already have memory being pinned to a NUMA node and connecting to others via a vendor specific interconnect, so maybe it's not that strange and different from today.
I'm guessing the endgame will be consumer parts all being RAM-on-package with no external memory interface, and workstation/server parts will take a hybrid approach like Intel is already doing with the Xeon Max chips which have 64GB HBM on the package and an external DDR5 interface supporting terabytes of slower bulk memory.
Sockets still make sense because you can choose between 10 or so different CPUs for a particular socket format.
But with just in time manufacturing you can imagine ordering the CPU directly from the motherboard manufacturer which solders it in place.
Given that AMD has been releasing AM4 CPUs since 2016, I think it's reasonable to assume that many of those who know how to build computers in the first place have upgraded their CPU. Why switch the whole motherboard/CPU combination when you can just plug in a better CPU?
I would say it’s even more strategic than the original.
ARM Holdings;
Imagination Technologies (UK) - PowerVR GPUs (mobile, automotive, embedded)
NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands) - GPUs for automotive & industrial
STMicroelectronics (France/Italy) - GPUs for automotive, industrial & consumer
BrainChip (Australia, subsidiary in France) - neuromorphic computing chips (similar to GPUs)
Graphcore (UK) - intelligence processing units (IPUs) for machine learning (alternative to GPUs for some applications)
InCore Semiconductor (Netherlands) - custom high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, including GPUs
Kalray (France) - programmable processors for data centers (alternative to GPUs for some applications)
RISC-V International (non-profit, enables European companies to design own GPUs)
Think Silicon (Greece)
...any others?
50% more price, 100% more performance (at least in resnet). Plus ofc 2GB extra and newer architecture
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-gets-...
...but sounds rather janky (custom driver)
i am still unsure why doubling the vram works so seemlessly, but i wonder if you need modifications at driver/vbios level to fully utilize the new capacity.
This is so wrongheaded and shortsighted of us. This isn't the way to build a world of cooperation and prosperity.
The news is there is one for sale on eBay US?
They are on AliExpress I think? - https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-2080TI-22G.html
Video of someone else modding it - https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1sc411q73B/
Not sure I get the story.