IIRC, the RTX A1000 is an RTX 3050 8GB with ~10% of the shader cores disabled, retailing for double the price of a 3050?
I guess it's a boon for Intel that NVidia repeatedly shoots their own workstation GPUs in the foot...
I guess it's a boon for Intel that NVidia repeatedly shoots their own workstation GPUs in the foot...
I.e. maybe Nvidia say "if we're going to fuse some random number of cores such that this is no longer a 3050, then let's not only fuse the damaged cores, but also do a long burn-in pass to observe TDP, and then fuse the top 10% of cores by measured TDP."
If they did that, it would mean that the resulting processor would be much more stable under a high duty cycle load, and so likely to last much longer in an inference-cluster deploy environment.
And the extra effort (= bottlenecking their supply of this model at the QC step) would at least partially justify the added cost. Since there'd really be no other way to produce a card with as many FLOPS/watt-dollar, without doing this expensive "make the chip so tiny it's beyond the state-of-the-art to make it stably, then analyze it long enough to precision-disable everything required to fully stabilize it for long-term operation" approach.