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Techie uses voltage glitching hack to turn $2,500 Nvidia 8GB cryptomining GPU into a full-fat $20,000 A100 with 80GB of VRAM

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Techie uses voltage glitching hack to turn $2,500 Nvidia 8GB cryptomining GPU into a full-fat $20,000 A100 with 80GB of VRAM

Enterprising techies looking to build their own local AI cluster have far more interesting options than buying DGX Sparks or Apple Mac Studios. Used data center GPUs are everywhere, and a server rack's garbage is an enthusiast's treasure. This option has become even more popular with CMPunlocker, a soft-mod for Nvidia CMP-170HX cards that unlocks abilities well beyond stock. Now, a techie has taken it a step further, blasting through the remaining limitations with voltage glitching and creating a card faster than the actual $20,000 Nvidia A100 GPU with 80GB of VRAM... but from an $2,500 8GB CMP-170HX mining card.

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The volt-mod was done by Kate (GitHub link here), who got her starting point from a paper that described how one could exploit GA100 cards' microcode. She turned her attention to the normally protected onboard fuse controller. Although it's rarely discussed, a "fuse box" has been integral in most any CPU and GPU for a while — though it's normally used once at the factory to break physical connections in chips to parts that have tested poorly, thus disabling them so they can be sold as a lower-end model.

If you're wondering how people are getting 80-40GB of VRAM out of 8-10GB, the explanation is simple: the GA100 silicon actually includes all the corresponding HBM2e VRAM dies within; but they get disabled at the factory like the shader modules.


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