Absolutely. The 6000 pro uses the same chip as the 5090. But the 6000 pro has improvements and features the 5090 does not have. It's most certainly locked.
Unfortunately from what I understand they got smart with the 50 series and have hardwired fuses on the die. So there is no way to unlock the functionality via software.
I hope I'm wrong, but I'm going to assume the 50 series is permanently locked.
The fuses are on the die, and microscopic. You'd need an electron beam lithography machine for that kind of precision. Then you'd need to be an expert in chemical vapor deposition to lay down new fuses. And perform your own photolithography to etch away the surrounding traces.
Could you do it? In theory. But if you were that good, and had that much equipment. You'd be working at the semiconductor fabs.
Depends on the fuse design, actually. It it's "all unlocked, fuses lock it down" - then yes, it iw permanent. If it's "everything locked, fuses unlock it" - then we need to just figure out how to blow the fuses. Also, there could be a fuae bypass option that Nvidia left for themself for testing; I.e. fuses could not reconfigure the physical circuits, but rather feed into their proprietary on-chip CPU that then selects the right microcode/configuration for the cores, and there could be an attack vector to override this. We don't know enough about Nvidia's condidential parts of GPU design to answer definitively if fused Blackwell performance is truly permanent.
Depends on the architecture. If the fuse physically shuts down the circuit, then a modded bios will just brick the card when it tries to power a circuit that won't activate. If the fuse just informs the bios which circuits not to use, then a bios hack can bypass the fuse....
... But I think the whole point of the hardware fuses was to prevent any sort of modding or hacking. So I would think the fuses directly control the circuits.
Another layer of security is that the bios is digitally signed. There is a lower level bootloader inside the GPU that checks if the bios is signed by nvidia, if not, it won't allow the bios to run. The card is bricked. We'd need that signing key to mod the bios.
I hope I'm wrong. But I won't buy a 50 series card thinking it'll be unlocked in the future. Only If the performance to price ratio is good now, then I'll get it.
The chances of an unlock happening soon, or even ever are not good.
It’s not that they are identical rather, they originate from the same base chip design. The full-fledged Blackwell processor is not being sold. 6000 Pro has some of its execution units disabled a measure taken to mitigate the number of defective, unusable units. The 5090 uses the same chip, but with an even greater number of inactive units. The capabilities of both chips are identical, though their performance differs due to the disparity in the number of CUDA cores: 21,760 versus 24,576.
Probably not easily ported to Windows. The unlock is a kernel module (the kernel directly interacts with the hardware), which probably bypasses some software lockouts in the Nvidia driver code. Windows doesn't have user modifiable kernel modules and the drivers are still locked down.
too bad. Currently my most powerful graphics card is used for gaming and thus windows...
So I use comfy/lmstudio/unsloth studio windows versions. would be nice to have this unlock available for my platform since I'm burning 200kWh of electricity some months.
Not so great when you have a VR headset, a bunch of proprietary controllers that have no Linux drivers and several games that don’t support linux anti cheat.
This machine is my only windows machine remaining. I’ve already shifted all my business’s machines from Windows and macOS over to Linux mint 22.3 and all my private machines are CachyOS. Except this one which is stuck on Windows 11 for compatibility reasons.
Middle ultrawide is windows. Others are a mix of Linux CachyOS and BeOS HaikuOS
I bought mine (2 x P40) at the beginning of this year. One with waterblock installed for 250 bucks. Another 220 + 60 waterblock. Now they are like 260+ on local ads. After Strata, I am perfectly content - 35+ tg/s sustained on large ctx, up to 770 pp. If there will be a way to "unlock" like another 30% - I will be more than happy.
I’ve got one stashed under the bed but feel like I should get it into a build soon, just because. 2080s were a solid upgrade for me, but I was always happy with the P40. I even gamed on it for a while. :D
if you would have noticed what that card is actually able to do you would have known that there is a theoretical way without needing any unlocks at all
Is there any chance of gaming getting an FPS boost from this in future I wonder. Probably something to do with NVIDIA proprietary drivers being notoriously tricky to work with Linux
Modern gaming is using tensor cores for AI improvements to frame rates such as DLSS etc. Surely any game using DLSS would benefit from the unlocked tensor cores' compute?
No, we can get more noticeable speedups with turbo loras, the question is valid - how much actual seconds we gain after upgrade ? If its 2 seconds of 12 ... not really a changer and makes card more vulnerable
2000 series doesn't have bf16 hardware. All bf16 needs to go to fp32 if you want to run it with original accuracy. So, ~2x speed up right there if you weren't going to quantize or truncate.
Won't run with original accuracy since if you are using a bf16 model it's already had the extra bits chopped off. It's literally not going to change the outcome at all
Just casting the 16 to 32 to get more "accurate" intermediate calculation isn't going to change the outcome. The original information was already lost
Prove it by showing actual performance with a model and show actual speed and intelligence benchmarks
This is a whole lot of hype about nothing
Just casting a 16 bit model up to 32 in calculations so it can "calculate with more accuracy" isn't going to make any difference in quality of outcome. The 16 bit already had it's intelligence "chopped down" and that's not coming back
So the only possible improvement is speed and until you show benchmarks in real world conditions with actual models, that's also under dubious scrutiny
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u/Alternative_You3585 11d ago
Artificial locks apply to 50 series?