Re:Auto giants like BMW, GM and Toyota make drivers ‘subscri...
by hakfoo on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @10:34PM
(#32588734)
They may all be there, but they may not work.
At one point, the old Geforce 6800 cards came in three varieties. The cheapest model had two disabled functional units. You could often unlock one successfully (6800XT to 6800), but both (6800XT to 6800GS) was prone to much higher instability and failure. Even if all the transistors worked, the rest of the board (power delivery, heatsinking) was often downgraded on cheap models.
That's only for the very high yield ones which get sold for specific computing purposes. The GPUs you buy at the store are already from the shit pile. Within that shit pile though, they all have exactly the same amount of transistors in there usually across different versions of the same product line, and if you buy the highest end version you get use of all of the transistors, if not you don't - but they are still there.