Interesting! I had only heard of them as cheap gaming boxes. Didn't know they were being used for cheap inference, too, but it makes sense.

> They hold a special place in my heart because I deployed 20k

Sounds like something I'd love to hear more about if you can share

ethereum mining, long shut down...

This needs a blog post & HN submission

Cool stuff. Just read: https://github.com/akandr/bc250

Yea, I'm bummed I didn't know about the 40-CU unlock, although it probably wouldn't have had much impact on mining performance. It still would have been neat to test. I did build a whole automated solution for auto-tuning each individual board. It would start at the "best" settings and then downgrade every time there was a crash. If it wasn't crashing, then those were the new "best" settings for that individual chip.

afaik unlock was discovered very recently

It was discovered recently, however we were dealing with asrock and AMD directly given the quantity we bought, and they didn’t say anything. Kind of lame imho.

Wow holy crap this is news to me! I will have to consider picking some of these up for testing, what is it like working with them?

there is a discord server for fans of bc-250... lots of information there.