Re:Using voltage glitching to unleash the A100 in my mining ...
by nomel on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @01:31PM
(#50456776)
No, that's absolutely not the perspective of the bean counters at hardware companies. The fuses are also for economic security. If someone wants more features, you make sure that they paid for them. You don't give away higher tier SKU functionality for free. This will be removed in the next revision, as have all the many other similar cases before it.
Product tiers come naturally with IC's, by disabling physical sections of the chip that can't work due to inevitable manufacturing defects. You don't throw defective chips away, you physically cut off those defective sections of the chip, with a saw or with a fuse, so you can sell it without that defect. This works great in the beginning, when your yields are low and you're still dialing in the manufacturing process. But, as yields increase, you might not have enough of the lower tier chips to meet demand. So you, just fuse otherwise good chips. Chips are cheap, after all!
There was probably some cost/engineering justification for it, but there's a very high chance that justification is looong gone. Chips are cheap, but revisions are expensive!
Product tiers come naturally with IC's, by disabling physical sections of the chip that can't work due to inevitable manufacturing defects. You don't throw defective chips away, you physically cut off those defective sections of the chip, with a saw or with a fuse, so you can sell it without that defect. This works great in the beginning, when your yields are low and you're still dialing in the manufacturing process. But, as yields increase, you might not have enough of the lower tier chips to meet demand. So you, just fuse otherwise good chips. Chips are cheap, after all!
There was probably some cost/engineering justification for it, but there's a very high chance that justification is looong gone. Chips are cheap, but revisions are expensive!