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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

How do they stop companies from buying consumer GPUs? I have used some minor firmware tweaks to unlock full commercial capabilities out of Nvidia GPUs in the past. Perhaps that is against the tos and a large company couldn't get away with it like an individual can?

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> Perhaps that is against the tos and a large company couldn't get away with it like an individual can?

A while back they made a change to the terms of the GeForce driver, barring it from deployment in datacenters except for blockchain processing.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/geforce-license/

Wasn't the ostensible justification here making the cards more available for the enthusiast gaming market they were (to some extent) intended for?

That's an honest question, I can't fully recall.

That might be what they labeled it as, but it really was to prevent companies from buying the cheaper GPU for AI training.

They need their datacenter GPU numbers to look good at the end of the Q, they can't do that when all they are selling are 3090 that are perfectly fine to train the majority of AI models.

If you're Google/Apple/etc, you don't want to be relying on some unofficial firmware tweak where the next driver update could completely brick your business and force you to never update the driver again.

Nvidia doesn't allow you to use consumer CPUs in servers/data centers.

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