Seems like a bit of an insult to the colleagues that manage to successfully design a 50+ billion transistor GPU that their product gets messed up by something like this. Talk about the last mile.
For example, the RTX 4090 has 16,384 cores, so you have to divide 50+ billion by that number. Then inside every core you have lots of similar repetition, etc.
The biggest challenge is to create a die that size with little to no defects, which is of course the foundry's achievement.
A modern great CPU or GPU chip is not that simple to design. It is not just an ALU copy pasted thousands of times. Otherwise there would be more competition.
Not really, the cores are really similar units.
> A modern great CPU or GPU chip is not that simple to design.
Of course not, for starters there's not just the shader cores (a 4090 also has 512 TMUs, 176 ROPs, 128 RTX, and 512 tensor cores), you need to design all of these before you can replicate them, then you need to design the common components.
But the point was that the 50 billion transistors were not designed for individually, there is a large amount of block reuse. Your analogy would hold if windows inlined everything.
NVidia clearly has spectacular software and digital hardware designers.
Mechanical, analog, and power engineering are entirely different disciplines.
It doesn’t add anything to OP’s point that it took so much effort to engineer a GPU only to be messed up by a stupid connector.
We've seen these failure stories time and again to various repercussions, but they seem to all come down to some form of greed whether it be reputational or monetary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_dis...
So, yeah, how about building a rocket designed to send three humans to the moon, but failed because of some <$1 part?
I would bet the cause coming down to minor manufacturing defects and testing that was “too good” at plugging things in not accounting for sloppy end user assembly.
Combined with good old inadequate safety margins.
> things you never thought of worrying about.
In my experience, it's nearly always the connectors that you suspect first.
It is weird that in their push to all time high TDP they didn’t spend more time thinking about it. That said, cutting edge often means bleeding edge, something something.