THE NVIDIA AI GPU BLACK MARKET | Investigating Smuggling, Corruption, & Governments

Comments

• Kissaki@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  Why did you link an image instead of the video?

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  • recursive_recursion@piefed.ca ⁨56⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Great question!

    As far as I'm currently aware, due to YouTube constantly changing things, YT thumbnails often will not load unless directly linked to the video's thumbnail (at least here on the Fediverse).

    Because of this, it allows me to link to alternative sources within the post such as Invidious (YT alt ad-free frontend), Peertube, Bandcamp, etc.

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• muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I really respect Gamers Nexus for actually doing the shit Linus Tech Tips just haws and haws over.

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  • amju_wolf@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I don’t think LTT ever did or claimed to do investigative journalism (or really journalism at all)?

    They make entertainment videos that sometimes have mildly informative value.

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    • Default_Defect@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I just got sick of there always being a new “controversy” with him and his inability to seem like he gives a shit about it. Each time he gets accused of something, whether he did it or not, he just goes on the WAN show to sigh as big as possible and say “Guys…”

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    • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Bullshit, straight up bullshit.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I don’t think LTT ever did or claimed to do investigative journalism (or really journalism at all)?

      But thats how it’s presented, and that’s how many viewers interpet it.

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  • lefixxx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    LTT doesnt make deep investigative hours-long videos anyway

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  • Buffalox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Oh I almost forgot about him, I blocked his channels years ago. He is an idiot and a shill, and did illegal hidden advertising.
    Why anyone would still watch his channels is very strange IMO.

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    • lefixxx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Illegal hidden advertising?

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    • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      It’s kind of a guilty pleasure for me. I like it in the background sometimes. It’s like watching code blue cam. Cops are occasionally useful bullies but I don’t watch it for the cops. I watch it for the white trash judge judy bullshit. It’s a methed out freak show sometimes. It’s spectacle.

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• humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Much easier black market than drugs, because it is legal to import it, and no one checks when you export it.

  Nvidia has 18%-28% of its sales to Singapore. They defend this by saying only 2% of their product is shipped there, but they don’t say which countries receive the bulk of shipments that are billed through Singapore.

  some 5090 cards in Hong Kong (from OP) are the same price as the US, which makes it hard to understand why US people have been charged with smuggling, and shows complicity of entire supply chain to funnel to China. Premiums over MSRPs in US would be zero or lower if this was all above board. You also can’t find a 5090 on Amazon, but you can in Hong Kong boutique?

  Prohibition for the loss, as always.

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• DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Sweet Tech Jesus! It’s 3 and 1/2 hours long.

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  • dinckelman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s a really good watch. I’ve put it on while playing some Factorio, so time went by quite quickly

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    • mizule@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      that’s an amazing idea, i’ll do that.

      any other factorio-playing videos for my second monitor? :p

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  • yucandu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    yeah even I’m not that autistic and I watch videos of people soldering

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    • TheRealKuni@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I dunno, if it were Hbomberguy talking about YouTube plagiarism for four hours I’d watch it.

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    • sheogorath@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I usually put it on when I’m playing Alan Wake 2 so I wouldn’t shit my pants too hard.

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    • sramder@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Pace has a really nice series on YouTube ;-)

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I feel dumb for it but I just can’t keep track of all the controversies and scandals right now:

  Which scandal were they referring to the week of August 11 for why nobody in the US state department would respond?

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  • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    We really need a spreadsheet to track all this shit.

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• Wispy2891@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  But now that Nvidia agreed to pay a bribe to the government it’s no longer black market

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  • 123@programming.dev ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Good ol’ orange market.

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    • ksigley@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Orange is the new black.

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• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Funny thing is ‘Local ML’ tinkerers largely can’t afford GPUs in the US either.

  The 5090 is ludicrously expensive for its VRAM pools. So is the 4090, which is basically OOS. You want a real pool, you need to shell out. Hence people here have either been building used RTX 3090 boxes (the last affordable compute GPU Nvidia ever sold), EPYC homelabs for CPU offloading, or have been trying to ship those modded 48GB 4090s back.

  The insane supply chain is something like this:

  • Taiwan GPUs -> China

  • China GPU boards -> US

  • US GPU Boards -> Smuggled back into China

  • Deneutered GPU Boards -> Sold back to US

  All because Nvidia is playing VRAM cartel and AMD, inexplicably, is uninterested in competing with it when they could sell 48GB 7900s basically for free.

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  • jaschen306@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I live in Taiwan and the GPU is more expensive than America.

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  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s not explicable why AMD is not breaking rank on VRAM and vGPU, same reason as failing Intel.
    But the reason is not mentionnable in polite company and it relates to why AMD exists at all.
    By all accounts, AMD should have gone under decades ago, instead they’re one of the only x86 platform licensee and they got that basically because of a fluke in history.

    But here’s the real deal, because of the regulatory environment, monopolies are technically illegal. Of course since 1980s enforcement of that has been a total joke as proven with the failure of the Microsoft anti-trust case. Anti-trust is currently neutered and even back then it wasn’t really “anti-trust”, merely anti-monopoly. That is the playbook for Intel and Nvidia that allows AMD to continue existing. They exist so that the other two aren’t monopolies. They are kept alive as long, some market segments will have some competition and other will simply not be touched by Intel and AMD, dynamically decided, kind of like splitting territory, so that AMD can always survive.

    So that Intel and Nvidia don’t became actually illegal monopolies. This is a very conservative playbook as since the 90s they could have very well become monopolies and the neolibs wouldn’t have squeaked. They would have cheered !

    That’s why you’re not getting that actually threatening to Nvidia amounts of VRAM and vGPU from AMD and why they’re dropping support for their 2018 datacenter GPU if they get a little too much of a good deal on the used market.

    The solution is simple, destroy nvidia, not a calculated and gentle trust bust, no, break the company so it stops existing as a coherent entity.

    Nvidia is a bunch of software and PNGs on top of TSMC. Break Nvidia, break Intel, break microsoft, break cisco, broadcom, break everything in silicon valley and put it all in a blender. And if anything grows too big again, break it the duck up again.

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    • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      the playbook for Intel and Nvidia that allows AMD to continue existing.

      This isn’t a good explanation for why AMD would act stupid. But there still needs to be one.

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  • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You could also buy the Apple studio with its large amount of unified ram for a similar price of a 5090.

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    • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      barebones 780m amd mini pc. 128gb ddr5600. About $700. Under $800. Vulkan is good, non AMD supported version of ROCm works for some, because AMD says fuck you to its users. $2000 higher end mini pc with 8600s gpu is other option for high ram with under double the performance.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The pricing for memory is still pretty bad. $4K for 96GB, $5.6K for 256GB, $10K for 512GB. One can get 128GB on the M4 Max for $3.5K, at the cost of a narrower bus so it’s even slower.

      SOTA quantization for these is mostly DIY. There aren’t many MLX DWQs or trellis-quantized GGUFs floating around.

      And if you want to finetune or tinker instead of just run, you’re at an enormous disadvantage there.

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The issue is that nVidia are increasingly marketing their consumer grade GPUs to “prosumer” users. Whether that is small research groups working with “AI” or people farming the latest memecoin or… the other things you would need REALLY REALLY high bandwidth linear algebra from and let’s move on.

    Whereas AMD are actually still targeting that consumer market. I think it was the nvidia 40x generation where their consumer cards had like no memory at all and AMD were pumping out 16 GB on their cheap(-ish) models? My brain can only remember card generations while I am actively shopping and… yeah.

    And yeah. I would LOVE an AMD card with 32 or even 64 GB of even slower memory. But games are still going to target nvidia because people keep buying it and that means that you just won’t have much use beyond the 8 (or apparently now 16) GB that nVidia are going to let you buy. At which point… why waste money?

    As for the prosumer and enterprise space? nVidia… have a long history of being assholes and previous GN videos have talked about the behind the scenes pressure they allegedly apply to system integrators and the like. And I will leave that there for Reasons.

    But yes, many mid-tier and even high-tier companies could benefit from just buying AMD cards and there is very much a market for “high end” AMD cards… it is just that they have so few customers to make it worthwhile.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I dunno what your talking, but all AMD has to is this:

      • Pick up the phone.

      • Tell their OEMs VRAM restrictions are lifted.

      • Put it down.

      …That’s it.

      They’d make seperate SKUs with double the VRAM. AMD doesn’t have to waste a cent.

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• dan@upvote.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Thanks Steve.

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  • adavis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Papa’s here

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    • mamg22@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      *awkward pause* See what I did ther… *video cut*

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• TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  My god, this is the LOTR Extended Edition of tech journalism videos

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• ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Whaaaat. US protectionism is purely performative and ineffective? I’m shocked! Surely this administration couldn’t be incompetent?

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  • nooneescapesthelaw@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    In the video alot of people said that it is slowing them down

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• Cocopanda@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Mr Burke is going to get black bagged.

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• cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  That was a lot of CAPITAL LETTERS

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• TheBat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I can’t wait for this fucking bubble to burst.

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