Why I think this sort of "High-tech Computer Hardware Cottage Industry" stuff is significant (ignoring the fact that it's One Internet Rando versus One Trillion Dollars).
IMO, we --- as in someone somewhere who's seeing it coming --- stand to gain far greater indirect benefits, as and when GPU datacenter over-investments transmute into serving today's severely under-served but world-reforming science/industry application areas…
Think Massive GPU Infrastructure -> Industry application transmutations... "on-campus GPU supercomputers too cheap to meter".
My optimistic LLM-AI scenario is a hope that we get a version of what happened after the boom years of railroads, telecoms, and/or cloud computing (currently in progress)… Which was the decades after massive capital investments, the implosion of which unprecedently fuelled large-scale industrial and economic and socio-political phenomena, by way of infrastructure ownership re-allocations through write-offs, fire sales, and bankruptcy style M&A.
A hope that we get a disintermediation of datacenters. Back to the neighbourhood VPS provider. People shipping out containers to private industry and universities and so forth — stacks of supercomputers in your backyard... A whole new breed of Oxide Computer Company companies.
But this dream-like phenomenon is not going to happen in places in poverty of hands-on local neighbourhood "Computer/GPU hardware mechanic" expertise. (A poverty that is tied to zoning laws, tariffs, import duties, and public policy --- Are you pouring gobs of cash into making large datacenters, at the cost of all the other sides of the equation; education, training, small and medium businesses, precision manufacturing capacity, long-range sponsorship of the various sciences, R&D, arts etc. etc. etc.)
The revolutionary proliferation of mobile telephony in India (where I live), for example, was---and continues to ride---largely on the back of a mobile phone cottage industry that proliferated.
Mom-and-pop shops that can do pretty much everything you need to ... repair, update, un-bork your cell phone, your phone plans, prepaid sims etc. Print you your documents and photos, fix your broken screens, replace bloated batteries, do "whatsapp agent" stuff (government paperwork). This has been an unbroken trend from the early days of the Nokia 3310 to the now-a-days of cheap ubiquitous android devices, and even "feature phones" participating in money flows via zero cost-to-consumer UPI payments.
A similarly revolutionary thing did not happen for computers in India, because of decades-long protectionist policies. High import duties ("luxury goods"), and regulatory capture by computer hardware distributors who still maintain a choke-hold on imports and supply. We do have an equivalent cottage industry of computer repair people, but it's nowhere close to the ubiquity that it could have had because it's just so damned hard to sell computer hardware in India.
Given GNs other coverage its a bit odd for them not to mention why someone would bother to make a 48 GB 4090. Or the whole side business of these "repair shops" of removing cores for sanction busting AI cards, reassembling the now worthless PCB with the cooler and scamming some unsuspecting customer that thinks they are getting a deal.
If the cards were legally acquired in the first place, I don't see how they (the shop) have any moral reason not to upgrade the cards however their customers want. It isn't their laws that prevent high memory cards. And the appeal of this is not just limited to sanctions limited countries. The prices for these modified cards are wildly cheaper than any vaguely equivalent card that and video will allow to be sold from an authorized OEM.
Five for one would love to be able to do that sort of upgrade work and offer it in the Continental US.
It is true that they did not entirely specified what happened to the waste boards here. Clearly somebody who is stripping parts is then reassembling cards and selling them on eBay or other places. I hope it is not this shop, but clearly they didn't even try to disclaim that behavior. I'm not saying they didn't disclaim it because they're guilty, it could just have not come up.
Generally there are a number of valuable components on the waste boards which can be parted out, and often kept on-hand for other repairs. Each of the chips on those boards are valuable for future repairs, and (in the USA at least) often quite difficult for repair shops to obtain. Here[0] is an example of such a chip from a MacBook Pro - it's a proprietary, custom Apple component so generally you can only obtain them through salvage.
I don't know if this shop sells any of their scrap into the scam industry, but I bet they'd have a white-hat market available for a lot of it.
> removing cores for sanction busting AI cards, reassembling the now worthless PCB with the cooler and scamming some unsuspecting customer that thinks they are getting a deal
I'm either particularly ignorant or this claim has some inconsistencies. My understanding is that you cannot "remove cores" from a GPU. The titular RTX 4090 (Ada Lovelace) comes with 16,384 CUDA Cores. At face value, it sounds like you're saying that Brother Zhang's repair shop uses some nano-technology tools to open up the Ada silicon itself and then somehow disable or destroy or dissect the silicon to reduce the core count. And then they sell these reduced core counts GPUs (???).
That's obviously preposterous, but I'm having trouble steelmanning this to re-construct your actual meaning.
Okay so 'stefan_ is arguing that the board which now has no GPU at all and is completely non-functional then gets sold to unsuspecting consumers? In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick. How does this behavior reflect back on Brother Zhang's shop at all?
So far, everyone's concepts have felt pretty half-baked. Perhaps someone could point me to some actual reports relating to this topic which go into real detail about allegations around how these repair shops contribute to fraud. I'm not having a lot of luck engaging here, but maybe I'm just a bit dim-witted.
> In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick.
Plausible deniability. With a real-looking GPU, the seller can always fall back on user error, bad PSU, driver issue, PCIe slot problem etc.
The buyer may even doubt themselves at first and spend time reseating the card, reinstalling drivers, swapping cables, or testing another system. By the time they're confident it's not their fault, the return window or dispute period may already be gone.
None of that works if you send a brick or an alarm clock PCB - the fraud is immediately obvious.
For that kind of scam, all you really need the cooler, which are often parted out for legit reasons (watercooling, replacements, probably some specialized high-density and rackmount plays) and may be available as a spare or "second-shift" offering.
It would probably be easy to produce a PCB that's the right size to fit a 4090 cooler, but just contains 90 cents worth of random SMD parts. And you can produce them in quantity when you want them rather than relying on an erratic supply of stripped "real" PCBs.
Why I think this sort of "High-tech Computer Hardware Cottage Industry" stuff is significant (ignoring the fact that it's One Internet Rando versus One Trillion Dollars).
IMO, we --- as in someone somewhere who's seeing it coming --- stand to gain far greater indirect benefits, as and when GPU datacenter over-investments transmute into serving today's severely under-served but world-reforming science/industry application areas…
Think Massive GPU Infrastructure -> Industry application transmutations... "on-campus GPU supercomputers too cheap to meter".
My optimistic LLM-AI scenario is a hope that we get a version of what happened after the boom years of railroads, telecoms, and/or cloud computing (currently in progress)… Which was the decades after massive capital investments, the implosion of which unprecedently fuelled large-scale industrial and economic and socio-political phenomena, by way of infrastructure ownership re-allocations through write-offs, fire sales, and bankruptcy style M&A.
A hope that we get a disintermediation of datacenters. Back to the neighbourhood VPS provider. People shipping out containers to private industry and universities and so forth — stacks of supercomputers in your backyard... A whole new breed of Oxide Computer Company companies.
Interesting critique / counterarguments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419416
Adding to that...
But this dream-like phenomenon is not going to happen in places in poverty of hands-on local neighbourhood "Computer/GPU hardware mechanic" expertise. (A poverty that is tied to zoning laws, tariffs, import duties, and public policy --- Are you pouring gobs of cash into making large datacenters, at the cost of all the other sides of the equation; education, training, small and medium businesses, precision manufacturing capacity, long-range sponsorship of the various sciences, R&D, arts etc. etc. etc.)
The revolutionary proliferation of mobile telephony in India (where I live), for example, was---and continues to ride---largely on the back of a mobile phone cottage industry that proliferated.
Mom-and-pop shops that can do pretty much everything you need to ... repair, update, un-bork your cell phone, your phone plans, prepaid sims etc. Print you your documents and photos, fix your broken screens, replace bloated batteries, do "whatsapp agent" stuff (government paperwork). This has been an unbroken trend from the early days of the Nokia 3310 to the now-a-days of cheap ubiquitous android devices, and even "feature phones" participating in money flows via zero cost-to-consumer UPI payments.
A similarly revolutionary thing did not happen for computers in India, because of decades-long protectionist policies. High import duties ("luxury goods"), and regulatory capture by computer hardware distributors who still maintain a choke-hold on imports and supply. We do have an equivalent cottage industry of computer repair people, but it's nowhere close to the ubiquity that it could have had because it's just so damned hard to sell computer hardware in India.
Stuff like that.
(edit: add clarification)
Given GNs other coverage its a bit odd for them not to mention why someone would bother to make a 48 GB 4090. Or the whole side business of these "repair shops" of removing cores for sanction busting AI cards, reassembling the now worthless PCB with the cooler and scamming some unsuspecting customer that thinks they are getting a deal.
If the cards were legally acquired in the first place, I don't see how they (the shop) have any moral reason not to upgrade the cards however their customers want. It isn't their laws that prevent high memory cards. And the appeal of this is not just limited to sanctions limited countries. The prices for these modified cards are wildly cheaper than any vaguely equivalent card that and video will allow to be sold from an authorized OEM.
Five for one would love to be able to do that sort of upgrade work and offer it in the Continental US.
It is true that they did not entirely specified what happened to the waste boards here. Clearly somebody who is stripping parts is then reassembling cards and selling them on eBay or other places. I hope it is not this shop, but clearly they didn't even try to disclaim that behavior. I'm not saying they didn't disclaim it because they're guilty, it could just have not come up.
Generally there are a number of valuable components on the waste boards which can be parted out, and often kept on-hand for other repairs. Each of the chips on those boards are valuable for future repairs, and (in the USA at least) often quite difficult for repair shops to obtain. Here[0] is an example of such a chip from a MacBook Pro - it's a proprietary, custom Apple component so generally you can only obtain them through salvage.
I don't know if this shop sells any of their scrap into the scam industry, but I bet they'd have a white-hat market available for a lot of it.
0: https://store.rossmanngroup.com/zc8-u9850-edp-mux-a1707-a199...
> removing cores for sanction busting AI cards, reassembling the now worthless PCB with the cooler and scamming some unsuspecting customer that thinks they are getting a deal
I'm either particularly ignorant or this claim has some inconsistencies. My understanding is that you cannot "remove cores" from a GPU. The titular RTX 4090 (Ada Lovelace) comes with 16,384 CUDA Cores. At face value, it sounds like you're saying that Brother Zhang's repair shop uses some nano-technology tools to open up the Ada silicon itself and then somehow disable or destroy or dissect the silicon to reduce the core count. And then they sell these reduced core counts GPUs (???).
That's obviously preposterous, but I'm having trouble steelmanning this to re-construct your actual meaning.
remove cores = remove the GPU die
Okay so 'stefan_ is arguing that the board which now has no GPU at all and is completely non-functional then gets sold to unsuspecting consumers? In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick. How does this behavior reflect back on Brother Zhang's shop at all?
So far, everyone's concepts have felt pretty half-baked. Perhaps someone could point me to some actual reports relating to this topic which go into real detail about allegations around how these repair shops contribute to fraud. I'm not having a lot of luck engaging here, but maybe I'm just a bit dim-witted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJlFmyr8c14 https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/192z13d/scammers_...
> In that case, why would the scammer sell the 4090 board at all? At that level of fraud, the scammer could just as well send a circuit board from an alarm clock, or a brick.
Plausible deniability. With a real-looking GPU, the seller can always fall back on user error, bad PSU, driver issue, PCIe slot problem etc.
The buyer may even doubt themselves at first and spend time reseating the card, reinstalling drivers, swapping cables, or testing another system. By the time they're confident it's not their fault, the return window or dispute period may already be gone.
None of that works if you send a brick or an alarm clock PCB - the fraud is immediately obvious.
For that kind of scam, all you really need the cooler, which are often parted out for legit reasons (watercooling, replacements, probably some specialized high-density and rackmount plays) and may be available as a spare or "second-shift" offering.
It would probably be easy to produce a PCB that's the right size to fit a 4090 cooler, but just contains 90 cents worth of random SMD parts. And you can produce them in quantity when you want them rather than relying on an erratic supply of stripped "real" PCBs.
Great resources, thank you. Makes sense.
did you bother to see the video? they are a legit repair shop being transparent about everything, no one is in the dark they are getting a new product
yeah, same as the resilient aftermarket for used Thinkpads