254
Old RTX 3080 GPUs repurposed and modded for Chinese market as 20GB AI cards with blower-style cooling
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
254 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
58150 readers
4347 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Repurposed batches of "RTX 3080 20G AI" cards featuring blower-style coolers and with 20GB GDDR6X are being spotted in large quantities over in China, stored and sold via AliExpress.
These are yet another attempt to work around U.S export controls that now prohibit the sale of the fastest data center and consumer GPUs to China and other countries.
Prolific leaker I_Leak_VN also found many of these RTX 3080 20G AI blowers in warehouses via the Xianyu app, a Chinese-based used goods e-commerce website owned by Alibaba group.
LLM (Large Language Model) workloads greatly benefit from more VRAM, and there are other offerings showing repurposed RTX 3080 Ti 24GB GDDR6X cards.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and we're now seeing Chinese retailers repurposing RTX 3080, 3090, and 4090 "consumer" graphics cards into AI accelerators to at least partially work around the U.S. sanctions.
Earlier, these GPUs were sold for dirt cheap as miners wanted to get rid of them quickly to recover some of their investment.
The original article contains 741 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!