[jfb]

If someone's willing to pay, sure! But more realistically, a ML researcher doesn't want to know the differences between Haswell-E and Skylake, or which DIMMs are rated at which speed, or what's the optimal Linux driver situation, still less to know how to fix any of the myriad things that can go wrong. When Caffe starts screwing up, it's really nice to be able to call nVidia and make your overheating Titan their problem.

[semi-extrinsic]

I'm down with you about calling support when your hardware craps out. But an ML researcher who doesn't know the difference between Haswell-E and Skylake, etc., will likely make suboptimal choices when using the hardware. Using GPUs efficiently requires in-depth understanding of how they function and how they interact with the rest of the system.

[jfb]

This is true, and also, I think it's perfectly likely that nVidia is trying to soak people buying with other people's money.