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by metadat 1186 days ago
How is this card (which is really two physical cards occupying 2 PCIe slots) exposed to the OS? Does it show up as a single /dev/gfx0 device, or is the unification a driver trick?
1 comments

The two cards show as two distinct GPUs to the host, connected via NVLink. Unification / load balancing happens via software.
Kinda depressing if you consider how they removed NVLink in the 4090, stating the following reason:

> “The reason we took [NVLink] off is that we need I/O for other things, so we’re using that area to cram in as many AI processors as possible,” Jen-Hsun Huang explained of the reason for axing NVLink.[0]

"NVLink is bad for your games and AI, trust me bro."

But then this card, actually aimed at ML applications, uses it.

0. https://www.techgoing.com/nvidia-rtx-4090-no-longer-supports...

Market segmentation. Back when the Pascal architecture was the latest thing, it didn't make much sense to buy expensive Tesla P100 GPUs for many professional applications when consumer GeForce 1080 Ti cards gave you much more bang for the buck with few drawbacks. From the corporation's perspective it makes so much sense to differentiate the product lines more, now that their customers are deeply entrenched.