[Kirby64]

> Bullshit. There will be hackers in the future who can do it in their garage. Just... not anytime soon.

I'll take your bet on this. Silicon designers aren't unaware of this potential vulnerability, and if you want to prevent eFuses from being un-blown, you can design for that. I would place money on there not being any commercially viable way to restore an eFuse in a 4090 die at any point in the future. You can probably do it, but it would require millions of dollars in FIB and SEM equipment and likely would destroy the chip for any useful purpose.

Usually the only useful reason to attempt to recover/read/unblown fuses is to read out private keys built into chips.

[guerrilla]

> You can probably do it, but it would require millions of dollars in FIB and SEM equipment and likely would destroy the chip for any useful purpose.

The price tag and size of these things are what I'm talking about. SOME day it will get much cheaper and smaller. A 4090 will be useless at that point, but I still play with 8086s and vacuum tubes, so...

No point in betting though. We'll both be dead by then.

[Kirby64]

I’d still take the bet. FIB and SEM stuff is highly specialized and miniaturizing it to be obtainable by a garage user seems unlikely even in the distant future. Either way, you still couldn’t take a 4090 and make it functional as a 6000 series. You’d destroy it in the process if it was even possible at all.

[guerrilla]

Nah, it's going to become democratized. It's already started.

There's been a few different stories like this lately:

https://interestingengineering.com/videos/guy-builds-integra...

People said the same thing you're saying now about computers. You're just being silly and forgetting history.

[Kirby64]

Making a hobby etching thing that isn’t anywhere close to the state of the art is cool, but not exactly anywhere close to what is needed to look at a modern chip.

You’re trivializing the challenge of modifying something that is on the order of 50nm wide and specifically designed to not be able to be tampered with.

[guerrilla]

I feel like you don't understand how time works. ;) We've barely had any of this technology 50 years. Give me 500 years and I absolutely guarantee you that I'll fuck up some 4090s with some gadget the size of a mobile phone that costs the 10 cents and it'll work perfectly fine.