To truly understand how the hack works, you need to dissect the CMP 170HX. The CMP 170HX is the flagship SKU in Nvidia's CMP series and leverages the GA100 (Ampere) silicon. It is the same 7nm die that powers the more expensive A100 accelerator. Unlike other Nvidia silicon with separate soldered memory chips, the GA100 itself is a monolithic chip with on-package memory. That means the total amount of memory is physically present on all GA100 silicon, so it comes down to how many memory stacks are active.
The GA100 silicon features a total of six HBM2e memory stacks. Depending on the SKU Nvidia is aiming for, it could have five or six memory stacks enabled. The chipmaker carves the CMP 170HX from defective or binned GA100 silicon that did not meet the stringent quality requirements for the enterprise-grade A100. Nvidia officially sold the CMP 170HX in 8GB and 10GB variants. All the chipmaker did was disable the additional memory through firmware, along with other limitations, such as nerfing compute performance and PCIe interface speeds.
Nvidia's approach is somewhat reminiscent of the old AMD Phenom II and Athlon II days, where some models shipped with disabled cores that could sometimes be unlocked through BIOS tweaks. Similarly, the CMP 170HX 8GB and 10GB models can potentially be unlocked to access their full memory capacity of 64GB and 80GB, respectively, though only 40GB is confirmed to be working from user feedback. As detailed in "A Canary in the Crypto Mine: Defeating Stack Protection in a GPU Secure Coprocessor," Jon Pry's research paper provides the technical blueprint for bypassing Nvidia’s Falcon security microprocessor, which tools like CMP Unlocked are based on.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this exploit is that it is entirely software-based and requires no physical modifications to the CMP 170HX. It sounds like a joke, but you are literally downloading more memory for your graphics card. It’s important to note, however, that the amount of memory you can successfully unlock and maintain stability will vary. The issue is that there is no way to know whether the locked-away memory is fully functional because Nvidia did so for product segmentation, or whether the chipmaker deactivated it due to physical defects. It's a similar situation to another repurposed crypto device, AMD's BC-250, that we recently tested .
Pre-modded RTX 2080 Ti cards with 22 GB of VRAM surface on eBay for $500
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-crypto-mining-gpus-hacked-to-restore-locked-away-vram-in-order-to-feed-ai-boom-software-mod-unlocks-64gb-of-vram-on-usd250-cmp-170hx#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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