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Nvidia Fakes Fermi Boards At GPU Tech Conference
fragMasterFlash writes with this excerpt from SemiAccurate:
'In a really pathetic display, Nvidia actually faked the introduction of its latest video card, because it simply doesn't have boards to show. Why? Because it didn't get enough parts to properly bring them up, much less make demo boards. ... Notice that the three screws that hold the end plate on are, well, generic wood screws. Large flat -head Phillips screws. Home Depot-grade screws that don't even sit flush. If a card is real, you hold it on with the bolts on either side of the DVI connector. Go look at any GPU you have; do you see wood screws that don't mount flush or DVI flanking bolts? ... If you look at the back of the fake Fermi, [from this PC Watch picture], you can see that the expected DVI connector wires are not there, just solder-filled holes. No stubs, no tool marks from where they would be cut out. Basically, the DVI port isn't connected to anything with solder, so they had to use screws on the plate."
A company faked a product...won't be the first time, won't be the last time.
This is actually a lot more common than you might think. Lots of tech shows (whether it's cell phones, computer parts, etc) bring "fake" models in. Sometimes it's just the production case with weights in. Sometimes, when a device needs to be outputting video, what you see is just a movie being played as opposed to its actual output.
Recently, netbook manufacturers have been caught doing it. During shows, you can see some brand new, thin and light netbook with a sign as "display model only". When show-goers pick it up, they see empty holes where USB, power, and ethernet connections should be. All that's there is a LCD, a keyboard, and a plastic shell.
Little update found on this article: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15798/34/
Having built many a prototype board in my day I can tell you I have utilized all manner of odds and ends including not only wood screws but wood as well - I don't think it means the card is a fake, it may be an engineering prototype or a software development board or whatever. I personally don't see anything in the photos that screams to me "FAKE" !
Those do not look like wood screws to me. not even close. They appear way too small and they dont appear to be counter sunk. Go to lowes and see if you can find any wood screws that match. They do remind me of the ones used to mount motherboards or for mounting 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 drives. And my geforce 7800 gtx has those stand offs with both dvi connectors. I didnt realize that was novel.
What the article didn't see fit to mention is that the combination of wooden NVIDIA card and NVIDIA Linux driver still outperform the equivalent production ATI card and ATI Linux driver.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
You'd think a company like Nvidia would be a bit more careful given their CEO's penchant for bold claims and harping on any perceived gaffe by competitors.
I suspect this "announcement" was very rushed after AMD's recent announcement of their new DirectX 11 part that seems to outperform anything Nvidia has out at the moment and at a lower price point. Combine that with Intel's snub on producing chipsets for new/relevant PC platforms and one can imagine that Nvidia was anxious to appear competitive. Nvidia is in for a VERY tough slog.
So the biggest complaint FTFA is the improvised/hobbiest/hurried/hasty assembly from Nvidia to make it for conference presentation? I'd say in the end it's still the card, it got demo'd and who cares. It'd be a different story if it was shipped out to the public consumer market that way, otherwise I wouldn't have a problem using it as long as it performed. Duct-tape Engineering at it's finest and it got Nvidia through their conference. I applaud. All that oppose, go cash your /. geek card in at the scrapbook store.
The end of the motherboard was roughly dremmelled off to match the fan enclosure (that is surely the designed fan enclosure for the card). The power connectors were glued on, and didn't match the solder pads for said connectors (indeed one was mostly sawed off).
Prototype? No. This card can't work.
Blatant fake presented as a working board? Yes.
Back-pedalling and claiming it is a mock up after the fact? Yes.
This type of reporting is, in my opinion, one of the best things that have come out of the communication acceleration we have gone through. While many people here are already aware of these practices there many that aren't yet. This is the best weapon we have against the consumer manipulation that has been going on since WWII. I'm not saying that NVIDIA is a bad company, everyone does this, all we need is awareness about it.
In all seriousity, you speak a bitter truth. My Nvidia 8600GT recently died, so I replaced it with an ATI Radeon 4770, as phoronix had raving reviews about good linux performance. Now the drivers for it have killed my linux completely, black screen with artefacts replaces the login screen and I can't rescue it from a login shell because ubuntu disabled the root password. Rather pathetic that they didn't account for the removal by implementing the option to log in with your normal username (I'm talking about in the recovery mode shell-login here)
So for now I'm using windows XP... Bugger.
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
Anyone in the embedded systems biz who's ever gone to a trade show probably knows the "brick in the box" technique.
1. You fab a slick looking enclosure for your "new product".
2. You put a brick in the box.
3. You show the box with wires coming out of it, and a PC behind the curtain displayinging the actual app.
That way, you have something to show/promise/sell YEARS before an actual product is ready, and can blame the engineers for being slow to finish and test that "last 10%".
The author is apparently not that familiar with screws. "Not being countersunk" has little to do with what type of screw something is. Neither does being a "wood screw" have much to do with bing flush with a surface. It has to do with the screw being "pan-head", and whether the surface has been drilled to allow the screw to fit into it. (That's the 'counter-sunk' part.)
To see if it's a "wood screw", a "machine screw", or a "sheet metal screw", you'd have to see the threads and especially the tip. Wood screws have broadly gapped threads, and a sharp tip, and generally a bit of a taper along their length to the point, designed to gouge themselves into the wood as you screw in but without splitting the wood. Sheet metal screws have closer spaced threads, a sharp tip, and much less taper or none: they're used to screw into soft metal like aluminum and gouge their way in, but you generally have to pre-drill a hole for them. Machine screws have closely spaced threads, no taper, no sharp tip, and require the hole to be pre-threaded to work.
Counter-sinking takes time and a bit of skill to get just right without overdrilling and making the case weak. Merely tapping, or pre-threading is quicker: I can easily believe that a prototype would not be countersunk.
Shocker, a Slashdot author unfamiliar with screwing.
Notice the source. The site semi accurate is run by a guy, Charlie Demerjian, who was fired from The Inquirer for a number of reasons, including making shit up. In particular, this guy has it in for nVidia. I don't remember the details of why he has it in for them, I think they cut him out of the information loop because he leaked some info he wasn't supposed to. Regardless, he hates nVidia and does everything he can to make them look bad. In his case, that includes just straight out making shit up.
So that's why he's making such a big deal of this being a fake. He wants it to be fake because, well I dunno, I guess that is somehow a "win" in his mind.
Personally I find it funny since companies do mockups for demonstrations all the time. Wouldn't at all surprise me if the card he was holding was such a mockup.
At any rate as with most things in life, you want to check sources, and on the Internet that is doubly true. Some people have an agenda to push and will... modify, to put it mildly, the truth to suit their needs. I though we'd all be well aware of that after all the political BS of recent years :P.
OK. He got the screws wrong. Big deal. Try reading the article.
Some of the things NVidia did on their "working board" include: covering the SLI connector, not having the DVI connector wires go through vias, place the PCI-E power connectors wrong from where the board shows they should be, cut off the end of the board with a saw right though where there was more stuff, have half the vents on the back of the card completely blocked...
This isn't just "they used the wrong screws", this is "total fake that couldn't possibly work". Saying it was a working board was a total lie.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I believe it forces asking for the root account for run level 1.
Dear GP: If that's the case, try sticking a "2" on the end of your boot params (ie. select the line, hit e, edit the line with the mention of /boot on it, and add a " 2" to the end, then hit b to boot).
The screws just look like the screws you need use for hard drives. Wood screws are normally galvanized or black in color. As for the underside connection points, who knows how things are held together on the inside...or they faked it. Pics of the inside or its not a fake I say.
I'm sorry, but this screws in the end plate are not wood screws. I work with wood on a regular basis and spent over a decade as a manufacturing engineer in electronics manufacturing. These screws are common assembly screws in electronics, not furniture. It is also common to leave off components on proto, demo or even production PCAs. Many circuits are designed to be partially populated using a single board with various levels of features. As far as "First Silicon" is concerned, if a chip is working to spec, there is no reason not to use it. While this may not be a production board (I have no way of knowing), it could be a working prototype. I'm beginning to think the writer is a bit of a drama queen.
Oh, and there's AMD/ATI adverts all over it. Who gives a fuck about nVidia using a mock up, companies do this all the time at tech shows. It's a non-issue! What is the issue is why an article from a site that is so obviously geared around slagging off nVidia was posted here.
(and no, I'm not new here.)
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Little things matter. When designing hardware, when building software, getting those little details right helps prevent errors and failures later on. The ranting about the wood screws dominated the original post: failing to correct that would help make anyone else who repeated the rant look like, well, like someone who shouldn't be trusted with a screwdriver.
Getting those details right can help your credibility quite a lot when you fill out a bug report, a blog, or even a letter to family.
What's up with all the decorative crap that goes into video card housings these days? It would be nice to be able to get high end hardware that isn't burdened with fluff designed to appeal to the minimally sapient crowd.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Just on a point of information, the "PR drone" was actually Jen-Hsun Huang, company president and CEO. If the card he was waving around was a mockup, he surely knew about it.
Not that I see that it matters. Huang openly admitted they're at least "a few months" away from production, and it was strongly implied at the press conference that GeForce models would come before Quadro and Tesla (lots of airy talk about high-end customers running to different cycles). It was a cute spot that this was, most likely, not a real card, but it's not as if it blows open a huge lie.
I don't see anything particularly wrong with that card. Let's go through it in order:
1) The chip itself: If you're going to be standing on stage, potentially wandering aroung with a little piece of metal in your hand that represents your company's future and is literally worth millions to your competitors, are you REALLY going to show off the real thing? No. You use something that looks close just to indicate size, approximate appearance, and other basic details so the idiots in the crowd know what they're looking at.
2) The number 7: I'm not sure what exactly is implied by the author here, but going along with displaying basic information, it's sensible to alter the display chip with a hand-drawn logo, for the benefit of observers.
3) Blocked vent: From the look of the rest of the card, is seems that the cooling air needs to come from somewhere. My guess is that some comes from inside the case, and some comes through that "blocked" vent. See, a long time ago, humans discovered that when you run a fluid through something with tiny holes, big things (like dust) are kept out, giving you a nice clean fluid. Filters are good things.
4) Screws: Personally, I use those screws all the time in my computer. They're great for mounting disk drives, PCI cards, case components, and generally anywhere else you need a small machine screw. Screws don't always fit perfectly in a final product, let alone in a prototype.
5) DVI bolts: Yep. All my DVI ports have them.
6) Stacking two single-slot cards together to show the end plate doesn't need screws: Single-slot end plates are most likely held on with screws through flanges bent over the card itself. How exactly would that be easier on a double-slot card than just punching a hole and running some machine screws through, especially considering that there's no indication of what's actually behind those screws? My personal hypothesis is that the screws go into a plastic wall that divides the card,
7) Soldering of DVI port: Personally, I think it'd be easier to just solder a DVI port in than clip off all the little wires from the port so it would physically fit where it is. This entire claim is based around apparently a single photograph. Judging from that same photograph, there's also no contacts on the edge connectors, and only a smudge written on that sticker in the middle.
8) Half-covered SLI connector: SLI is an edge connector. From the same photograph, it appear's there space there to make contact with an edge and cover the contacts with a thin connector. That should work, right?
9) Power connectors: Assuming that it's absolutely impossible to use wires to connect anything over a distance of one inch, the 8-pin connector appears to just rotate its pins by 90 degrees, probably to accommodate the other stuff that appears on the board in the immediate vicinity. I'm not an expert, but according to this, that extra connector appears to provide just more power, so would it not be possible to connect it in the port, rather than on the board?
10) Glue: Since when is glue not an acceptable means of attaching parts? I personally have used glue many times, in many ways, for the purpose of holding things in place. On a board destined for display, it seems like an even more practical solution.
11) Board being cut off: This one almost seems legitimate,except for the fact that I have a few boards lying around here with traces (and a few components) right on the edge of the board. Yes, it looks a little crude. In fact, it almost looks like a prototype made for display, possibly even by just cutting off test circuitry from the board.
12) Exaggerated marketing: I'm really not concerned that the spokesman said "This is Fermi" if it isn't. The point is that it's a close approximation, and the card's actual functionality isn't an issue. If they had used a real prototype that happened to burn up during testing, it would be hailed as evidence that "the car
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.