Funny enough, maybe the fusing itself (if they go a bit above-and-beyond on it) is exactly why it is a pro model.

I.e. maybe Nvidia say "if we're going to fuse some random number of cores such that this is no longer a 3050, then let's not only fuse the damaged cores, but also do a long burn-in pass to observe TDP, and then fuse the top 10% of cores by measured TDP."

If they did that, it would mean that the resulting processor would be much more stable under a high duty cycle load, and so likely to last much longer in an inference-cluster deploy environment.

And the extra effort (= bottlenecking their supply of this model at the QC step) would at least partially justify the added cost. Since there'd really be no other way to produce a card with as many FLOPS/watt-dollar, without doing this expensive "make the chip so tiny it's beyond the state-of-the-art to make it stably, then analyze it long enough to precision-disable everything required to fully stabilize it for long-term operation" approach.

That misses the "vertically integrated" part. (As does everything else right now, which was my point.)

The thing you linked is just a regular Gigabyte-branded 5090 PCIe GPU card (that they produced first, for other purposes; and which does fit into a regular x16 PCIe slot in a standard ATX chassis), put into a (later-designed) custom eGPU enclosure. The eGPU box has some custom cooling [that replaces the card's usual cooling] and a nice little PSU — but this is not any more "designing the card around the idea it'll be used in an enclosure" than what you'd see if an aftermarket eGPU integrator built the same thing.

My point was rather that, if an OEM [that produces GPU cards] were to design one of their GPU cards specifically and only to be shipped inside an eGPU enclosure that was designed together with it — then you would probably get higher perf, with better thermals, at a better price(!), than you can get today from just buying standalone peripheral-card GPU (even with the cost of the eGPU enclosure and the rest of its components taken into account!)

Where by "designing the card and the enclosure together", that would look like:

- the card being this weird nonstandard-form-factor non-card-edged thing that won't fit into an ATX chassis or plug into a PCIe slot — its only means of computer connection would be via its Thunderbolt controller

- the eGPU chassis the card ships in, being the only chassis it'll comfortably live in

- the card being shaped less like a peripheral card and more like a motherboard, like the ones you see in embedded industrial GPU-SoC [e.g. automotive LiDAR] use-cases — spreading out the hottest components to ensure nothing blocks anything else in the airflow path

- the card/board being designed to expose additional water-cooling zones — where these zones would be pointless to expose on a peripheral card, as they'd be e.g. on the back of the card, where the required cooling block would jam up against the next card in the slot-array

...and so on.

It's the same logic that explains why those factory-sealed Samsung T-series external NVMe pucks can cost less than the equivalent amount of internal m.2 NVMe. With m.2 NVMe, you're not just forced into a specific form-factor (which may not be electrically or thermally optimal), but you're also constrained to a lowest-common-denominator assumption of deployment environment in terms of cooling — and yet you have to ensure that your chips stay stable in that environment over the long term. Which may require more-expensive chips, longer QC burn-in periods, etc.

But when you're shipping an appliance, the engineering tolerances are the tolerances of the board-and-chassis together. If the chassis of your little puck guarantees some level of cooling/heat-sinking, then you can cheap out on chips without increasing the RMA rate. And so on. This can (and often does) result in an overall-cheaper product, despite that product being an entire appliance vs. a bare component!

Sure.. but even going consumer, for 16gb+, you can get an ARC A770 for $80 less, or an RX 9060 XT for a few dollars more... Will it perform better, I don't know. RTX 5060 Ti 16gb is about $70 more.

Prices from NewEgg on 16gb+ consumer cards, sold by NewEgg and in stock.

There are a lot of local AI hobbyists, just visit /r/LocalLLama to see how many are using 8GB cards, or all the people asking for higher RAM version of cards.

This makes it mysterious since clearly CUDA is an advantage, but higher VRAM lower cost cards with decent open library support would be compelling.

Right, but Intel is in no position to do that. So, they could play and put 32GB VRAM and also, why not produce one with 64GB just for kicks?

This could well be the reason why the rumored RDNA5 will use LPDDR5X/LPDDR5X instead of GDDR7 memory, at least for the low/mid range configurations (the top-spec and enthusiast configurations AT0 and AT2 configurations will still use GDDR7 it seems).

> Especially because VRAM suppliers might worry about ramping up production too much and then being left with an oversupply situation.

Given the high demand of graphic cards, is this a plausible scenario?

helps to be funded by govt that doesn't care about profits

I don't know the full set of differentiators.

For me (not quite at the A1000 level, but just above -- still in the prosumer price range), a major one is ECC.

Thermals and size are a bit better too, but I don't see that as $500 better. I actually don't see (m)any meaningful reasons to step up to an Ax000 series if you don't need ECC, but I'd love to hear otherwise.