36
I’m not interested in explaining this on the world version of this thread (or at least the one with a million posts that shows up in active/all) because even drollaccount69 has his limits, but this has nothing to do with repairability or “them” trying to get one over on “you”.
Over the past few years gpus have become hard to buy at msrp. People want to use them for ai. The memory chips are expensive and it’s worth it to solder a gpu core and twice the memory to a customs third party pcb to be able to sell the finished much more memory dense card. You can buy 4090s and 4080s with 48 and 32gb of vram respectively on eBay now and even larger configurations directly from shops that do them although maybe not on those specific cards.
But where do they get cores and the extra vram? They don’t buy the fucking chips from mouser, I can assure you of that fact. They get the vram and core chips off other gpus. So prices of gpus which would otherwise have no value to ai scalpers because of their low computational efficiency or memory density still track the premiums the big cards command because they get their cores and or vram pulled.
If that sounds crazy, as a person who has a fairly high degree of experience with microsoldering, it is. Those vram and especially core chips are huge and the boards they’re on are thick and the degree of skill required to desolder them successfully and consistently, even with every trick and tool at your disposable is very impressive.
I used to make people sign waivers before I’d do that kind of work because there’s a real, unavoidable chance of unrecoverable damage. It’s crazy.
So it should come as no surprise that designers of SBCs which have interesting computational capabilities and are differentiated by the soldered on ram are looking at clandestine bga rework shops essentially doing wizard shit at scale and thinking carefully about how they can keep those people from trying the same shit with their products.
Now you may think that still counts as hurting the customer, but in a world where there’s mounting incentive to yank ram modules from one piece of equipment and put them on another in order to sell a super high capacity device at a premium, preventing that kind of modification protects the customer of low ram devices. Which most home users of SBCs are.
Lest you start to think the sbc people are your friends, most of their sales are of low ram skus. They want to sell more units and having them all get snatched up and Frankensteined is bad for business.
It should also be noted here that Nvidia doesn’t care if an insane dystopian high tech black market sprouts up around their consumer shit, the only money that matters to them is in gb and vr racks sold directly. That black market could most likely sink rpi holdings if the same thing happened with their stuff.