✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 28

so i took apart an NVIDIA BF-3 card and would anybody who understands it please enlighten me why it has on board:

  • Puya P24CM02 (256 KB)
  • Winbond W25Q256JVBM (32 MB)
  • Winbond W25Q512JVBQ (64 MB)
  • MXIC MX66L2G45G (256 MB)
  • a Kingston EMMC128-TY29 (128 GB)
  • a Microchip CEC1736 root-of-trust controller (which embeds 2 or 4 MB of internal SPI flash and is connected to the other three SPI flashes... I think)
  • and an ASPEED chip with a p/n I did not extract from under thermal compound looking suspiciously similar to those awful BMC devices, connected to 1 GB of Samsung DDR4

I wasn't prepared for a 1 Tbit eMMC connected directly to the main ASIC. what could it possibly be storing there? the field engineer's porn stash?

Show threadTrammell Hudson
@whitequark this chonky NIC from IBM has four sticks of DDR3 and a CF card slot.
Mar 28 at 6:44pmWeb
Show threadlymenziesMar 28

@th @whitequark

Do you have the part number for this NIC? I'd like to read more about it.

Show threadTrammell HudsonMar 29
@lymenzies @whitequark it was a pre-production prototype of the PowerEN network accelerator. Some details on the architecture still survive: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi20/cse232B-a/papers/IBMPowerEN.pdf
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 29
@th @lymenzies line rate XML processing dates this to probably around 2006
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 29
@th @lymenzies okay, 2014 isn't very close but in fairness i didn't realize it was sponsored by IBM