✧✦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 thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 28
this is literally more flash than in most laptops, even if you include Thunderbolt controllers and the display firmware
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 28
apparently the network card runs ubuntu
Show threadmccMar 28
@whitequark what would be necessary to "reverse the flow" so that this is the "computer" and the card can run with no other peripherals except power
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 28
@mcc I literally just assembled this on my desk and it doesn't do this out of the box but I am led to believe that you can get an SKU which has a PCIe Root Complex and can talk to NVMe all on its own
Show threadimplr
@whitequark @mcc
The silicon should be the same. Some coworkers tried making it work on a BF2 (they're really cheap on ebay) with a collection of cursed pcie adapters, but that's not enough - iirc they determined you need the right firmware from the SKU sold as a root complex.
Probably hackable if you could figure out which magic registers to poke, probably incredibly tedious to figure this out.
Mar 28 at 7:47pmWeb