I think most likely is that the fraud team flagged the account and deactivated it, and there's no process internally to stop that so SVP guy couldn't do anything.
Sort of like the Google account issue where employees can't internally appeal to stop account suspensions.
I know for the 20 series Nvidia supplies AIB's like EVGA with binned chips too, higher end cards had GPU's with slightly different model numbers that typically clocked better. They probably do the same for all the different card makers.
Basically, after the chips are manufactured, they're not 100% uniform. Some have better performance, some have worse.
In this case, it means they're reserving the best chips for the founders cards. In other cases, there have been instances where a company has two products, a high end and a low end (or medium, etc). In some of those cases, people have investigated and the chips are actually exactly the same, but the lower end product will have a core disabled or similar, depending on the exact product. That'll happen a lot of the time when the company has yield issues where too many of the chips don't have acceptable performance or one part of the chip is just broken. They'll disable the broken portion and boom, the lower end product is born. That's still a net win for them because the alternate is either to throw the entire thing away or spend more time improving the yield.
chip manufacturing is an imperfect process, and so there is variance in performance/viability of all of the hardware on a chip. the higher performing chips are "binned" for the top end of the price point, while the lower performing chips are either binned for lower performance or have some of their functionality disabled. For contrived example, A company may produce nothing but quad core chips but sell those with some cores that don't meet minimum performance as dual cores with the bad cores physically disabled.
they cherry-pick their best silicon so you can run them at higher speeds if you're overclocking or lower voltage if you want cooler temperatures and less power consumption at stock speeds.
There's always a ton of speculation about it, I've seen the claim NVIDIA bins for FE cards and factory overclocked AIB cards together
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, you're paying a FE premium for early access mostly.
On the plus side, this time the FE card might have a top tier cooling solution, which is why I'll probably be caving to their FE tax (and probably plenty of others, focusing on cooling was a smart move)
I don't want to sound like a narc, but it seems like a really good idea to have some degree of oversight and safeguards on financial transactions of that magnitude.
I agree, and banks + the government do just that; large transactions, or 'pattern' transactions flag up in fraud and money laundering departments and are investigated.
But, bitcoin is free of oversight or centralized control, which was the exact point of the system.
I had my life savings (all funds in my bank account) frozen, without notice, without explanation, and without recourse for 3 weeks. They literally couldn’t tell me why my account was frozen besides “social security has flagged the account.” This was at one of the largest banks in US. I never committed any crime or suspected of one, or had any weird transactions. When I protested at the branch asking how I’m supposed to pay rent they said “sorry”. After almost 3 weeks they unfroze it without explanation and offered to pay the bounced check fee for my rent.
Yeah I’d rather have bitcoin. Bitcoin removes the need for banks altogether. I don’t want the banks and government in control of my money.
I'd start with two separate accounts, less likely to be frozen simultaneously. After that, I'd try holding some cash in a safe somewhere. Or prepay rent for a free months. Or keep some money in a friend or family account.
Bitcoin would be lower on my list.
I’d argue that with Bitcoin being volatile enough to have double percentage point swings in a single day, that you’re not in full control of your money with Bitcoin either.
And obviously the people who invented and developed Bitcoin disagree. "Oversight and safeguards" translates in practice to "mostly ineffectual but otherwise repressive bureaucracy".
There is oversight, with a high degree of certainty only the holder of the corresponding private key to which funds were transferred is able to make transactions with allocated amounts.
The risk of doing that is if an authoritarian regime gains power then they can effectively black list you from the financial system. This is absolutely an issue in certain countries.
I think we’ve been conditioned to believe that any application of medium complexity requires hundreds or thousands of developers. Snarkiness aside, they have a very concrete set of functional constraints and total control over the hardware, network, and software environment. Issues like resource management, dependency conflicts, security, scale, etc are taken out of the equation, things that are often the biggest time and resource sinks.
NASA's software teams are also remarkably small, and manage to produce code with one of the lowest defect rates of all time. (Space shuttle code had 0 defects in 500k SLOC!)
