Mining GPU Nvidia CMP 170HX - let's run some models!
To satisfy my curiosity, I investigated different GPUs and found this: a mining version of the A100 — the CMP 170HX.
It is a very interesting GPU. Based on public documentation, it has hardware similar to the datacenter A100. If you open it up and look at the board, you will see that it's very similar to an A100 board; it even has NVLink connectors.
Online, I found almost no information about how to run it, whether it works with LLMs, or if it's supported by default Nvidia drivers and CUDA. So, I decided to test it myself. I installed it in my lab (see previous post https://huggingface.co/posts/kostakoff/584269728210158) and found that the default nvidia-driver-570 works with it out of the box. After that, I checked if CUDA was available, and it worked too.
The next step was to try running some models: - Stable Diffusion XL with BNB4 quantization: It took around two minutes to generate an image, but it works! - Compiled llama.cpp for CUDA (https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/docs/build.md#compilation): I run Mistral 7B Q4_K_M, and this actually worked even better. It was able to generate 33 tokens per second and read 400 tokens per second.
There are some limitations related to power utilization: - When running PyTorch, it doesn't utilize more than 80 watts. - When running llama.cpp, utilization is a bit better but still limited to 113 watts.
I found this GitHub thread about the Nvidia CMP https://github.com/dartraiden/NVIDIA-patcher/issues/73, and it looks like this mining GPU has an internal rate limiter based on FMA compute calls. I haven't found a solution to bypass it yet.
I found it very funny that the Hugging Face profile has a specific section where we can share our hardware.
It really brings back memories of the good old days when we used to flex our custom PC specs on enthusiast forums 20 years ago! That inspired me to fill out my own profile and share it here.
And this is my first set of GPUs that I am using to learn MLOps: - RTX 3090 – the best one; unfortunately it doesn't support the latest FP8 and FP4, but it’s still very powerful. - Tesla V100 – performance is almost like the RTX 3090, just much older. - Tesla P100 – old, and doesn't have tensor cores, but still can handle small models. - Radeon MI50 – old, similar to the P100, but uses ROCm instead of CUDA, which is actually a pretty good experience to setup. - GTX 1080 Ti – mostly useless, no FP16 support. - GTX 1660 – first generation of the Turing architecture, but mostly useless.
After I began learning MLOps I realized that I needed some kind of home lab, there are a lot of GPUs that I need to learn how to set up and test. So I spent some time to do a researching which platform I could buy or build. My requirements ware: - Limited budget - Power supply 1 kW or higher - Few PCIe slots to be able to install more than one gpu - Zero maintenance cost, I don't want spend a lot of time or money to maintain lab hardware, except for the GPUs
I chose the Intel Mac Pro 7.1: - Prices on eBay acceptable - Excelent cooling - 1.4 kW power supply - 7 PCIe slots - Zero maintenance: I don't need to do anything with the Mac Pro hardware; it just works - Classic UEFI boot loader
It requires a bit of OS preparation: 1. Install Ubuntu 24.04 (it works with the general PC ISO image) 2. Set up T2 drivers
3. Install t2fanrd to manually manage fans (/etc/t2fand.conf) https://wiki.t2linux.org/guides/fan/ 4. Fix PCIe BAR: add pci=realloc to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT so the Linux kernel will properly initializes server GPUs without Graphics Output Protocol 5. Install NVIDIA GPU driver:
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-570
And it works! I was able to run server-grade Nvidia Tesla P100 (required DIY air duct), and consumer Nvidia Titan X, Titan V, GTX 1080 cards on the old Mac Pro 7.1 - even three in parallel.
#Nesso-4B is a fine-tuned version of Qwen-4B, trained on a highly curated and balanced dataset designed specifically for multilingual agentic workflows and conversational use cases.
As shown in the video below we simulate, the new “cowork” from #Antrophic, without any data sharing all running on a consumer device. The model can be used to build agentic behavior in #privateAI environments.
Not every problem requires super intelligence: in many cases, intelligence at the edge is more than enough.