GoKawiilResearcher uses voltage glitching to turn CMP 170HX mining GPU into an A100
A hardware researcher says they exploited a voltage fault-injection vulnerability in Nvidia's GA100 die to blow arbitrary fuses, enabling disabled features on a CMP 170HX mining card. The modified card reportedly exposes 80GB of memory, NVLink and PCIe Gen4, and activates more streaming multiprocessors than Nvidia enables on retail A100 cards, yielding roughly 1.18-1.2x higher FP16 throughput in benchmarks shown by the researcher.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
If reproducible, this suggests Nvidia's segmentation between cheaper mining cards and premium datacenter GPUs relies on fuses that can be physically defeated, which could undercut the pricing and licensing model for its AI accelerators. The researcher's numbers also hint that Nvidia deliberately caps functional SM counts on production A100s for yield consistency rather than raw performance, though this remains the researcher's own interpretation pending broader verification.
- A voltage glitching exploit reportedly unlocks A100-level capability from a cheaper CMP 170HX mining card.
- The modified card reportedly outperforms retail A100 cards by ~1.18-1.2x in FP16 throughput due to more active SMs.
- Disabled features like NVLink, PCIe Gen4, and possibly MIG could also be unlocked via this method, per the researcher.
Source: blog.kate.land, 2026-11-11
Published there as: “Using voltage glitching to unleash the A100 in my mining card”
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