The CMP 170HX Wiki

中文版： README.zh-CN.md · 中文站点

A comprehensive technical reference for the NVIDIA CMP 170HX (GA100): silicon, firmware, the community unlock, operating procedures, and the open frontier.

55 pages, roughly 278,000 words. Current as of 2026-07-31.

Two ways to read this

• Wiki tab for browsing, with a sidebar. Pages there are generated from docs/ and are identical apart from link style.
• docs/ in this repository is the source of truth. It is reviewable, takes pull requests, and builds the full themed site with search via MkDocs.

Keep the two in step. to_github_wiki.py publishes docs/ to the wiki; if edits are made on the wiki instead, sync them back before continuing so the trees never diverge.

Reading it

The pages are plain Markdown and read fine directly on GitHub or in any editor. Callouts are written as GitHub alert blockquotes (> [!NOTE]), which GitHub styles natively; MkDocs renders them as plain blockquotes unless a callout extension is enabled. To get search and navigation:

pip install mkdocs mkdocs-material
mkdocs serve          # http://127.0.0.1:8000
mkdocs build          # static site into ../site

What is covered

Section	Contents
start/	Orientation, card identification, quick start, risks, glossary
hardware/	GA100 silicon, board variants, memory subsystem, fuses and OTP, PCIe, NVLink, power, thermals, VBIOS
unlock/	The mechanism end to end: Falcon and Booter, the ROP chain, privilege level masks, memory geometry, compute throttle, driver patches, PCIe Gen2, full register reference
procedures/	Install, verify, troubleshoot, recover, multi-GPU, driver versions, uninstall
operations/	Cooling, power and PSUs, physical mods, performance, LLM inference, tuning
frontier/	Status board and the unsolved problems: PCIe Gen3/Gen4, NVLink, ECC, 80 GB, P2P
history/	Timeline, the clean-room and provenance question, dead ends, tool lineage
appendix/	Register index, preserved artifacts, external sources, methodology

Two things this wiki insists on

Capacity is per SKU and is not interchangeable. The 8 GB card (10de:20c2) unlocks to 64 GB. The 10 GB card (10de:2082) unlocks to 40 GB. The 80 GB configuration for 10 GB cards was built, tested, and rejected as unstable.

PCIe link speed and link width are separate problems. Gen1 to Gen2 is a software unlock, shipped in cmpunlocker master since 2026-07-29, so any card with the unlock installed runs Gen2. Going beyond x4 width requires hand soldering 24 AC coupling capacitors. Neither one achieves the other.

Conventions

Plain prose is confirmed fact. Experimental, dangerous and unsolved material is marked with alerts. Claims resting on a single observation say so in the sentence. Where evidence genuinely conflicts and nothing settles it, the wiki says so rather than choosing quietly.

No individual is named anywhere. Findings are attributed to dates and channels rather than to people. See docs/appendix/methodology.md for how the underlying claims were gathered, adjudicated and verified, and for an honest account of the limitations.