The customized APU on the core of Sony’s PlayStation 5 hasn’t simply been quietly powering these sport consoles, but in addition made their manner onto cryptomining playing cards round 2023 that are known as the BC-250. The APUs on these boards differ from the one discovered within the PS5 most notably by having two out of eight CPU cores disabled, together with many compute items (CUs) of the iGPU. Now apparently it appears that you could re-enable these CUs per directions by [duggasco] if you happen to’re feeling adventurous.
As said within the challenge’s README, BC-250 boards include solely 24 out of 40 CUs enabled, however this isn’t a everlasting (e-fuse) factor. As an alternative you may write to 2 {hardware} registers throughout the GPU driver initialization, one thing which might be added to for instance the Linux kernel module parameters.
Since many of those APUs seemingly had cores and CUs disabled attributable to them failing QA throughout PS5 APU manufacturing, there’s likelihood that among the CUs really are unhealthy. But as we noticed with the AMD Phenom II X3 with a supposedly unhealthy fourth core again within the day, typically demand for the ‘faulty’ half is excessive sufficient that good elements get blended in as nicely.
Thus individuals like [Lowest Logan] determined to give it a shot, demonstrating the usage of the patch with Bazzite Linux on a BC-250 system. After a reboot the system does certainly listing 40 CUs as being enabled, and operating Furmark reveals a giant enhance in efficiency with none glitches or hearth. There’s in fact thermal throttling, however that’s because of the default cooling answer not being designed for operating it at full blast.
By the way the actual PS5 has solely 36 energetic CUs, so this technically makes these unlocked APUs extra highly effective. With the water cooling answer demonstrated by [Lowest Logan] the thermal throttling can be resolved, exhibiting that you could get a reasonably good gaming system out of those outdated cryptomining boards if you happen to occur to win the silicon lottery.
