Unlocking Turing Tensor Cores: A Measured Throughput Account of From-Scratch Pre-training on a Single 22G RTX 2080 Ti

arXiv:2611.05419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The RTX 2080 Ti (TU102) ships full second-generation Tensor Cores in hardware, yet the vendor throttles FP16 matrix multiplication at the driver level, leaving usable tensor throughput well below the hardware peak. turing-unlock lifts this restriction with a kernel module that, before the nvidia driver binds the device, writes the FP16 speed selectors (SS0=0x88888888, SS1=0x8) and releases the ACR mutex; published measurements report cuBLAS FP16 matmul throughput rising from 55.7 to 91.4 TFLOPS (about 1.6x).