A Single Thermal Paste Query Reveals the Long Tail of AI Hardware

The Vega 56 was never an AI card. AMD designed it for 1440p gaming in an era when Tensor Cores were a research paper, not a shipping product. When the first wave of consumer AI inference began in late 2022, this GPU was already a generation behind — no bfloat16, no dedicated matrix multiply unit, no support for the precision formats that modern models require. Running inference on it means running models the frontier labs consider toy-sized, at quantization levels that precision-sensitive tasks reject. The user's question about thermal paste…