[HN Gopher] Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of ...
___________________________________________________________________
Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in
half
Author : bcatanzaro
Score : 179 points
Date : 2021-02-18 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.nvidia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.nvidia.com)
| CryptoGhost wrote:
| Nvidia should partner with Steam. Steam has enough meta-data on
| user accounts to be able to offer a level of certainty about how
| accurate and authentic a given account and it's user information
| is. You could then use a trusted enough Steam account as a one-
| per-customer method to sell a card to.
|
| You wouldn't have to monkey around with hardware freedom and even
| if a person decides to re-sell it at least it had the chance of
| being used by a "real gamer" first.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| I'm in the market for a card for computer vision stuff, but
| don't have steam.
| CryptoGhost wrote:
| Understood but Nvidia is justifying the changes by saying
| "we're taking an important step to help ensure GeForce GPUs
| end up in the hands of gamers."
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| That would be much worse than this.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Even simpler way to be to lock the card to a specific unique
| Nvidia account for a limited period after sale.
| neogodless wrote:
| Clearly the solution for everyone is to either make a popular
| computer game that matches the signature of cryptocurrency
| mining, or develop a cryptocurrency that is mined by beating
| computer games that require high quality and frame rates to
| maximize the mining rate.
|
| The graphic card manufacturers would, of course, have to optimize
| their hardware and software for these situations, to make the
| gamers happy.
| Jonnax wrote:
| It's kinda amazing that Nvidia could have increased the RRP for
| each of their 30 series cards by $300 and it'd still be in short
| supply.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Buying gamer GPU allows to sale it later, when crypto bubble pops
| up. Buying specialized hardware makes it useless later. Prices
| (and availability) for specialized hardware must be really sweet
| to satisfy miners.
| tmaly wrote:
| Why not just make a massively parallel ASIC and make the price
| competitive to the RTX 3060?
|
| This would be better than crippling the product via software
| drivers.
| throwaway2a02 wrote:
| My understanding is that the ETH and other algorithms designed
| to be run on GPUs have big memory and memory bandwidth
| requirements, which is what makes it more difficult (or less
| cost effective?) to implement on an ASIC.
|
| LE. I see you meant NVidia should be making the ASICs. In that
| case, that's exactly what they're doing, isn't it? This CMP
| line is exactly that.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| ethereum was especialy designed to be mined with gpu, i think
| asic or fpga will miss the memory size that gpu have.
| terramex wrote:
| The big draw of gaming cards is their resale value, when they
| become obsolete for mining they can be resold to gamers for
| significant fraction of their original price. Truly huge mining
| operations use ASICs anyway, but for medium sized farms gaming
| GPUs make more sense.
| m463 wrote:
| Will this nerf minecraft too? ;)
| golover721 wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is Nvidia getting pressure from the
| Gaming industry to do something about it. As far as Nvidia is
| concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so
| it is a gold rush for them. The gaming industry I am sure is
| getting concerned that for their new AAA titles already under
| development which require these high end GPUs, their customers
| won't be able to get ahold of them. Or at least will be unwilling
| to pay the huge markups that the cards are going for.
| jarenmf wrote:
| They are only doing that to promote their new NVIDIA CMP HX
| product line
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Aren't ASIC miners at least an order (or in the case of Bitcoin,
| several orders) of magnitude more efficient than these chips? Is
| this just more attractive in terms of more easily accessible
| supply?
| mindcandy wrote:
| ASICs are great for Bitcoin because B's algo strains the math
| features of a chip. An ASIC can bake a whole iteration of the
| algo into a single, huge instruction.
|
| Many people in the community don't like ASICs in crypto because
| they believe their high cost and rarity creates a hurdle for
| mass adoption. Every kid playing games on their computer has a
| GPU, but it's much harder for that same kid to get their hands
| in an ASIC. Mass adoption by all kinds of people, not just
| already rich corporations, is important to the security and the
| mission of crypto.
|
| In response, Ethereum was designed to have an algo that
| stresses your RAM rather than your processor. This reduces the
| advantage of ASICs tremendously. You can't drive RAM much
| harder than GPUs already do. And so, Eth and many other memory-
| hard cryptos are still mined on GPUs.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Looking up (admittedly expensive) ASICs on Amazon shows ASICs
| that outperform MH/s/watt on Etherium by 2x vs the best
| nVidia card announced.
| _alex_ wrote:
| There are ASICs for Bitcoin and other coins that use SHA.
| Ethereum and other "later" cryptocurrencies using hashing
| algorithms that are memory-hard and there aren't efficient
| ASICs for those. If you're mining Ethereum or ZCash or
| something, you're using GPUs
| rtrdea wrote:
| People still GPU mine ether
| dis-sys wrote:
| those who bought 3090/3080 five months ago can probably sell
| their GPU cards at the original purchase price. you will never
| be able to do that for those ASIC based devices.
| Thaxll wrote:
| Not original more like 2x more.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I never got around to selling my old r9 380 that I used to do
| some mining on. Unfortunately too old now I guess, doesn't go
| for more than $80.
| SloopJon wrote:
| If NVIDIA feels the need to gimp the upcoming RTX 3060, that
| suggests that the new CMP cards will not be attractive enough to
| compete on their own price/merit, or that they will be similarly
| supply constrained. That said, I'm curious to see how they
| perform for machine learning.
| michaelt wrote:
| Of course they won't compete on their own price/merit.
|
| This will be like Quadro: Same chip, a couple of feature flags
| flipped, then sold at several times the price to price-
| insensitive market segments.
|
| Nvidia have noticed miners will pay $1000 for an MSRP $500
| card, and they want to take a cut without alienating the gaming
| market too much.
| ralmidani wrote:
| I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply
| issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes
| the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes,
| does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides
| speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of
| dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to
| try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even need it for a class
| they're taking), and might also want to play the occasional game,
| have to pay an arm and a leg to get their (remaining) hands on a
| modern, efficient card?
|
| I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
|
| Edit: the "Syrian refugee crossing into Europe" trope might pop
| up as a counter-argument for crypto. I am Syrian and still have
| relatives there. Refugees' assets are a drop in the ocean of
| speculators' mining and HODLing.
| Tenoke wrote:
| > I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product
| line.
|
| I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of
| this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people
| don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is
| there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data
| centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060
| would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
| ralmidani wrote:
| I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them
| doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
|
| Also, my concern is not for data centers running creepy ML
| models that invade users' privacy, but for the average home
| user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time
| get decent frame rates when they play a game.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with
| them doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
|
| My argument is they should and could have scaled up the
| production rather than just shuffling around which group
| they hurt or help at the expense of which other (be it
| miners, ML folks or gamers). This isn't the 'right thing',
| it just helps the group you prefer on this round.
| belltaco wrote:
| https://www.networkworld.com/article/3602456/youre-not-
| imagi...
| PixelOfDeath wrote:
| Ask AMD why scaling up to mining demand is a bad idea.
|
| A sudden implosion of demand combined with a flooding of
| the used GPU marked. Better not plan on bringing out any
| new GPU architectures when your warehouses are still full
| of the previous generation.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| You do understand Nvidia is a fabless company, correct?
| Scaling up demand isn't just calling up some factory
| manager and telling them to work harder, it's getting
| into a massive cagefight with AMD, Apple, and every other
| company out there that needs silicon all for the
| amusement of Samsung/TSMC
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| You do realize there is a global chip shortage right now?
| It's not as easy as clicking a button in ec2 to suddenly make
| more gpus.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| I think it absolutely makes sense for them to customize their
| products for the market they want to serve, even if it is
| artificial, that is their prerogative. But the product is just
| for gamers that want better games. I think it's funny that is
| the moral high road here.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Even $2000 video cards are sold out
|
| I'm speechless
| kyriakos wrote:
| It doesn't surprise me. My 2yo GPU is selling in EU for
| double the price I originally bought it from the same
| retailer. Its the first time computer hardware is actually
| not depreciating but gaining value as it ages.
| paulmd wrote:
| When I upgraded to a 3070 I sold my 1080 Ti for 50% more
| than I paid for it and at this point I think I could have
| gotten more (it was a blower so not exactly a desirable
| card though). Cost me 100 bucks after tax to do the
| upgrade. Then I scored a 3080 and sold the 3070 for $700
| plus shipping.
|
| It's to the point where I'm thinking about selling my
| "backup" 1060 3GB card, but if my GPU died then I would be
| in real trouble because lol at getting ahold of GPUs right
| now.
| pyr0hu wrote:
| Same, bought a GTX1660 Super, and the price doubled since.
| It's madness what's happening on the GPU market.
| gabereiser wrote:
| A year ago I bought a RTX 3070 when I rebuilt my
| entertainment rig. I replaced a GTX1080 and got rid of it.
| I should have kept it and resold it. It's crazy and I wish
| there were two categories of cards. Mining cards and Gaming
| cards. Looks like NVidia feels the same and is making
| dedicated cards for the basement farmers.
| felipelemos wrote:
| Maybe you are confusing with the series 20XX? The RTX
| 3070 were only released a bit more than 4 months ago.
| uncledave wrote:
| Yeah I sold my 1660 GTX for PS40 more than I paid for it
| after 2 years. Was shocked.
| bob1029 wrote:
| The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to
| the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over.
| The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager
| coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed
| system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are
| doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained
| in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency domain vs seconds to
| minutes).
|
| For reference, Visa does thousands to tens-of-thousands of
| transactions per second. The cost to run one of these
| transactions is negligible because it can be handled so
| quickly. Contrast with BTC, which struggles to hit 10
| transactions per second on a good day. I used to work in a
| facility that monitored debit transactions. Our SLAs were
| ridiculous. Certain customers had requirements that if a single
| transaction took more than 100 ms, we were to open a ticket and
| contact their help desk immediately. This is the type of rigor
| it takes to maintain a financial payment network that consumers
| will have confidence in using.
|
| This is not something that can be solved with current crypto
| approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding
| how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed
| system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.
| [deleted]
| cloudhead wrote:
| I'm not sure why you would compare Visa with Bitcoin, unless
| you had no idea what you were talking about.. Visa does not
| enable one to transact without the rest of the banking
| system. It's useless on its own. Really pointless point of
| reference.
| deweller wrote:
| The long term road map for Ethereum 2 is 100k transactions
| per second. This is a theoretical maximum and it will likely
| take years to get there.
|
| This defies your assertion that scaling cannot ever be
| achieved with current crypto approaches.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| The long term roadmap for MyCoin(tm) is to hit twelve
| bajillion transactions per second by next Tuesday.
|
| It isn't easy to hit those throughputs on a normal system
| where nodes are reliable and trustworthy, workloads are
| carefully controlled, and latency is under a millisecond.
| There's no reason to think Ethereum can pull it off.
| humaniania wrote:
| Always just around the corner, just like functional PoS. I
| won't believe it until I see it.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Okay, so for the foreseeable future: "The practical utility
| of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use
| cases that all of the speculators fawn over"
|
| Not really a change in semantics here. It's still the point
| that crypto promised a LOT of really cool things for
| fintech that realistically won't materialize for a long
| time.
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| 100k transactions per section w/ serializability and all of
| the other things required to satisfy real-world concerns
| like fraud and regulatory constraints?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Bold of you to assume that the crypto-crowd have
| seriously taken fraud and and consumer protections into
| account. Crypto-currencies are a poor technical
| "solution" to a socio-economic problem, and while this
| remains the case associated problems (regulatory
| constraints, etc) will continue to be things that are
| relegated to the "don't care/won't fix/too hard" basket
| at worst, and stapled on as an afterthought at best.
| That's before we even get to the hardcore libertarian
| mindset that is incredibly prelevant in crypto-
| currencies.
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| This comment is peak Liberal hacker news.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Just wait until they'll limit ML/DL using those heuristics
| because you're supposed to buy specialized hardware and let
| gamers play their games.
|
| First they came for the miners, and I did not speak out.
| liuliu wrote:
| Yes, that is worrying. But, they already have license in
| place to ensure no one uses their gaming GPUs in the cloud,
| where the big money is already. (And it worked, I cannot find
| any low-cost cloud providers with gaming GPUs for GPGPU
| computing).
|
| I hope they don't, given that there is limited upside and a
| lot of push back from dev community.
| option wrote:
| how Syrian refugees (or any other people from war torn place)
| convert their assets to crypto before leaving?
| ralmidani wrote:
| Good question. I don't know the details, but early on in
| Assad's war against Syrians, the situation was easier than it
| is now. In 2012/2013, a lot of cash was taken to neighboring
| countries.
| mactrey wrote:
| There are no two ways about it: the Syrian refugees who were
| planning to buy RTX 3060s for mining are going to be hurt by
| this announcement.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| They don't need to mine for that, merely buy existing
| Bitcoins.
| Leherenn wrote:
| Is that easy? I assume they are going to have Syrian pounds
| as cash. Then I guess you need to put them in a local bank
| account and use that account to buy BTC. Can you buy BTC
| with Syrian pounds? If yes, wouldn't the exchange rate be
| dreadful? I'm not sure exactly who would want SYP.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| You need someone to accept Syrian pounds for the nvidia
| gpu too, and you need to buy electricity and have
| functional internet service... there's really no reason
| to mine instead of buy in this case.
| ljm wrote:
| The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of
| electricity being burned through for what is essentially a
| skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for
| speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely
| artificial, and artificially scarce, product.
|
| Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had
| with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any
| victory at all it is a pyrrhic one when you look at the
| externalities.
|
| If you can call a digital gold rush a victory, anyway. The
| physical one in the US was pretty bad for a lot of people.
| infogulch wrote:
| > skeuomorphism of gold mining
|
| I'm gonna steal that one, thanks. :D
| lrossi wrote:
| Great, another company that is dictating what software I am
| running on the computer I own.
|
| I've never mined Ethereum, but this really upsets me.
| hobofan wrote:
| With their proprietary drivers and their separate Quadro cards
| (which are identical hardware but running different drivers),
| NVIDIA has already been dictating what you are running for
| ages.
|
| This is not the start of NVIDIA dictating what you are running,
| just a new symptom of it.
| adamdusty wrote:
| Then get literally any other Nvidia card?
| NKosmatos wrote:
| I agree, when you buy the hardware you should be able to do
| what you please with it. This applies for something you already
| own and use.
|
| Imagine a new driver, for hardware you already own where you
| couldn't watch cat videos (extreme example) in 4K but only in
| 360p :-)
|
| On the other hand if you're well informed before buying such a
| card, that it will have reduced performance for crypto (or
| whatever) I guess it's ok and you can select something else.
|
| We have to be realistic here and understand that on one hand
| NVIDIA hates miners since they're creating a shortage of cards
| for gamers but on the other hand they're the ones buying all
| new cards straight away for mining.
|
| I think this is a marketing trick so that both gamers and
| miners are happy, RTX line for gamers and CMP line for miners,
| win-win for NVIDIA :-)
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| > I think this is a marketing trick so that both gamers and
| miners are happy, RTX line for gamers and CMP line for
| miners, win-win for NVIDIA :-)
|
| But they won't magically have twice the amount of chips on
| hand, will they? So either they make a lot of CMP cards and
| too little RTX cards, and gamers will still struggle to get
| one, or they'll make sufficient RTX cards and too few CMP
| ones and miners have a big incentive to get around those
| restrictions (and will, in all likelihood). I guess they can
| mark up those CMP cards and include some mining-friendly
| features in the future for some additional revenue.
| Uke wrote:
| This could be the win-win-win for all parties, if only the
| cuda cores on the die have to be known good, it could mean,
| that the yield of nvidia goes up, gamers get their gpus
| with graphics, and miners get a card that can mine for a
| limited amount of time but then can't go into secondary
| market.
| varispeed wrote:
| If you cannot run what you want on the device, do you really own
| it?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| If you cannot buy it because miners have purchased all the
| stock, do you really own it?
| varispeed wrote:
| Not sure how this is relevant. Company should look how to
| increase the supply instead of artificially crippling the
| product to squeeze more money.
| asutekku wrote:
| If it is not physically possible, this decision makes a lot
| of sense. Due to the global semiconductor shortage it
| simply is not possible to build more on the scale customers
| would like to.
| varispeed wrote:
| The instrument to regulate that is called the price. You
| increase the price until there is a steady supply. That
| would help funding new fabs and in the long run increase
| the supply so that it could be available for a broader
| range of consumers. The way they do it is not
| sustainable. They will not generate enough money to pay
| for new manufacturing plants this way.
| kristjansson wrote:
| > 'long run'
|
| That's on the order of years for this problem. I would
| imagine that Nvidia doesn't think it could survive the
| reputational costs of charging market clearing prices for
| their cards for years - effectively proscribing their
| core gamer market for the entire period.
|
| Sure, that's what's happening now, but it's the fault of
| scalpers not a business decision by Nvidia. The scalpers
| get the ire of the core market, and Nvidia gets to look
| like it's doing its best (while guaranteeing all the
| inventory it can make will sell)
|
| It's the same reason your favorite band charges a low
| face for tickets that doesn't reflect demand - they don't
| want to be the bad guy excluding poor people from the
| experience, they just let the scalpers do that.
| varispeed wrote:
| So they essentially got themselves in a pickle. It looks
| like they have not invested money in infrastructure and
| instead lowered prices to attract as many people as
| possible thinking what they currently have will be
| "enough". They have not predicted that the demand will be
| so high that it will exceed their current abilities and
| they have no money to increase the production and they
| are unable to raise the money without destroying the
| market they built. That they want to give the experience
| to the "poor" people it is just a poor excuse of poor
| management.
| kristjansson wrote:
| > unable to raise the money
|
| I think Nvidia could borrow or raise basically any amount
| of money if they had capital-intensive projects to invest
| in that would solve current or future supply constraints.
| Retained earnings are not the only way a company can
| invest in itself.
|
| The problem isn't capital, its fundamental inelasticity
| of supply for semiconductors. Fabs (or capacity in fabs)
| can't be spun up or down quickly, nevermind cheaply.
| unionpivo wrote:
| The problem is that everybody wants to build on newest
| TSMC and maybe Samsung fabs.
|
| Apple outbid everyone (and given their budget, will
| continue to do so.), so the rest of them are fighting for
| whatever capacity is left.
|
| TSMC is expanding, but new factories take years to build.
|
| So the issue here is mostly the overreliance of whole
| world on TSMC and Samsung.
| glennpratt wrote:
| And crypto demand can evaporate tomorrow, as it has in
| the past and leave those plants unprofitable.
| dageshi wrote:
| However many they produce, miners will buy all of them.
| Miners will outbid gamers on the same cards. What is your
| solution?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| By crippling the product for miners, they're increasing the
| supply for gamers.
| varispeed wrote:
| What if you are a gamer and you want to mine when you
| don't play?
| talhah wrote:
| No, you never bought it to begin with. Can't own what you
| never paid for obviously.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Well, ask Apple about that.
| ortusdux wrote:
| Many car manufacturers have found that it is cheaper to ship
| all vehicles with a feature, and then have the owner pay to
| unlock it.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/2/21311332/bmw-in-car-purcha...
| Zenst wrote:
| Would be better if they just did specialised versions of their
| datacenter systems geared towards the issue and capitalise upon
| it for a win win around. However as a stop-gap solution that
| won't impact many, but some crypto miners - I can see what they
| are going for.
| protoman3000 wrote:
| As I wrote in the other thread here, this won't change anything.
| The additional chips which were previously binned probably don't
| exceed demand. The demand of miners is inelastic and they will
| buy anything.
| Klwohu wrote:
| Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other
| applications like machine learning too? Will people who already
| bought these cards for mining have to watch out for updated
| drivers or firmware? This is an absolute nightmare scenario which
| will come back to haunt Nvidia for years. I can't believe they
| approved this.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how games perform on the newly gimped
| cards people already own. Can they firmware-gimp a card to
| reliably stop mining without affecting games? We'll see!
| mywittyname wrote:
| >Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in
| other applications like machine learning too?
|
| Maybe? It would make sense because ML use cases are
| professional and there's a lot of money to be made there.
|
| This isn't without precedent. Quadro cards have always been 99%
| GeForce cards with some special bios magic to de-gimp them for
| CAD or VFX applications. They charge 4x the price because they
| know that workstations running $50,000 a seat software can
| afford the premium.
| terramex wrote:
| RTX 3060 has not been released yet, it goes on sale February
| 25th.
| Klwohu wrote:
| OK, but it still seems like a problem until people can see
| that this doesn't affect their games. Perhaps this will
| reduce demand among miners after all.
|
| I shouldn't be surprised - this is what Nvidia already does
| with their Quadro vs. consumer line. Heck, I owned a Sound
| Blaster Live! which was functionally equivalent to the EMU
| APS and used the hacked drivers for years back in the olden
| days.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like
| machine learning too?
|
| While their move is questionable (I don't judge, but recognize
| that it's questionable), there is a situation out there that is
| 1. specific and 2. concrete (gaming cards that can't be
| purchased for gaming), which is unlikely to apply also to
| machine learning.
| cybrexalpha wrote:
| Have nvidia lost their minds?
|
| It's going to take days for mining operations to reverse-engineer
| the driver and undo this. So commercial operations won't be
| affected at all.
|
| Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if
| After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is
| it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then? Suggest I
| buy a Quadro for AE support?
|
| This will only penalise average users.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Yeah, this is about par for the course for Nvidia.
|
| I wish AMD had a working product to kick their teeth in...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| They mostly do, the problem is that they're even more supply-
| constrained than Nvidia right now.
| COGlory wrote:
| They do. The 5700XT is still an excellent card, the 6700 and
| 6700XT are coming out soon, and the 6800 and 6800XT are both
| absolutely killer cards as well, especially at the reference
| prices.
|
| Vendors and demand have effectively driven prices to an
| insane amount, and you just can't get them, unfortunately.
| Short of AMD doing something like Nvidia is doing here, I
| doubt we'll see them on store shelves any time soon.
| slezyr wrote:
| 5700XT costs 1000$ in Ukraine. It cost 500$ when it just
| got released. WTF?
|
| Edit: 1100$ actually.
| COGlory wrote:
| I just sold a used one for $1100 that I paid $380 for on
| release. It's because crypto has gone up so much.
| izacus wrote:
| And the reason you can't buy them is exactly the same
| reason nVidia is adding limitations - to try to make the
| cards less appealing to scalpers so the actual customers
| may get some.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Except you won't be able to buy any of them, even when they
| are released.
| account42 wrote:
| You might not like the price, but the 6800/6900 ones tend
| to stay in stock these days in at least some parts of the
| world [0][1]
|
| [0] https://www.mindfactory.de/Hardware/Grafikkarten+(VGA
| )/Radeo... [1] https://www.alternate.de/Grafikkarten/Big-
| Navi
| zelon88 wrote:
| That's for the people who already own the card.
|
| If you're in the market for a new card and you have the option
| of a powerful, purpose-built card that works out of the box or
| one that needs endless tweaking, few people would choose the
| more complex option. Especially if it means every new driver
| that gets released is going to require days to make work
| properly.
| bluescrn wrote:
| A GeForce will have much more resale value than a mining-
| specific card once mining becomes unprofitable or the next
| generation of cards come along
| arsome wrote:
| It all depends on availability - if there are no more CMP
| cards available, but GeForce cards are still around and
| there's a known good cracked driver for them, this won't even
| be a question.
|
| Miners don't care about driver updates so it's really a one-
| off, not endless, once it's running they don't have to touch
| it.
| wtallis wrote:
| There's no "endless tweaking" to keep your GPU mining rig
| working.
|
| Constant GPU driver updates are the norm for gaming GPUs
| because GPU drivers include a huge pile of workarounds for
| buggy games, and there are new buggy games hitting the market
| all the time. But if you just want to run a specific
| straightforward GPGPU task like a miner, you only need to get
| _one_ driver version properly cracked to unlock full
| performance, and keep using that until the hardware is no
| longer profitable to mine with.
|
| And it seems pretty likely that a countermeasure bolted on to
| the drivers this late in the process will be defeated fairly
| quickly, and miners will go on a second shopping spree after
| clearing out the stock of the new purpose-built mining cards.
| (Assuming those even ship before the 3060 drivers get
| cracked.)
| judge2020 wrote:
| Plus, part of the profitability of mining cards is being
| able to resell them once their profitability is low (and
| they do usually still work fine for gaming after a year of
| mining). The new mining cards will have to be insanely
| profitable to make them look better than the 30-series
| cards.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| People are and still will be buying up every card that they
| can get their hands on at a price that turns an ROI of less
| than 6 months. They-ll just download a different
| driver/firmware if needed.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| The CMP cards will be much cheaper than the GPU gaming units so
| why would they bother ???.
| paulpan wrote:
| So true. Nvidia can't not know how resourceful cryptominers are
| - and to what lengths a miner will go to modify the firmware
| for even a few percentage point improvements. It'll just lead
| to a never-ending back and forth (will daily drivers become a
| thing?) until Nvidia decides it's not worth the effort.
|
| This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers.
| What's interesting is that these "mining-crippling" changes
| will only apply to the 3060 GPU, not the rest of the RTX 3000
| series. If it was a legitimate gesture, then Nvidia would've
| made it universally applicable.
| cat199 wrote:
| > This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers.
|
| Color me cynical, but this seems like a strong gesture at
| increasing margins on GPU computing by upselling using
| cryptocurrency and gamers as PR pawns/scapegoats
|
| if Nvidia is selling more cards than they can
| produce/distribute at desired target prices they should
| produce more cards and improve their distribution networks..
| sujinge9 wrote:
| Or, even easier, raise prices...
| lxgr wrote:
| Maybe there is some hardware enforcement involved? Also,
| retroactively capping functionality of a sold product seems
| like a PR and legal nightmare.
| g_p wrote:
| The Sony PS3 precedent of removing OtherOS springs to mind
| regards retroactive restrictions.
| paulpan wrote:
| From the announcement it seems this is driver-side only, so
| a big nope.
| Jonnax wrote:
| I'm guessing their 3060 product is their budget card so it's
| easier for them to limit performance on that.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for someone to
| reverse-engineer the drivers and remove the slowdown code.
| protoster wrote:
| They might doing the same thing video games do to combat
| piracy. No DRM is unbreakable, all games are eventually
| cracked, so why bother? The thought is that it buys enough time
| during the critical launch window to sway people who will have
| pirated the game to buy a copy instead.
|
| The case for this kind of video card "DRM" is actually stronger
| because miners either have to gamble and buy cards they know
| they won't be able to use until (or even if) a "crack" is
| available, or wait until a solution is available before buying
| them.
|
| If the miners wait, this is a win for gamers and Nvidia PR
| because the cards will be bought by gamers since cards have a
| limited supply unlike video game licenses.
| tux3 wrote:
| I'm sure someone raised that objection internally, and was
| pointedly ignored (as they should be if all you care about is
| the PR angle of "we're doing something"!)
| notum wrote:
| Or. Uhm. Use older drivers? I bet these are bios changes
| though.
| hn8788 wrote:
| The RTX 3060 hasn't released yet, so if the cards ship with
| this limitation, there aren't any old drivers to use.
| notum wrote:
| You're right, I forgot they package up drivers for all
| cards in the same versioning scheme, so using 4XX version
| of the package won't support the card.
| nuccy wrote:
| I use CUDA for scientific calculations and I wonder how this
| will affect GPU performance since any detection algorithm may
| have fault positives. The only problem with such artificial
| limitation is that usually people who mine crypto are very
| inventive (if you have doubts about that just check laptop
| mining farms [1]), since they try to squeeze out as many H/s as
| possible. It is just a matter of time when the 'right' driver
| will be available.
|
| 1. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-GeForce-
| RTX-3060-laptop...
| jbnorth wrote:
| Honestly if it's an issue they'd probably tell you you're
| also using their GeForce cards wrong and you need to move up
| to Quadro.
| notum wrote:
| "No no sir, I see that you're using Quadro TensorFlow, you
| need to use a Quadro PyTorch card."
| hobofan wrote:
| > since any detection algorithm may have fault positives
|
| Though not impossible, NVIDIA has been doing application
| detection for ages for the purpose of tuning the performance
| of the latest popular games. So as long as your scientific
| calculations don't calculate too much Keccak-256 hashes, they
| should probably be fine.
| terramex wrote:
| Their application detection is based on executable name.
| Fairly popular game I worked on was misdetected because
| apparently we used executable name of some decade old FPS.
| They fixed it in NVidia Control Panel, but Shadowplay
| continues to put gameplay recordings in wrong folder to
| this day.
| hobofan wrote:
| Huh wow, I would have guessed that it was based on some
| more complicated heuristics. Well then I guess my
| previous comment is moot.
| jki275 wrote:
| I bet it's less than a day.
| the-enterprise wrote:
| (1) Many gamers are miners in their spare time!
|
| (2) Big Mining operations actually write their own drivers
|
| (3) Huge Mining operations even use custom boards
|
| (4) I heard that that Nvidia has been selling silicon directly to
| the big boys (https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedly-
| sold-175-million-worth...)
|
| (5) With this action I expect its only the little guys getting
| removed from the game here (1) a huge benefit for the big players
| (2)(3) benefitting the corporations biggest customers (4)
| TomVDB wrote:
| > (2) Big Mining operations actually write their own drivers
|
| Strong claims require strong evidence.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This doesn't seem that far fetched. Especially since miners
| don't need to produce full-featured drivers.
| lima wrote:
| The objective seems to be to stop miners from buying up
| consumer GPUs. Nvidia added a separate product line for mining.
| wmf wrote:
| If both those product lines use the same dies, mining is
| still taking GPUs away from gamers.
| Bayart wrote:
| I wonder who they're going to blame when they still can't get
| their card but can't pin it on the miners.
|
| As for these mining cards, without the resale value they might as
| well be ASICs.
| k__ wrote:
| Is mining a viable investment?
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| At this exact moment, yes (I would think). But that says
| nothing about tomorrow, or next month. Even if the crypto price
| stays the same or goes higher, your ROI depends on how many
| other people are mining and what their hash rate is.
|
| The people that are doing the best right now are almost
| certainly the ones with fully depreciated equipment.
| IceWreck wrote:
| While I hate the GPU shortage, I dont think this is the right way
| to go. Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your
| hardware is a bad precedent.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| It's also a precedent nvidia (and AMD) set well over a decade
| ago by limiting several features to their quadro line. 5-10
| years ago it was 10-12bit color. Today it's SR-IOV. There was
| also the gsync/freesync debacle not so long ago.
|
| This is the first time the ends have even remotely justified
| the means.
| cma wrote:
| I think number of video encoding streams is artificially
| limited to 2 as well on consumer cards.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your
| hardware is a bad precedent.
|
| Everything does it - from Intel chips being binned by
| performance, Windows versions and # of CPUs, and pretty much
| any big software products.
|
| Another way to see it is: it costs X to develop a line, and a
| vendor can charge everyone the same, no matter how they use it,
| or they can design and partition the line so users with
| different needs pay more or less. So, for example, a home PC
| with 8 cores is not paying for software that handles 128 cores,
| and those needing 128 core software pay more. When Intel does a
| run of CPUs, and tests them, and finds some can run at 4 GHz,
| and others only at 3 GHz, then they can either throw out the
| 3GHz ones and charge everyone much, much more for the single
| sku, or they can partition the same chip into bins for
| different prices, effectively lowering the chip cost for every
| single sku.
|
| The alternative to pricing in tiers is to charge the 128 core
| user less, and the 8 core user more, then the majority of users
| get charged more for things they will never use. Or only sell
| the top of the top of the chip yield, making the per unit cost
| astronomical, since now your yields dropped through the floor.
|
| Personally, I like market segmentation, since it allows me to
| only pay for the things I want, while others can buy the things
| they want. I prefer not being charged to support development of
| things I don't want or need. And in some cases it lowers the
| cost for everyone.
| wtallis wrote:
| Binning chips for yield is different from artificially
| crippling chips. There's nothing wrong with taking an 8-core
| CPU with a defect in one core and selling it as a 6-core
| part, or underclocking it until all 8 cores are stable and
| selling it as a slower part. The odious part happens when fab
| defect rates drop and yield improves, so basically all the
| dies can function as 8-core chips. When that happens, Intel
| _et al._ start disabling perfectly functional cores to
| artificially constrain the supply of high-end parts. That 's
| a pretty clear cut market failure that's only possible
| because the barriers to entry are so high.
|
| The most extreme instance of this that I'm aware of was when
| Intel sold a ~$50 piece of software that would unlock the
| rest of the L2 cache on a specific low-end processor model.
| They didn't say it _might_ work on your chip; every instance
| of that model had apparently passed QA with the full cache
| enabled but shipped with a fourth of it (IIRC) disabled. So
| Intel wasn 't saving any money or harvesting any otherwise-
| unusable parts with that model. They were just price fixing.
|
| Product segmentation for software is also a different issue,
| because all the scarcity is artificial to begin with, with no
| natural underlying supply curves because there's no marginal
| cost to making another copy.
| mywittyname wrote:
| > That's a pretty clear cut market failure that's only
| possible because the barriers to entry are so high.
|
| I see that as a market success. People with lighter needs
| can purchase a neutered chip at a lower price. While people
| with greater needs can purchase an unlocked chip for a
| premium.
|
| An alternative is to only have one chip, which is priced
| higher than the neutered version. Because of lost sales,
| fewer people overall buy the chip, so the price per unit
| goes up. This is a net loss to the consumer.
|
| Another idea is to build two chips for each market. This
| increases design and production costs. And is a net loss
| for the consumer.
|
| Or they could always just avoid making the more powerful
| chip at all, and stick with the volume seller.
|
| This is a really common strategy in consumer products
| because it makes so much market sense. It sounds unfair
| when you think of it as, "paying for a product which you
| can't access the full potential". But it sounds pretty nice
| when you frame it as, "getting a discount for not using a
| feature."
| p1necone wrote:
| It's a market failure because in a market with proper
| competition it wouldn't be possible for Intel to do this
| without being undercut by someone else on the higher end
| parts.
|
| If you're able to take e.g. an 8 core cpu, artificially
| disable 2 of the cores and sell the 8 core for $300 and
| the 6 core for $250, and still make a profit/break even
| on both of them then you could be selling the 8 core for
| $250 and your competition should be punishing you.
| TomVDB wrote:
| > Product segmentation for software is also a different
| issue, because all the scarcity is artificial to begin
| with, with no natural underlying supply curves because
| there's no marginal cost to making another copy.
|
| What you're saying is that due to some irrelevant
| production related factor, it's totally fine for a software
| company to price their product based on what the market is
| willing to pay, but as soon as a piece of hardware is
| involved, that principle doesn't apply anymore.
|
| What about selling software that comes with a hardware
| copyright protection dongle? Under which category does that
| fall? The marginal cost of producing that dongle is not
| zero after all.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| > there's no marginal cost to making another copy
|
| Marginal cost is not the only cost. It's disingenuous to
| treat it as such. It's also incorrect - making a copy for
| someone to access is most certainly not free.
|
| And the economics is sound - partitioning markets allows
| sales at lower prices to many purchasers. There's simply no
| way around this, no matter how you feel about it.
|
| >That's a pretty clear cut market failure
|
| No, the same economics above apply - partitioning the
| market lets those less needs obtain product at a lower cost
| than those with more needs, no matter how the
| device/software is created.
|
| Market segmentation replaces a single, ham handed consumer
| and producer surplus with a multi level one, allowing each
| side to capture more of the surplus for their benefit,
| leaving less of the summed surplus on the table.
|
| Not every purchaser has the same surplus to trade. By
| splitting the market some purchasers that would not
| otherwise buy are now willing and able to do so, and the
| tighter or possible non-existent margins there are offset
| by selling to those accepting higher price points, almost
| always offset by extra capability.
|
| And no matter how you slice it, commodity chips and
| software are so incredibly cheap compared to the value they
| provide it's hard to claim these prices are somehow not
| reasonable. For less than a week's pay I can purchase an
| incredible set of tools that I can then turn into orders of
| magnitude more value for me. Pretty much any professional
| making a living based on computers is in the same position.
| wtallis wrote:
| > Marginal cost is not the only cost. It's disingenuous
| to treat it as such.
|
| Well, it's a good thing I didn't do that. I just said
| that the lack of any real marginal cost means that
| artificial market segmentation for software should be
| analyzed separately from artificial market segmentation
| for physical goods. And only one of those two analyses is
| relevant to this thread. The software stuff you brought
| up is a red herring.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >that artificial market segmentation for software should
| be analyzed separately from artificial market
| segmentation for physical goods
|
| This is akin to economic voodoo. There is no reason to do
| anything different for either one - they are products,
| customers buy them.
|
| Once you want this artificial split, I guess based on
| your (incorrect) claim that there is no marginal cost
| (original claim) or lack of any real marginal cost
| (backpedaled claim) as the deciding factor, then when do
| you start to add a continuum of how you analyze based on
| a continuum of costs?
|
| If there is a marginal cost 3/4 between your two cases,
| do we now need to interpolate your forms of analysis? All
| because you personally don't like how markets work?
|
| Or why not simply use the same method, standard
| economics, to analyze them? And realize all these
| products have the same benefits to consumers via varied
| pricing?
|
| >The software stuff you brought up is a red herring.
|
| No, it shows how markets work. That you move your
| goalposts in the middle of a thread is the fallacious
| reasoning.
|
| And you've failed to address that segmentation like this
| allows people to buy that could not have otherwise. Do
| you dispute that segmentation allows cheaper pricing for
| some consumers, and in some products, all consumers? Are
| you arguing for higher prices or just ignoring this
| empirical fact?
| travisporter wrote:
| Off topic but does Tesla still software limit their batteries?
| I always cringed at that; just knowing something exists that
| isn't being used to it's full potential
| Ciantic wrote:
| > Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your
| hardware is a bad precedent.
|
| Unfortunately it happens all the time. For instance Nvidia had
| Quadro lineup, with nicer multi-display settings that to my
| knowledge was always just driver thing. They never ported those
| to GeForce line up, and people suffered with displays that wake
| up too late and all windows were messed up when you waked up
| your computer.
|
| It hasn't happened to me lately so they might have fixed it,
| problem was that if one of the displays took longer to wake up
| then Windows didn't recognize it until it was too late. With
| Quadro you could force the EDI settings so that it faked for
| operating system that the display was there.
| driverdan wrote:
| Unless they're cheap no one is going to buy them. Those hash
| rates are terrible. I get 50MH+ on my 2080ti at around 200W. Why
| would someone buy hardware that's worse than a 2 year old GPU?
| Tenoke wrote:
| This is from the company that previously brought you 'No GeForce
| in data centers'.
| serverholic wrote:
| Wow nVidia really needs some serious competition.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Aside from AMD, there really isn't anyone competing on high-end
| mass market PC GPUs. Intel is making some moves, but nothing
| has been released yet.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-hpg-graphics-unve...
| zokier wrote:
| It's tsmc if anyone who needs competition. Without solving the
| supply side, its unlikely that the situation will improve
| meaningfully for the consumer.
| TomVDB wrote:
| Indeed. We can only hope that AMD implements a similar
| slowdown.
| serverholic wrote:
| Why shouldn't people be allowed to use their GPUs how they
| want?
| TomVDB wrote:
| Why shouldn't companies be allowed to do product
| segmentation?
|
| Limiting mining performance on a consumer GPU is no
| different than limiting certain professional or machine
| learning specific performance features.
| serverholic wrote:
| This isn't about product segmentation. They're
| artificially neutering their product.
|
| It's perfectly fine to offer a different product that's
| designed for better performance but to artificially limit
| product A so that people are forced to buy product B
| (that's probably more expensive) is messed up.
| TomVDB wrote:
| Microsoft designed Office with professional features, but
| they artificially neuter the Home version with a compile
| switch.
|
| This is no different.
|
| As long as you know what you're paying for, segmentation
| is fine. It allows consumers to pay for what they need.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| In Germany, NVIDIA quotes 519 EUR as the starting price for the
| RTX 3070 series. Unfortunately, the cards are sold out almost
| everywhere and the few sites that accept back-orders list them
| for almost 1.000 EUR now, which is crazy. So Kudos to them for
| doing this, as the crypto craze seems to heat up there's no end
| in sight for miners buying up GPUs and NVIDIA risks angering a
| lot of regular people that weren't able to buy a new graphics
| card for almost 6 months now.
|
| That said I'm not sure how effective this measure will be as in
| my understanding all that miners need to do in order to
| circumvent this throttling is avoid downloading the newest NVIDIA
| drivers (?). In addition, I'm sure miners will quickly come up
| with a crack that renders the throttling moot, so not sure if
| this will fix the supply side. Offering specific hardware to
| miners that doesn't compete with that for gamers seems to be a
| better solution, but again if NVIDIA isn't able to satisfy the
| demand for such hardware miners will keep buying regular GPUs and
| try to circumvent the software throttling.
| Tenoke wrote:
| > So Kudos to them for doing this
|
| I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of
| this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people
| don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is
| there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data
| centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060
| would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
| TomVDB wrote:
| > I'd rather they have scaled up the demand.
|
| There are car factories shutting down due to lack of chips.
| The silicon for the systems that I work on has its lead times
| increased from the customary <30 to 50 weeks. The supply
| issues is worldwide, for all fabless semiconductor issues.
|
| How do you suggest they scale up demand short of building
| their own fabs? (Which I hope you aren't suggesting...)
| Klwohu wrote:
| Building more fabs is the only sustainable solution. Demand
| is higher than supply, and miners will just use older
| drivers or figure out a workaround pretty quickly, unless
| the new mining cards are substantially cheaper yet just as
| fast as the "gaming" GPUs.
| TomVDB wrote:
| Building more fabs is the general solution to the demand
| in silicon. And that's happening.
|
| But in the context of "I'd rather they have scaled up the
| demand", where "they' is Nvidia (or almost any other
| fabless semiconductor company), it's not a solution
| because it's impossible for them to build fabs or to
| foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was
| caused by COVID-19.
| flixic wrote:
| Fab equipment is also massively back-ordered.
| protoman3000 wrote:
| This doesn't change anything, as the additional yield by reusing
| binned chips is not enough to meet inelastic demand from miners.
| They will buy anything
| TwoNineA wrote:
| Yup, there are laptop mining farms in China. Anything with 30?0
| GPU in it is instant buy for them.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This won't have an effect on any other workloads?
|
| (I am an ignorant layperson on this topic.)
| Thaxll wrote:
| Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware
| impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation.
| Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD /
| NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800.
|
| On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on
| the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have
| a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power
| consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not
| think about that.
| tromp wrote:
| We did think about it but wanted both the simplest possible
| consensus model and the widest possible distribution of coins,
| which led us to Proof of Work (geared to lower-power ASICs) and
| fixed block reward. Proof of Stake is much more complicated, is
| subjective, and doesn't provide for coin distribution.
| jki275 wrote:
| Proof of stake is a solved problem, has a fixed block reward,
| has no ASICS or need for them, is no more complicated, is not
| in anyway subjective, and distributes coins just fine as both
| ADA and XTZ are doing right now.
| shawnz wrote:
| They are correct that proof-of-stake doesn't solve the
| initial wealth distribution problem. ADA and XTZ solve it
| by pre-mining the coins.
|
| Ethereum is instead solving it by having an initial proof-
| of-work period and then moving to proof-of-stake after some
| amount of mining and wealth distribution has already
| happened.
| jki275 wrote:
| That's not what they said. They said POS can't distribute
| coins, which is not accurate.
|
| ADA and XTZ did pre-mine their initial distribution, and
| now they distribute coins through stake rewards.
| tromp wrote:
| That's not distribution. That's just letting every owner
| maintain their share of the pie by staking.
| jki275 wrote:
| You can argue whatever you want, it's distributing coins
| to the people who secure the network.
| sabalaba wrote:
| The CBECI tool estimates that bitcoin consumes about 15.24
| gigawatts.
|
| There are approximately 2 million employees working at FDIC
| insured banks in the United States.[2] There are approximately
| 330 million people in the United States.[3] United States food
| production uses about 10 quadrillion BTUs per year (about 332
| gigawatts = [10 quadrillion BTU / (365 _24_ 60 _60) sec to
| gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW. That's
| approximately 1 kilowatt per person in the United States. There
| are probably some good arguments about exports etc but we will
| hold that aside for now. In 2019, total U.S. primary energy
| consumption per person (or per capita consumption) was about
| 305 million British thermal units (Btu).[5] = 305 million btu /
| (365_24 _60_ 60) sec = 10kW. So, we get around 11kW per person
| for the total food and primary energy consumption rate.
|
| 11kW / person * 2 million people = 22 gigawatts
|
| So, we come to the conclusion that if you look at the people
| employed by FDIC insured banks in the United States alone, they
| have a larger impact on the environment than bitcoin. If my
| calculations are correct, maybe we don't need this complaint to
| be the same first post in every thread on crypto.
|
| Maybe I'm missing something or have done an incorrect
| calculation, if so, please point it out.
|
| [1] https://www.cbeci.org
|
| [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/193286/number-of-
| employe...
|
| [3] https://www.census.gov/popclock/
|
| [4] https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-
| pro...
|
| [5] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1
| andosa wrote:
| How many people work on Bitcoin (mining, exchanges like
| Coinbase etc)? What's the number of transactions (money
| transfers, loans etc) per employee in banking vs Bitcoin
| ecosystem?
| jbob2000 wrote:
| So Bitcoin is a weight in addition to all the banking weight?
|
| We're running two banking systems right now. It's inefficient
| and stupid.
| mam2 wrote:
| bitcoin fans will agree with you and say we should remove
| traditional banks ^^
| beefield wrote:
| You miss the fact that what bitcoin does is a tiny fraction
| of what banks do.
|
| I mean, how do you do for example mortgages or corporate
| finance with bitcoin - without hiring all the people and
| using all the resources current financial system does?
|
| Frankly, more proper comparison would be the resource
| consumption of using gold in the financial system.
| tzs wrote:
| You are comparing (baseline US power use/person x number of
| people working at banks) to (power consumed to do the
| computations to operate the bitcoin blockchain).
|
| I fail to see how this is relevant to the question of how
| bitcoin compares to the banking system as a system for
| storing and transferring money from an energy perspective.
|
| The relevant comparison would be to compare the costs of
| doing a similar volume of similar operations using bitcoin
| and the bank system.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| I feel so lucky to buy RTX 2060 two years ago. It's still a
| good card if you're not doing 4K gaming, and right now it costs
| more than when I bought it.
| edem wrote:
| Same here. I wanted to put together a computer for a friend
| and I just bumped into these *insane* prices.
| macNchz wrote:
| When I started building a computer and realized these new
| cards were going to be unobtainium last fall, I bought a used
| 1080ti instead. Despite being older it still holds its own
| against newer cards. Lacking RT and DLSS features (which
| didn't matter much to me), it was reselling at a sizeable
| discount vs comparable used 20x0 cards.
|
| Five months later I still have my eBay searches saved, and
| the exact model I bought is now regularly selling for 40+%
| more than it cost me. There's one right now with a few hours
| left on the clock, currently going for 50% more than I paid,
| with 75 watchers and 51 bids. It's wild.
| CraigJPerry wrote:
| Not to take a side in this fight but i find the counter
| argument about the environmental cost of regular currencies
| interesting.
|
| How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions
| vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That's a whole lot of
| data centres.
|
| I'm not persuaded that we can put costs like legal (or even
| military) protection under just the dollar column - if you
| steal my $CO2COIN i can leverage the legal system to pursue
| you.
| asah wrote:
| not to mention the humans involved in clearing dollar
| transactions...
| namdnay wrote:
| > How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar
| transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That's a
| whole lot of data centres.
|
| About 40000 times less I think? That's the figure I saw for a
| SEPA transfer or Mastercard transaction vs the bitcoin
| equivalent
| notRobot wrote:
| Source?
| patrickaljord wrote:
| The dollar is backed by the petro-dollar, the fact that
| Saudi Arabia and friends only accept dollars when selling
| oil is one of the reason the dollar is strong. When you
| factor in that the US military protects the petro-dollar
| while at the same time being the biggest consumer on earth
| of oil, it starts adding up. Europe and therefore the Euro
| is also protected by the US army. All of a sudden, your
| fiat's energy consumption is probably much bigger than
| bitcoin ever will be.
| namdnay wrote:
| The dollar being strong or not doesn't change the fact
| that a transaction in _any_ currency is several orders of
| magnitude more energy-efficient than with bitcoin.
| DennisP wrote:
| It's not like we'd stop protecting our oil supply if we
| converted to Bitcoin. We'd still need oil for cars and
| planes and so on. If we manage to stop using oil, we
| won't need the military to protect it anymore, even if we
| haven't converted to Bitcoin.
|
| So I don't think we can lay the military's oil
| consumption at fiat's feet.
| jki275 wrote:
| The vast majority of BTC mining is done in facilities that
| are colocated with hydro dams in China, so the CO2 emission
| is not what you might expect just hearing the number of KWH
| being used.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| You think China is in the habit of building hydroelectric
| plants in places where no one needs electricity?
|
| Also, a minute with Wikipedia and a calculator will show
| you that transmission losses for the longest possible
| straight distance in China are <5%.
| jki275 wrote:
| I think that the bitcoin mining companies that run in
| China have a pretty good handle on how to get very low
| cost electricity, and hydro doesn't produce the CO2
| emissions you're so concerned about.
|
| So what's your point?
| IshKebab wrote:
| His point is that crypto mining isn't using some carbon
| neutral electricity that was just lying around unused. If
| crypto minors didn't exist that hydro electricity would
| have been used for something useful. So by mining crypto
| _unless you actually build extra hydro power stations_
| for them you are 100% adding to CO2 emissions.
| iexplainbtc wrote:
| The environmental impact of "Proof of Work" could have been a
| problem but the inventors did think about that and realized
| that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable
| resources that would otherwise be untapped. As usual the
| ethical burden should be on the user of the tool, not the tool
| itself.
|
| In the long run miners who do not use untapped (cheaper)
| renewables are going to be priced out, it just takes some time.
| That said other protocols much less computationally intensive,
| such as "Proof of Stake", are starting to be tested.
|
| Anyhow, good idea NVIDIA!
| [deleted]
| hobofan wrote:
| > the inventors did think about that and realized that mining
| can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources
|
| So where exactly did you read that in the Bitcoin whitepaper?
| Because everything else is just guessing.
| iexplainbtc wrote:
| Proof of work was not invented (or envisioned to be used
| with digital currencies) by Satoshi. It's been around since
| 1993. I can't really find a reference to prove what I
| claimed so I would agree I might have been misled to think
| that. But the truth is that it doesn't matter whether it
| was taken into account or not, what matters is that you can
| mine Bitcoin (or do any PoW) using untapped renewable
| resources (which is why big mining operations are based in
| places with abundant geothermal/hydropower and very little,
| if any, population) but you wouldn't be able to do much
| else in those places.
| magna7 wrote:
| Ethereum has been designed from the very start to switch from
| PoW (mining) to PoS (validating) and Phase 0 of that transition
| has already started.
| TomVDB wrote:
| I remember that argument being made 2 years ago during the
| last mining craze.
|
| Given the existing investment in Ethereum HW, it almost seems
| like it's just a carrot to deflect criticism about power
| consumption, but not something that will actually happen.
| DennisP wrote:
| It's already running with $5 billion in ETH deposited.
| It'll take some more time before migrating the legacy
| chain, but the really hard part is live. There was nothing
| like that two years ago.
| ppf wrote:
| You mean "the really easy part"? The Beacon Chain doesn't
| do much at all. Last time I checked, they hadn't even got
| a design for how contract code would be executed in Eth
| 2.0.
| serverholic wrote:
| This is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that
| virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is
| unwilling to innovate is wrong.
| striking wrote:
| When?
| DennisP wrote:
| Beacon chain is live with over $5 billion in ETH deposited
| so far, and has been running flawlessly since its December
| 1 launch. There are minor tweaks coming this summer. A few
| months after that, if everything still looks good, they'll
| migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on
| Ethereum will end.
|
| The migration is a decent amount of work but it's not the
| difficult research task that the beacon chain was. Someone
| did a proof-of-concept in about a day, though the exact
| plan has changed since then.
| viraptor wrote:
| > they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-
| work on Ethereum will end.
|
| Likely closer to: they'll create a mirror on the new
| chain and a group of unknown size will keep ETH 1 fork
| alive.
| serverholic wrote:
| Literally as we speak. It's in production, but the process
| of deprecating proof-of-work will still take a couple
| years.
| jki275 wrote:
| Never.
|
| They've been "moving to proof of stake" for something like
| three years.
|
| The miners are making money off of them not moving to proof
| of stake. The miners stop making money when they move to
| proof of stake. The only people who can actually allow the
| chain to move to proof of stake are the miners.
|
| Meanwhile, xtz and ada have been proof of stake since their
| inception, 3+ years already for both.
| DennisP wrote:
| There is nothing the miners can do to stop the migration,
| any more than they can stop you from making your own fork
| of Ethereum and convincing your friends to run it.
|
| The miners _can_ keep running the legacy version, and try
| to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given
| the massive community support for PoS, they 're not
| likely to be very successful.
| hobofan wrote:
| I mean I'm also disappointed by the slow pace of the
| transition, but they are clearly making progress towards
| it.
|
| They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with
| a much too optimistic timeline. In the meantime a lot of
| companies working towards that have collapsed or
| refocused on other efforts, delaying the whole
| transition. It will probably take another ~3 years (my
| personal estimate) until the transition is reasonably
| finished and core parts of the ecosystems have migrated,
| but at least it's moving into the right direction.
| bhaak wrote:
| > They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years,
| with a much too optimistic timeline.
|
| PoS has always been on the roadmap even before their ICO.
| But yes, with a MUCH more optimistic timeline.
| hobofan wrote:
| Yes, but back then nothing more than the first few ideas
| towards their PoS existed IIRC.
|
| 2-3 years ago is when the Casper FFG paper was published
| and subsequently the architecture of Ethereum 2.0 (and
| the concrete 3-phase roadmap towards it) were published.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It's a continuous process that is already in progress and
| aimed at (mostly) completing in 2022. For what is worth,
| ETH PoS alternatives are also gaining a lot of ground in
| the mean time.
| lima wrote:
| The beacon chain - the first step in the transition - has
| already launched: https://beaconcha.in/
| jiofih wrote:
| Wait, haven't they been moving since 2018?
| moonbug wrote:
| yeah, next year in Jerusalem.
| lima wrote:
| > _On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain
| wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in
| 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus
| increasing power consumption. When people designed those
| currency they def did not think about that._
|
| And they probably didn't factor in ASIC miners and large mining
| pools, either. Proof of Work is legacy technology at this
| point, it's a good thing Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake
| along with most of the ecosystem.
| krsdcbl wrote:
| I don't quite get why everyone seems to get onto the
| environment train with crypto but seem to have had no issues
| with gold
| bhaak wrote:
| _Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, famously dismissed
| gold in a speech given at Harvard in 1998. He said: "It gets
| dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt
| it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to
| stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching
| from Mars would be scratching their head."_
|
| It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it
| were cheaper it would be used a lot more for technological
| devices.
|
| I can't wait until asteroid mining crashes the gold price and
| hopefully puts an end to the ecological disaster that is gold
| mining.
| [deleted]
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| The same about diamonds.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| That's a false dichotomy.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Because we don't have any alternative to gold.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| As far as I know (last time I googled it) if speculation
| was removed and hoarding, gold would be worth about $100 an
| ounce for the things we need it for.
|
| So yes we do have alternatives to gold. Things such as
| Bitcoin and crypto, which keep going up in value, while
| gold speculation has stagnated and is even going down.
| Weakening dollar and massive debts due to the pandemic
| should mean gold skyrockets, but people are buying the
| alternatives. It looks grim for gold. Tesla didn't buy
| gold, they bought Bitcoin.
| strangeattractr wrote:
| What would be the price of BTC if speculation and
| hoarding was removed?
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "When people designed those currency they def did not think
| about that."_
|
| They did think about it, and decided that libertarian fantasies
| outweigh environmental impact.
|
| Horrible waste is an explicit design choice in the Bitcoin
| school of cryptocurrencies.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I'm trying to imagine what you think went through the mind of
| Satoshi Nakamoto. Do you imagine he just woke up one day and
| said "You know what I like? Carbon emissions! For no reason
| but carbon emissions! Somehow, I benefit from carbon
| emissions!". I really just don't think that's how it panned
| out.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| It seems like Ethereum 2.0 style proof of stake taking off could
| really limit a lot of the harms with crypto mining.
| mikkelam wrote:
| Yeah this definitely seems weirdly late for nvidia to enter.
| Mining is about to die.
| corebuffer wrote:
| > We're limiting the hash rate of GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs so
| they're less desirable to miners and launching NVIDIA CMP for
| professional mining.
|
| Limiting to justify a new product. Like they do to fp64 rates and
| virtualization support.
|
| >RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific
| attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and
| limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by
| around 50 percent.
|
| Nice, one more reason to get the open source driver moving.
|
| edit: formatting
| dannyw wrote:
| I'm a miner (7x3070, 2x3080, 1x3090) and I support this nerf. The
| reason is because I am also a gamer, and it's always regrettable
| that cryptocurrency mining has made gaming cards out of reach.
| vosper wrote:
| Are you making a profit mining? Or is it more of a "supporting
| the network" kind of thing?
| dannyw wrote:
| I'm projected to make a generous profit, but that actually
| depends on the continued Ethereum price.
| 0xfaded wrote:
| Out of curiosity how did you get those cards? Did you manage to
| buy them at retail or is the economics such that the miners are
| willing to pay the scalper premium?
| dannyw wrote:
| I bought them through a IT reseller, at more or less retail
| price around here.
| patriksvensson wrote:
| Honest question: Have you calculated your profits now VS
| what your profits would have been if those same $$
| purchased the cryptocurrency of your choice on the day you
| bought the cards instead? Which would have been more
| profitable (taking selling the equipment after into
| consideration as well).
| hahahahe wrote:
| This is a joke right? This also confirms their figure (5-10%) for
| crypto mining was a blatant lie.
| dang wrote:
| A related article is https://wccftech.com/nvidia-launches-
| cmp-30hx-40hx-50hx-and-...
|
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180342, but we merged
| the threads)
| arsome wrote:
| Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do
| it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners
| are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing
| firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc
| to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to
| jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux
| driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they
| make more profit.
|
| Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game.
| As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this
| is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for
| these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high
| rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon.
|
| Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only"
| cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics
| too... this is no exception.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
| jsheard wrote:
| Someone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to
| the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on
| pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was
| artificially reduced.
|
| https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu...
|
| It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some
| heuristic decides that mining is happening. There's speculation
| that the limiter might actually live in the cards VBIOS, which
| is much harder to modify than the driver as newer Nvidia cards
| require a signed VBIOS to boot.
| hinoki wrote:
| So we'll see mod chips for GPUs soon?
| dheera wrote:
| Maybe it's time to create an adversarial network that can
| figure out how to mine on the GPU without causing it to halve
| the hash rate, train that network on an NVIDIA GPU, and shove
| it to them.
| tus89 wrote:
| Is it even in theory possible to produce silicon that does not
| perform well on crypto operations while allows 3D to run at
| full speed? Or do they simply rely on the same underlying
| operations?
| leetcrew wrote:
| wouldn't hashing be mostly int operations, while 3D graphics
| would be FP32? I dunno if they still do this, but nvidia used
| to artificially limit the rate for other float widths on
| geforce parts to segment the market.
| panpanna wrote:
| Will this work?
|
| One "excuse" miner had for buying GPUs was that they could sell
| them 6-12 months to gamers.
| supernes wrote:
| Gimping their products through software is very on-brand for
| NVIDIA, gotta admit.
| eugene3306 wrote:
| but how will it affect ML applications?
| ur-whale wrote:
| We sell you this product, but we will make damn sure to decide
| what you can and can't do with it and will therefore throttle its
| abilities.
|
| Linus was absolutely correct.
| dekken_ wrote:
| This should be illegal
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Why? You can always make your own GPU.
| rrss wrote:
| A product performs worse at some stuff than it might have in a
| hypothetical reality, and it says so on the box. What should be
| illegal about this, and why?
| dekken_ wrote:
| I suppose I'm free to not buy it.
|
| As for a reason, why should they be able to dictate what the
| hardware they release is used for?
| kcg wrote:
| I think people are missing the fact that the 3060 that NVIDIA is
| halving the hash rate on is not yet released. It is expected at
| the end of this month and different than the already-in-market
| 3060 Ti.
|
| The 3060 Ti was already NVIDIA's mining efficiency leader (per W
| and per $). I think the 3060 would be in the same ballpark, if
| not better, which I assume is why NVIDIA is doing this.
|
| Presumably they will do nothing to the existing cards (in part
| because it would solve very little if you could just use old
| drivers to get the unthrottled MH/s).
| dblooman wrote:
| Ordered a 3080 Card 1 hour after launch months ago, it arrived
| last week, never waited for a PC component of this cost for this
| long
| unanswered wrote:
| A lot of comments are referring to hardware freedom to run what
| you want but I don't see anywhere in the article saying that you
| can't run whatever you want to on this hardware. It's just going
| to pretend to be slower hardware, not cut off capabilities. It
| seems entirely within Nvidia's moral rights to release a product
| that is not the _best possible_ of all conceivable products; that
| 's literally the point of the budget gpus anyway!
|
| The behavior on display in this thread is highly reminiscent of
| the behavior of people demanding that open source authors do free
| work for them.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The issue seems to be that it's the driver doing the halving,
| not the hardware itself, which is a little odd. Given the large
| profitability, anyone who actually buys 3060's for mining will
| hack the driver/pay for a hacked driver that removes this
| limitation.
|
| > RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific
| attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and
| limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by
| around 50 percent.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| So they're hamstringing normal cards (to protect gamers of
| course!) and releasing a "new" card without the hamstring at a
| higher price and we're to believe this is simply to protect
| gamers and not a money grab?
| namdnay wrote:
| It's a seller's market at the moment, so an easier "cash grab"
| would just be to increase the price of the base card to the
| higher price.
|
| No, I think the belief is that they need to keep at least a
| minimal base of support among gamers and developers, for when
| the inevitable crypto crash comes and they need to go back to
| their original customer base
| rrss wrote:
| Wouldn't the easy money grab be to just set MSRP for all cards
| way higher ($5k?) while the demand is ~infinite?
| shawnz wrote:
| > Wouldn't the easy money grab be to just set MSRP for all
| cards way higher
|
| But then how do they capture the "just gamers"? They would
| have to additionally sell a neutered card just for them, and
| that is exactly what they are doing here
| bronco21016 wrote:
| It seems like manufacturers are now resorting to artificial means
| to curb demand, rather than increasing supply.
|
| What are the practical reasons supply hasn't kept up? Obviously,
| a fab is expensive but they have to be just printing money with
| these things in the current market. This really goes across the
| board with semiconductors as CPU supply issues are outrageous
| right now as well. Why aren't more fabs being built? Is this just
| plain and simple greed?
| dannyw wrote:
| The lead times for the machines used in fabs are in the years.
| smcleod wrote:
| Is it just me or does the model naming seem misleading - 30HX has
| a hash rate of 26MH.
| sneak wrote:
| It's a real shame that companies think that they should be the
| ones dictating how you use a piece of hardware you bought from
| them.
|
| It's a further shame that they would _artificially hinder_ their
| hardware for such purposes.
|
| I will avoid nvidia in the future as a result of this sort of
| attitude, and I don't even mine cryptocurrency. I have no dog in
| this race other than a philosophical one.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| it is annoying they limit their drivers this way but ultimately
| this is in response to their core customers' frustrations.
| Nvidia is trying to segment their products so that the video
| game market can get their cards without dealing with the boom
| and bust cycle of cryptomining.
|
| I somehow doubt these drivers will be enough to stop it,
| however.
| dannyw wrote:
| Gimp the memory bandwidth, that'll do it.
| glennpratt wrote:
| That will also hurt games. It's a huge differentiator
| between integrated GPUs and dedicated.
| thefz wrote:
| The real shame is allowing scalpers to run their stock dry and
| generating this problem.
| sneak wrote:
| Scalpers do not alter supply _or_ demand.
|
| What, to you, is the difference between a scalper and a
| dealer?
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| It's easy to speak philosophically when you have no dog in the
| race. It's harder when you need a GPU for other tasks and have
| to pay the crypto tax.
| sneak wrote:
| There is no "crypto tax", just supply and demand. I recently
| bought a NIB 3090 (secondhand, because nvidia are in denial
| of reality apparently) for gaming and video production.
| xtracto wrote:
| No. They (nvidia or someone else) should be building tons and
| tons of cards for the existing demand. I just cant understand
| why isnt someone salivating at such market inefficiency.
| dahart wrote:
| They did exactly that just 3 years ago when bitcoin was
| hot, and (when bitcoin crashed) ended up with an oversupply
| of GTX cards that delayed Turing sales and tanked the stock
| for a while. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-
| cryptocurrency-earn...
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Doesn't really make sense to blame Turing's sales on this
| when it was also a pretty bad generation in general
| (price hikes, poor performance, RTX gimmick turned out to
| be a flop).
| dixego wrote:
| A thought just occurred to me: is there an upper limit to
| how much computing power (and energy) cryptocurrency mining
| can reasonably use? Or could all computer hardware be
| repurposed to mine crypto and there would still be demand
| for more hardware?
| unmasked_poker wrote:
| Usually the amount of crypto that can be mined in a given
| time frame is limited. So you could buy more hardware,
| but it would not be profitable.
| rrss wrote:
| because building 8nm semiconductor fabs is slightly harder
| than setting up a lemonade stand.
| blibble wrote:
| the vast majority of their customers will happily give up
| crypto-mining for the chance to buy a card at a reasonable
| price
|
| (... assuming the miners can't trivially patch to the drivers
| to re-enable the functionality)
| vsareto wrote:
| Nvidia is in a "tough" spot. If they increased GPU prices to
| take advantage of miner demand, they could be rich but lose the
| gaming segment. If they keep the price accessible for gaming,
| then they end up dealing with scalpers and low availability
| which, fair or not, impacts their brand. This is really an
| attempt to get the miners to buy something else so they can
| have both market segments.
| sneak wrote:
| Segmentation has always left a bad taste in my mouth. I had
| to buy my 3090 (for gaming and video production) secondhand
| NIB because nvidia was playing dumb with prices.
|
| And don't get me started on DVD region locks.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Support working hardware in the future (AMD)
| christkv wrote:
| 1.2.3 Class action lawsuit.
| namdnay wrote:
| Class action lawsuit relative to a product that isn't sold yet?
|
| What next, class action lawsuit against Apple when they
| announce the next iphone won't have any external ports?
| moralestapia wrote:
| I agree GP's argument is a bit exaggerated, but this would be
| more akin to Apple announcing "we will no longer let you play
| music from XXX". IANAL but maybe there's grounds for a
| lawsuit on that.
| christkv wrote:
| Duh for some reason I already thought it was on the market.
| Yeah as long as it's clearly stated I imagine its fine. I
| guess the 3080 and 3070 will become even more premium.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| GPU supply is a huge problem, but this is a massively problematic
| solution. It likely won't even work; if it can be done w/
| firmware, it will be reversed by firmware patches. I've been all
| through GPU firmware flashes in a quest to get both NVIDIA and
| AMD cards passed through to VMs w/ QEMU on Unraid, and I feel
| like this could be easily circumvented based on that experience.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > I've been all through GPU firmware flashes in a quest to get
| both NVIDIA and AMD cards passed through to VMs w/ QEMU on
| Unraid
|
| I you refer to the infamous Error 43 on Nvidia, it can be
| worked around by setting some QEMU flags.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| This is a terrible move.
|
| This is also a fantastic move.
|
| Personally I am very very VERY much okay with this. This will
| keep consumer cards in correct demand. And if miners want to
| throw away money for mining, they can.
|
| People talking of modding, its a high effort and high risk.
| Again, I'm okay with that. The cost of modding will likely be the
| same as just buying a specialized card. Overall mining is a
| horrible environmental impact.
| ENOTTY wrote:
| there's going to be a brisk market in reverse engineering the
| drivers and getting around this
|
| "RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific
| attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and
| limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by
| around 50 percent."
| glsdfgkjsklfj wrote:
| nvidia going to learn a lesson.
|
| first, this is very obviously because they noticed cloud
| operators are offering these RTX cards and they do not have a
| 10x-the-price-enteprise-quadroRTX yet.
|
| what they think will happen:
|
| they will blame miners for their production issues, make RTX
| cards less attractive for cloud operators, sell a truck load of
| quadro cards to them while offloading RTX cards to actual gamers
| who then generate revenue in other ways (they do not have those
| free game bundles deals for nothing)
|
| What will happen:
|
| nerf cards, lose sales for gamers and ML startups.
|
| impact production lines even more with multiple models, lose
| sales for cloud operators.
|
| cause actual miners (not their strawman 'oh the prices are up'
| for their production issues) to either reverse engineer the
| drivers, or just keep the old drivers running and buying the now-
| cheaper RTX cards, compounding the production capacity.
|
| game studios that started to use those features to speed up crowd
| AI etc will just slap a "AMD Recommended" on their games.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Do you have a source on game studios using hashing for crowd
| AI?
| notum wrote:
| I hate that I wasn't able to get a 30x series because miners
| grabbed them. I hate that my preorder was canceled by the
| supplier on the day it was supposed to ship, just because a farm
| had a better price.
|
| But guess what Nvidia? I no longer want your products. As much as
| I may dislike the fact crypto is affecting gaming (rendering,
| machine learning...) I can't help but ask: Who in the holy F are
| you to tell me what to do with my product?
|
| I take it back actually, I'll buy one to use instead of toilet
| paper. Fix THAT with a bios update.
| DennisP wrote:
| It's probably not even necessary. They're also introducing a
| card that removes everything not needed for mining. Unless
| they're overpricing that card, it will be more cost-effective
| for miners and outcompete the gamer cards.
| swalls wrote:
| This ignores the fact that cryptominers sell their old cards
| on to gamers, at a value which, due to the shortage, is
| potentially even higher than what they bought it at. The only
| way out I see is flooding the market or a crypto crash.
| thefz wrote:
| > Who in the holy F are you to tell me what to do with my
| product?
|
| It is the same with hardware video encode, RTX cards are locked
| up to 2x streams at maximum while they are in most cases
| capable of many, many more (i.e. Plex transcodes). Not that
| this is an issue though, since it's a driver lock with a
| working fix.
| jki275 wrote:
| I suspect there will be a bios fix for this lock about a day
| after they're released. Unless they put this in hardware
| somehow, it's not going to be effective.
|
| And, they mention the ETH algorithm specifically is what they
| detect -- there are a bunch of other algorithms that aren't
| ETH that are profitable to mine.
| notum wrote:
| Christ I had no idea. I beg to differ, it's a HUGE issue.
| my123 wrote:
| Same thing for ECC being disabled on customer GPUs.
|
| And ECC disabled on customer Intel CPUs and AMD Ryzen APUs.
| (AMD is quite sneaky there, non-Pro CPUs have ECC but non-
| Pro APUs don't). Market segmentation is a usual thing on
| the computer market.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Nvidia uses boot-chain security to prohibit third-party drivers
| from using their GPUs - if you don't use Nvidia's own power-
| management blob, the card will lock itself to the lowest thermal
| bucket and highest fan speed until you reset it. It's arguably
| why they're able to segment their GPUs by application so
| effectively.
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