[HN Gopher] Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate
___________________________________________________________________
Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate
Author : stambros
Score : 247 points
Date : 2021-02-19 12:03 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| victor9000 wrote:
| Is there any way to get these cards at MSRP? Why can't I just
| pre-order one from nvidia and have it shipped when it becomes
| available?
| WalterGR wrote:
| Discussed 2 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260
|
| Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in
| half (nvidia.com) 454 points by bcatanzaro 2 days ago | flag |
| hide | past | favorite | 731 comments
|
| There are 30-ish more submissions here:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=1&prefix=tru...
| lwhi wrote:
| I wonder if open source drivers will eventually circumvent this
| limit?
| Jonnax wrote:
| Nvidia PR [1] has stated that it's a bios level feature. And
| their bioses require signatures.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/bdelrizzo/status/1362619264423747590?s=2...
| lwhi wrote:
| I remember years ago (we're talking 20 years), it was
| possible to circumvent chip level batching between Nvidia
| Geforce and Quadro.
|
| Geforce was the consumer range, and Quadro was used for
| workstation graphics.
|
| They both used the same chip .. but a resistor on the board
| gave the driver an indication of which range the card
| belonged to.
| phire wrote:
| They have gotten somewhat better at chip security since
| then.
|
| I remember AMDs Phenom tri-core CPUs being unlockable to
| quad-core 12 years ago, but nothing really since.
| lasagnaphil wrote:
| Sadly, the last time I checked the benchmark for the nouveau
| project (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nv
| idia-n...), it wasn't even close to being "usable" in terms of
| performance (need to expect about 10x slowups in games).
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| It's because you need to load firmware on the gpu to make it
| run fast and that firmware is illegal to redistribute and
| impossible to reimplement since it's signed. There is nothing
| the nouveau project can do short of finding an exploit in the
| cards crypto.
| joombaga wrote:
| I was curious if the mining algorithms could be tweaked to
| avoid detection.
| 15155 wrote:
| Unless they decide to add more algorithms after the fact, I'd
| be very surprised and outraged if this detected anything
| other than Dagger-Hashimoto via its memory access pattern.
| tsujamin wrote:
| Curious to see how ethereum participants react to this. Will it
| just become a race to defeat nvidia's mining-detection logic in
| order to up the available supply of cards?
|
| (caveat: don't know enough about contemporary ethereum to know
| how this works with PoS)
| lmilcin wrote:
| I am happy with this kind of heavy handed move for once if this
| is intended to reduce demand for _graphics_ products for their
| other uses and make them available for people who intend to use
| them for work and gaming.
|
| Maybe I will finally be able to afford top of the line GPU.
|
| I mean, bitcoin miners can still pay high prices if they want but
| finally there will be GPU that will not be encumbered by mining
| craze.
| qqii wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260
|
| Also on reddit: (Linus from Linus Tech Tip's Take, I'd
| reccomended watching this one)
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/locpyb/nvidia_pre...
|
| (Initial Article)
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/lmnpag/geforce_is...
|
| (Clarification that the restrictions in driver+firmware)
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/lnf78f/nvidia_gef...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/lnrgdc/cryptomini...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/lng4q4/nvidia_has...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/lmqd56/nvidia_ner...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/lmom3w/nvidia_is_...
|
| (Initial Leak)
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/lmrsrj/zotac_gefo...
| jleahy wrote:
| I'm guessing they are going to try and raise the prices and
| create a new market segment. Just as they have separated
| datacenter GPUs, increased the price massively (coming up to a
| factor of 10x) and then tried to use a stick to prevent the use
| of desktop GPUs for datacenter work (eg. the licensing change).
|
| Unfortunately (for their bottom line) it probably won't work, if
| the restriction is in the driver then someone like myself (or
| many other people in HN) will have it patched in a number of
| hours. If it's in the firmware it'll take longer, but it'll be
| done. Unless they've actually fused out integer units on the
| consumer cards, that would be bold.
| cedricgle wrote:
| I can imagine that nowadays you can protect your hardware with
| encryption chip that unlock firmware with public/private keys.
| To break it you will have to remove the chip.
| qqii wrote:
| > According to Bryan Del Rizzo, director of global PR for
| GeForce, more things are working behind the driver.
|
| > According to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing.
| There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060
| silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the
| hash rate limiter."
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/278712/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-a...
|
| I think it's important to look at as the article does - the
| other way around, the CMP lineup will be excellent for their
| bottom line as miners, without competition from gamers and
| others can buy up cards that won't contribute to the seccond
| hand market when the mining boom dies down.
|
| As suggested in the article, silicone would have been allocated
| to mid and low end cards is now allocated to mining only cards
| that have little resale value and won't hurt their bottom line
| when they release the 4XXX series.
| almost wrote:
| Probably not the main reason and may not even be a reason. But
| this seems like it would work as a clever way not to have the
| market flooded with older (but still very capable) graphics cards
| once the value of them in a mining rig stops making sense.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Hacked drivers coming in 3... 2... 1...
| phire wrote:
| It's a bios/firmware level limitation, and the latest GPUs all
| have firmware signing.
|
| Not unbeatable, but it would require a much more involved hack
| than just modifying some drivers. Nvidia have painted a huge
| target on it, so we will see what happens.
| liquidify wrote:
| How exactly can they do this without screwing up a bunch of other
| classes of use cases?
| fortran77 wrote:
| I understand their motives, and as someone who needs GPUs to do
| scientific GPGPU computing, I appreciate the attempt to get more
| availability.
|
| However, I'd always be suspicious of my "crippled" GPU
| radium3d wrote:
| So I want a 3080... I assume this means it will be even harder to
| buy?
| legohead wrote:
| Been trying to build a PC for my daughter for weeks now, waiting
| for just a _half decent_ GPU to become available. You can 't find
| the 16*, 20*, or of course the 30* line of Nvidia available
| anywhere (except overpriced on Ebay), it's nuts.
|
| I'm not in a rush or I'd just buy a prebuilt PC which you can
| still find with these cards, but I wanted to show my daughter how
| to build a PC. Guess it will be a few more months...
| hahahahe wrote:
| I am convinced Nvidia is deeply involved in the crypto space more
| so than they care to admit. I can't wait until Apple matches or
| surpasses Nvidia so we don't have to listen to Jensen's lies
| quarter after quarter about how insignificant crypto mining is to
| their business.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah this is pretty clearly price differentiation. nVidia want
| trying to sell the same product to gamers and to miners but
| miners can afford much higher prices. So they create an
| expensive mining card, and then try and stop miners from using
| the cheap graphics cards.
|
| They've already done it for AI. This is just doing the same
| thing for crypto.
| altcognito wrote:
| Isn't it just so mysterious how they have all these supply
| problems? I wonder why they can't seem to manufacture products!
|
| In all reality, what they are doing is totally normal, I just
| wish they wouldn't lie about it.
| SXX wrote:
| How do you think they can lie as public company? Literally
| everyone is bottlenecked by TSMC right now.
| roblabla wrote:
| Nvidia isn't using TSMC for any of their current products,
| they're using Samsung. They may switch to TSMC for their
| more high-end cards, but I don't think that is the case
| right now.
| volta83 wrote:
| This isn't true. Nvidia is using TSMC right now for all
| of the compute products, e.g., see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere_(microarchitecture)
|
| > TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process for A100
|
| > Custom version of Samsung's 8nm process (8N) for the
| GeForce 30 series[8]
|
| That is, NVIDIA is using both, TSMC and Samsung. Both are
| probably maxed out.
| altcognito wrote:
| Right, so what's their volume on a100s and are they a
| favored mining tool? If so, I think that might be the
| disconnect between what people think nvidia is focused
| on, and what they are focused on.
|
| Plus, I'll point out that a lot of information can be
| hidden by public companies. Amazon was pretty quiet about
| it's growth in sales of AWS as a dominant force for a
| number of years.
| lvass wrote:
| This is just par for the course on closed down hardware. The
| manufacturer decides how you use it, that's how it has always
| been. I'm actually happy about this news, I hope it raises
| awareness for the need of open hardware, it's not like I'd ever
| buy one of these cards when competitors at least have open source
| drivers. Lack of hardware freedom generating electronic waste
| isn't unheard of either.
| dayyan wrote:
| This is horse s h I t.
| nottorp wrote:
| Does that mean they're bringing down the xx60 card price too?
|
| Rabid gamers who MUST have that 1440Hz refresh may be willing to
| pay anything for their space heaters, but there are people who
| play games but aren't willing to spend 1K (or 3K, how far have
| they gone these days?) on a video card.
|
| In other words, is this done to increase sales volume or just
| nvidia's profit?
| gnaman wrote:
| The article clearly states that the hash rate will be limited
| if Ethereum mining algorithm is detected by the driver, not
| otherwise. Gaming use cases will remain the same
| nottorp wrote:
| And will that make cards cheaper? I'm not asking about the
| technical details, just about what they want me to pay...
| Netcob wrote:
| It's done so that when the crypto bubble bursts again, the
| market isn't flooded with used graphics cards.
|
| In 2017 everyone was buying GTX 10XX cards, on one hand because
| they actually represented a good improvement over the last
| generation for a change, but mostly due to the crypto bubble.
| Which then burst at the beginning of 2018.
|
| Then RTX 20XX came along, which actually represented a slight
| drop in price/performance if you don't count the raytracing/AI
| cores (which to this day hardly matter in gaming), while used
| GTX 10XX cards were still everywhere.
|
| So now nvidia wants to make sure cards used for crypto go
| straight to the landfill after the current bubble bursts.
| michaelt wrote:
| And at the same time, it lets them cut out the scalpers and
| sell straight to the miners who'll pay twice the price for a
| card - without the price-gouging upsetting gamers.
| dahart wrote:
| > is this done to increase sales volume or just nvidia's
| profit?
|
| What if it's neither? Nvidia tried increasing production of
| 1070s and 1080s three years ago to meet bitcoin demand, and it
| bit them hard when the bitcoin bubble suddenly popped. They got
| stuck with an oversupply of cards right when Turing was
| launching, it ate into sales and the stock dropped in half
| overnight. Meanwhile their customer base of gamers were pissed
| because they couldn't get gaming cards. What if they're just
| hedging against another bubble popping, and trying to avoid
| getting killed by it, again?
| asxd wrote:
| Somewhat related, you can still find reasonably priced pre-built
| computers with latest-gen graphics cards. If you're in the market
| for an entirely new computer, this would be the cost-effective
| way to go. The HP Omen is one example (stock is still there from
| 3rd parties, but admittedly limited).
| somehnrdr14726 wrote:
| At some point nvidia would be better off mining with these gpus
| than selling them.
|
| The oddest solution I can think of is gamers lease graphics cards
| at a low low price and nvidia mines on them in the off-hours.
| With a big enough operation they could force all the other miners
| into becoming resellers. It's free, distributed electricity and
| it gets the gamers off their backs.
|
| (While I have your attention, I'm pretty sure proof of work is
| the paperclip maximizer sci fi warned us about.)
| sellyme wrote:
| > The oddest solution I can think of is gamers lease graphics
| cards at a low low price and nvidia mines on them in the off-
| hours.
|
| This would be a complete non-starter in markets with high
| electricity costs or temperatures. Running a GTX 3090 at 100%
| load during the summer where I live would cost $140/month and
| will heat up my room to about 65degC.
| ianhanschen wrote:
| Not a fan of miners disturbing GPU availability and pricing but
| this is a bad move. It's not an engineering move, it's a
| marketing move, and I'm sure the first attempt at doing this will
| come down to something just as shallow like a PCI PID check or
| some resistor strap check. Someone will find it worth the cost to
| make an FPGA based PCIe bridge that responds to the right knocks
| in the right way.
| bserge wrote:
| Not the first time they do this, either. They started limiting
| performance via firmware/software since Fermi iirc. Basically,
| nVidia's GTX and Quadro cards use the same exact chips but the
| latter have additional features and higher performance in
| professional applications.
| sneak wrote:
| I think the EULA also says that you can't use the drivers for
| the non-expensive cards in multitenant/datacenter setups.
| nine_k wrote:
| I suppose they recognize a specific algorithm. They already do
| special-casing for a number of game titles, and have been for a
| long time. Not a problem to match one more pattern, I assume.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| GPU mining is going to become much less attractive this year due
| to Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, right?
|
| If this is the case (perhaps an expert can chime in) - it makes
| sense to limit the hash rate now, to prevent these cards being
| dumped later this year? And to redirect miners towards higher-
| margin products in the meantime, whilst ensuring better supply
| for gamers (who are the actual long-term customers).
| hobofan wrote:
| Next year would be the earliest. That's when phase 3 of the
| Eth2.0 upgrade is planned to happen (though I'd personally add
| another year to that).
| icelancer wrote:
| Agreed. Vitalik time = Valve time. I figure two years, Q1-Q2
| 2023 is most likely.
| jkilpatr wrote:
| The ETH2 'beacon chain' is a meta-chain that's supposed to
| checkpoint a bunch of 'sub chains' for scalability. But they
| have launched it with many big questions unanswered.
|
| What does a 'sub chain' actually look like to interact with?
| How do you coordinate with many of them? All these questions
| have answers in theory, but not answers in solid production
| ready interoperable code.
|
| Furthermore some of these problems like 'how do you store a
| bunch of sub-chains' are questions not even properly answered
| in ETH1 nodes for the much simpler one chain case.
|
| By launching the beacon chain early the organizations
| developing ETH2 can validate and make money while all these
| questions are figured out. This is where the money goes instead
| of the improvement of ETH1 since that's a tragedy of the
| commons as this point.
|
| ETH2 is only worth money if these questions are figured out and
| ETH1 is somehow brought under the beacon chain's governance.
| Exactly how this is to happen... well I haven't even seen
| anything credible on this. Greenfield addition of chains under
| the ETH2 beacon chain is generously described as 'incomplete'
| moving ETH1 under ETH2 is much more challenging and I have not
| seen a plan with any level of detail.
|
| Given that everyone is making bridges to ETH1 now and typical
| development timelines. I would give a medium to high chance
| that ETH2 will miss it's window by a couple of years and
| activity will move to other faster chains that are available
| now and capable of siphoning off traffic from Ethereum using
| bridges until they reach their own critical mass.
|
| If I had to put money on it I would place 'proof of stake
| Ethereum' (defined as ETH1 under the POS beacon chain) more
| than 2 years out.
|
| I could see the sub-chains (greenfield) working by EOY,
| although I wouldn't grant it a high probability.
|
| Also if I had to put money on it I will bet on a halt of the
| Ethereum 1 chain for a time greater than 24 hours within that
| period, due to lack of maintenance on ETH1 nodes and increased
| stress from DeFi activity.
|
| -----
|
| ETH2 is kinda like 5G, yes there is a very real 5G network
| protocol, but in terms of pubic messaging, everything is 5G and
| communicating anything about how it works or when it will be
| available is filled with pitfalls and nuances that are
| difficult for the highly technical, much less the general
| public, to understand.
| reversecss wrote:
| What are your thoughts on eip 1559 and it's impact on mining
| profitability? That is supposedly coming this summer and my
| understanding is that it fixes in place gas fees, and burns
| off some fees that would otherwise go to miners. I'm not sure
| how large of an impact that will make on mining
| profitability, but I was under the assumption that some
| miners were going to pump and dump their cards right before
| they anticipate gpu profitability going down, so they can
| make some scalper money. I was thinking that miners would be
| redistributing their supply in the next 3 months or so.
| derefr wrote:
| IMHO the most important endpoint for ETH2 isn't ETH1 under
| the beacon-chain, _or_ greenfield projects under the beacon
| chain, but rather major projects that have already been in
| development for years, and already had a testnet targeting
| some alternative sub-chain substrate (e.g. Polkadot, Near),
| re-evaluating their alternatives at mainnet launch time, and
| choosing to use ETH2 as their mainnet substrate chain
| instead.
|
| That could create a lot of momentum/adoption for ETH2, very
| quickly. And it wouldn't take much: all these substrate
| projects are intentionally architected so that you can just
| develop for them as if you were developing for an ETH1 side-
| chain, and defer all the operational questions to network
| launch time. They've intentionally commoditized themselves!
|
| So, as long as ETH2 is the best choice for a substrate _when
| these projects go to mainnet_ , it's what they'll pick. And,
| for many reasons (that all mostly come down to "lifetime cost
| of bridging to either ETH1 and/or chain-foo-where-DEX-foo-
| lives"), ETH2 _may be_ the best choice.
|
| (Imagine if you developed your project against some Postgres-
| ish-DB-aaS cloud provider like Greenplum Cloud, but only used
| regular Postgres features; and then, when you went to
| production, you looked around and decided that Amazon RDS was
| good enough--and on top of that, required no re-engineering,
| since you weren't doing anything fancy.)
| jkilpatr wrote:
| > and choosing to use ETH2 as their mainnet substrate chain
| instead.
|
| But why exactly? Until ETH1 is in the ETH2 chain ecosystem
| ETH2 is just another blockchain platform, providing no
| network effects.
|
| ETH2's big selling point was higher throughput but bridges
| are already starting to commoditize access to more
| throughput from ETH1. ETH2 could provide smoother access
| than the bridge interfaces provided by other chains. (I'm
| speaking of bridges both to and from ETH1 and within the
| bridge blockchain's ecosystem like IBC)
|
| It's not that I don't think ETH2 _could_ win this. There 's
| a clear path to victory.
|
| - ETH1 integrated ASAP, going all in on expanding ETH1
| capacity and bringing it under ETH2
|
| - Provide a subchain interface that's better than IBC or
| any other cross-chain interface on the market
|
| - Fullnode tooling that really works well (partial syncing
| for block availability, seamlessly syncs multiple chains
| etc)
|
| Once you have these you can keep ETH1 users via network
| effect and provide access to more capacity more easily than
| other potential platforms.
|
| But I don't see a clear plan from ETH2 to do either of
| those things. Cross chain communication is a theory-only
| problem devoid of the extremely polished tooling it will
| need to win and ETH1 under the beacon chain doesn't even
| seem to have a plan.
| sedatk wrote:
| Avalanche seems to have sorted it out. It's been working on a
| PoS network without any significant issues so far.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Where is the class-action lawsuit? TOS be damned, people bought a
| product with an advertised spec and that spec was later
| _intentionally_ crippled.
| hrydgard wrote:
| 3060 is a new card, they're not "crippling" it post-release.
| kbumsik wrote:
| Not at all. 3060 is a new card and not released yet.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Oh. Ok. Ignore me. NVIDIA has me a bit sensitive because this
| is not the first time.
| wccrawford wrote:
| It's a little weird because they released the 3060 TI
| before the regular 3060, so when they say they're launching
| the 3060... It's just confusing. I feel like they should
| have given it its own identifier to help with that
| confusion, or launched them in the normal order. Base
| model, then the upgraded one.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I'd be too afraid it would affect performance for other tasks to
| seriously consider it then.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The company also limited the mining performance of the soon-to-
| be-launched RTX 3060 cards to roughly 50% of the normal
| performance
|
| What does that mean? What has NVIDIA actually done on those
| cards? Also, if this doesn't effect 3050, 70, 80 , Ti's, Quadro's
| and Tesla's - does it really matter all that much?
| [deleted]
| qqii wrote:
| A lot of people are claiming this as a win for the non mining
| consumer but as the articles puts it:
|
| > Nvidia does state that these GPUs "don't meet the
| specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't impact
| the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Frankly, that
| doesn't mean much. What does Nvidia do with a GPU that normally
| can't be sold as an RTX 3090? They bin it as a 3080, and GA102
| chips that can't meet the 3080 requirements can end up in a
| future 3070 (or maybe a 3070 Ti). The same goes for the rest of
| the line. Make no mistake: These are GPUs that could have gone
| into a graphics card. Maybe not a reference 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080,
| or 3090, but we've seen TU104 chips in RTX 2060 cards, so
| anything is possible.
|
| There's also seemingly little value for miners:
|
| > Note that the 90HX lists an Ethereum hash rate of just 86MH/s
| and a 320W TGP. After a bit of tuning, an RTX 3080 can usually do
| 94MH/s at 250W or less, so these cards (at least out of the box)
| aren't any better.
|
| > It gets worse as you go down the line, though. 50HX only does
| 45MH/s at 250W -- that basically matches the tuned performance of
| the RTX 2060 Super through RTX 2080 Super, with a TGP that's
| still twice as high as what we measured. It's also half the speed
| of an RTX 3080 while potentially still using the same GPU (10GB
| VRAM). Or maybe it's a TU102 that couldn't work with 11 memory
| channels, so it's been binned with 10 channels. Either way, who's
| going to want this? 40HX at 36MH/s and 185W and 30HX at 26MH/s
| and 125W are equally questionable options.
|
| Restrictions placed on the 3060 has also confirmed to be more
| than just the drivers:
|
| > According to Bryan Del Rizzo, director of global PR for
| GeForce, more things are working behind the driver. > According
| to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing. There is a
| secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and
| the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate
| limiter." This means that essentially, NVIDIA can find any way to
| cripple the mining hash rate even if you didn't update your
| driver version. At the same time, according to Kopite7Kimi, we
| are possibly expecting to see NVIDIA relaunch its existing SKUs
| under a different ID, which would feature a built-in anti-crypto
| mining algorithm. What the company does remains to be seen.
|
| (from https://www.techpowerup.com/278712/nvidia-geforce-
| rtx-3060-a...)
|
| Unfortunately for those that think this would be a good move, I'd
| agree with this article that:
|
| > Nvidia probably can't implement the same restrictions on
| existing GPUs without facing a class action lawsuit...
|
| To put it best is Linus from LTT (https://youtu.be/XfIibTBaoMM):
|
| 1. Silicone production is finite
|
| 2. These cards have no after market value
|
| Nividia isn't doing anyone but themselves any favours by
| releasing this.
| SloopJon wrote:
| > > These are GPUs that could have gone into a graphics card.
|
| That's an interesting take. After the discussion of the
| announcement earlier this week, I presumed that this was a way
| for NVIDIA to improve yields by rescuing bad chips from the
| scrap heap. If a failed 3090/3080/3070 is going to a CMP
| instead of a 3060, that's not the win-win that they're
| pitching. If the alternative is a 2060, on the other hand, I'd
| still give them the benefit of the doubt.
| qqii wrote:
| They improve yields on their flagship 3090s by rescuing ones
| that fail as 3080, 3070 or the highest bin that they meet
| specification. They wouldn't become a 2060 as that uses a
| different architecture.
|
| The manufacturing processes will also improve over time and
| at some point demand will dictate binning over yeild. Chips
| that are capable of better performance are restricted and
| sold as lower end cards. If yield is no longer an issue is
| simply more profitable.
|
| Back in the day it wasn't uncommon for enthusiasts to take
| lower end cards and bios mod them for equivalent performance,
| but now features are often disabled in silicone.
| postalrat wrote:
| If they can simply change the key needed to sign the bios or
| whatever for new cards coming off their production line they
| can continue to support cards that were sold before the change
| and have the limiter for cards made after the change. They
| could also make a tiny to change to the model number. I don't
| see how they could possibly be sued for doing so.
|
| Nvidia is making the same money regardless if a miner or gamer
| buys their existing cards. They won't be losing any money of
| 100% of their production goes to gamers. As a game er if this
| reduces miners interest in the products I want I'd say it's
| good for me.
| qqii wrote:
| They _can_ but I doubt the will as I, like the quoted article
| belive this would lead them to being sued over misleading
| marketing, just like the 970 3.5G controversy.
|
| Maybe the model number would do it, but I'd imagine it would
| have to be pretty distinguishing.
| postalrat wrote:
| They don't need to continue selling existing SKUs. Just
| change the signing key and SKU and change any misleading
| advertising they might have.
| nikeee wrote:
| Does this limitation also affect the use with hashcat or other
| software that uses OpenCL, for example?
| [deleted]
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I don't think Nvidia (or most companies) should be deciding what
| to do with the tools they sell. I don't want someone telling me
| what software I can run with my CPU or GPU any more than I want
| someone telling me what I am allowed to build with the hammers or
| screwdrivers I buy.
| password321 wrote:
| Well at least you could say it potentially helps the environment
| now that you won't have bunch of gamers crypto mining, or does
| that not matter the moment there is a drawback that affects us?
| logbiscuitswave wrote:
| I'd argue it's worse for the environment. These so-called
| mining cards can't be used as regular GPUs since they don't
| have any outputs - they are compute only. Once they outlive
| their usefulness they become e-waste since there would be no
| sustainable secondary market. At least a gaming GPU could be
| re-sold or otherwise repurposed.
| password321 wrote:
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/csr/product-recycling/
| sparkling wrote:
| This is why we need open source drivers. Now they are crippling
| cards for crypto mining, in the future there might be a whole
| list of other software features that require a paid unlock or
| even monthly subscription to use the full potential of your own
| hardware.
| rq1 wrote:
| I think it's done through firmware.
| qqii wrote:
| Here's a source:
|
| > According to Bryan Del Rizzo, director of global PR for
| GeForce, more things are working behind the driver.
|
| > According to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing.
| There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060
| silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the
| hash rate limiter."
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/278712/nvidia-geforce-
| rtx-3060-a...
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| They must be using an eFUSE to differentiate between a
| gamer and miner GPU , would not make sense to have
| differing SKU's.
| qqii wrote:
| It's likely they have other subtle differences too. That
| doesn't mean they can't be worked around.
|
| Mining cards could still produce a display output with
| Looking Glass style software.
|
| Gaming cards could still mine using modded drivers and
| firmware or a change in mining algorithm.
| kevingadd wrote:
| There are already a bunch of other cases like this. For
| example, the Windows GeForce drivers have been for years (if
| not decades) loaded with a bunch of shady OpenGL heuristics to
| punish you if you do stuff that looks like
| enterprise/industrial rendering (AutoCAD, etc).
|
| For an ordinary game developer this means cheap operations like
| texture readback will go from taking 1ms to 16ms (bumping your
| framerate down). The same stuff is consistently fast in
| Direct3D because enterprise/industrial workloads don't use it.
|
| NVENC for hardware video encoding is also artificially limited
| on consumer cards, which forces you to buy quadros for
| scenarios where you want to do multi streaming.
| terhechte wrote:
| I'm probably going to be downvoted into oblivion but I'm
| genuinely curious: Does anybody else think that the "mining is
| bad for the environment and gamers can't buy the cards" argument
| is a bit weird? After all, if all these cards weren't used for
| mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the
| same?
|
| I mean, is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy
| for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency? How much
| electricity do all the gaming PCs and gaming consoles in the
| world consume vs Argentina? To me, it feels a lot like Nascar or
| Formula one burning tons of fuel.
|
| I don't think that it is somehow bad to play games, but I wonder
| why the one (crypto) is always criticized into oblivion for the
| energy consumption, while the other isn't.
| sparkling wrote:
| How much use does a GPU get in a gaming PC? A few hours per
| day? In crypto farms these things are running 24/7. Anyway, i
| still think its a bad move to tell people what they can and can
| not do with their hardware.
| rq1 wrote:
| You don't play 24/7.
| throwaway525142 wrote:
| I would guess that computers used for gaming are turned off
| most of the time, whereas mining rigs are likely turned on and
| using much of the GPU at all times?
| almog wrote:
| > I mean, is there any inherent upside to burning tons of
| energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency?
|
| You presume the total energy consumption would be the same
| whereas it'd be more likely that GPUs that are used for mining
| will be used 24/7 whereas gaming is likely to be performed by a
| human being who cannot or would not utilize the GPU nearly as
| many hours of the day.
| badlucklottery wrote:
| > GPUs that are used for mining will be used 24/7 whereas
| gaming is likely to be performed by a human being who cannot
| or would not utilize the GPU nearly as many hours of the day.
|
| Yup. And even if they could utilize them 24/7, gamers
| generally* won't have 10+ cards going at once.
|
| *:I'm sure someone has some weird 360 degree flight simulator
| edge case.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Or say 15,000 cards.
|
| Crypto operations in modern times are not subtle. Margins
| are razor thin, so it's all about scale and efficiency
| mcny wrote:
| If you reduce this argument, the best way to help our
| planet is to have fewer children.
|
| I'd argue the target total fertility rate per woman should
| be somewhere below one. To hell with economic growth that
| relies on an ever increasing human population.
| oooooooooooow wrote:
| I'd much rather change my extremely wasteful (can't
| overstate how much, from someone that makes an effort to
| minimize it) lifestyle, and much rather use the force of
| law so that everyone has to, before advocating or forcing
| such an asinine policy.
|
| Even if strange when it comes to animals, humanity
| progresses following rules similar to classic evolution,
| aka by randomly mixing stuff until something works. We've
| gotten (only) pretty good at selecting and amplifying
| what works extremely well, but we still need a steady
| stream of randomly arranged characteristics to enter the
| pool. Imagine if the next Newton isn't born (or is born
| 200 years later) because a couple decided to not have
| children to "save the planet". Perhaps this figure
| would've been a key piece in a breakthrough discovery
| about energy, climate, terraforming, public policy....
|
| I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists.
| mrec wrote:
| > _I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists_
|
| I think it very much depends on how one experiences life.
| The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible
| to each other.
|
| Your point about "the next Newton" is unrelated, and IMO
| misses the mark. It's not coincidence that Newton, Hooke,
| Boyle etc appeared in the same place at the same time,
| and it's not because there'd been a crippling shortage of
| randomly arranged characteristics before that. The right
| characteristics aren't enough, you also need the leisure
| to develop them (which implies material surplus) and a
| society that makes sufficient use of scientific
| discoveries to value and propagate them. Nobody would
| have heard of Isaac Newton if he'd been born a
| subsistence farmer. I'm sure lots of potential Isaac
| Newtons were, and in many ways that's a tragedy.
| mcny wrote:
| > The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible
| to each other.
|
| Absolutely. Just to set the record straight, I am not
| anti-birth and I think I agree with GP more than I
| disagree. We must do everything we can to reduce the
| carbon footprint per person. I am just logically
| following what my parent post said.
|
| I didn't even know the word anti-natalist. I want all
| children who are born to be healthy and reach their full
| potential as productive adults. One child is a blessing.
| Two is also fine (I have a sibling).
|
| At least in a developed country, if someone has eight or
| more (not born at the same time) children, they are
| terrorizing the environment in my eyes. I don't see how
| you can justify that with access to decent healthcare and
| the infant mortality rate is under ten.
|
| I mean if you live in a place where infant mortality rate
| is over a hundred (a quick web search shows that IMR in
| Afghanistan is over 110 which means a hundred and ten die
| before the age of one of every thousand infants born), I
| can't imagine the pain and suffering the parents must be
| going through.
|
| We clearly can do better. The open question is how.
| Tenoke wrote:
| On the other hand, GPUs used for mining are typically used at
| ~60% the power draw and more often in places with cheap and
| greener electricity.
| qqii wrote:
| This should be weighted against these mining cards becoming
| e-waste instead of entering the seccond hand market. The
| energy used to manufacturea GPU is a significant part of its
| overall impact.
| falcolas wrote:
| I don't know anybody who will willingly buy a second hand
| video card used for mining cryptocurrency. They've been
| pushed so hard, for so long, that their useful lifespan is
| pretty much used up. It's a big part of the reason they're
| being sold and not continued to be used.
| qqii wrote:
| Plenty of second hand mining cards changed hands from
| miners to gamers two years ago, for the most case the
| price was very competitive.
|
| Depending on the card some would have been run
| underclocked and even undervolted. I personally know
| friends who purchased mining cards that are still up and
| running.
|
| For miners they're not being sold becuase they're not
| useful but because they don't have the cash on hand to
| continue the scale of operation when mining is no longer
| profitable. It's not that difficult to run the numbers
| yourself to verify this.
| Lvl999Noob wrote:
| > is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for
| games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency?
|
| Not an upside, but probably that the mining is mostly done by 1
| person (or org) who use a lot of energy. A gaming rig probably
| won't be running 24x7 as max utilization.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| Gamers use only 1-2 cards at a time and keep them for years,
| they don't build entire farms running 24/7 that burn out the
| cards in a short time.
| kall wrote:
| I would argue that gaming creates a lot more value (joy) per
| tflophour(?) compared to mining. How many thousands of hours of
| gaming equals one btc transaction?
| qqii wrote:
| How do you compare the value of gaming to trustless
| decentralised gambling or prediction markets? What about to
| NFT based trading cards? How about decentralised exchanges?
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I think that depends on when the mining took place.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Not even the most dedicated gamer is going to burn the amount
| of electricity a miner does with the same hardware. That's not
| even considering the number of cards miners purchase...
|
| The number of games that actually cause a modern GPU to hit its
| maximum TDP is also much lower than you'd think. If vsync is
| turned on, even a 3060 will trivially hit 60fps on
| older/simpler games, and modern ones unless the settings are
| turned way up. Games like Doom Eternal and Counter Strike Go
| are _incredibly_ well optimized and can easily hit hundreds of
| frames per second on modern hardware. Likewise if it 's a
| simple 2D game or more balanced title that leans on the CPU
| (unless you're using complex shader packs, popular games like
| Minecraft do a lot of their work on the CPU)
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Sure, ultimately gaming is entirely optional, but alas it's no
| different than other pastimes in that regard. Games make a lot
| of people very happy though and provide employment to millions
| (?) of people, so personally I'd put it higher in the needs
| hierarchy than crypto-currencies. Not being able to buy the
| latest graphics card due to high demand surely is a "first-
| world problem", but for NVIDIA it might become a problem if the
| situation persists, as they risk to anger a lot of loyal
| customers.
|
| Also, gamers and professional users will likely still buy
| graphics cards in 5-10 years (and more so), while I'm pretty
| sure miners will have either given up or switched to more
| custom solutions like ASICs by then (which has already happened
| with Bitcoin). So NVIDIA also risks losing a long-term market
| to please a potential short-lived market, hence I think they do
| the right thing by trying to disentangle these two market
| segments for good.
| qqii wrote:
| > Is this really good news, or is this just Nvidia playing
| both sides? To be clear, these CMP cards are still the same
| exact silicon that goes into GeForce and Quadro graphics
| cards. They don't have video outputs, cooling should be
| improved (for large-scale data center mining operations), and
| they're better tuned for efficiency. But every single GPU
| sold as a CMP card means one less GPU sold as a graphics
| card. What's perhaps worse is that while miners can still use
| consumer cards for mining (maybe not the upcoming RTX 3060,
| depending on how well Nvidia's throttling works), gamers
| can't use these mining cards for gaming.
|
| > Nvidia does state that these GPUs "don't meet the
| specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't
| impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Frankly,
| that doesn't mean much. What does Nvidia do with a GPU that
| normally can't be sold as an RTX 3090? They bin it as a 3080,
| and GA102 chips that can't meet the 3080 requirements can end
| up in a future 3070 (or maybe a 3070 Ti). The same goes for
| the rest of the line. Make no mistake: These are GPUs that
| could have gone into a graphics card. Maybe not a reference
| 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, or 3090, but we've seen TU104 chips in
| RTX 2060 cards, so anything is possible.
|
| Nivida isn't risking anything.
|
| They boost their sales now by selling mining cards knowing
| they won't enter the seccond hand market to compete with
| their new products.
|
| They gain good PR with their mining locked 3060 cards. Gamers
| praise them without internalising that a number of mining
| cards would have been binned lower and sold, but instead an
| artificial restriction allows Nivida to allocate behind the
| scenes.
| MAGZine wrote:
| They're actively not winning good pr because gamers realize
| they're being screwed despite nvidia's rhetoric, and miners
| can now no longer recoup some money from old cards they no
| longer need by reselling to gamers. And, everyone realizes
| how shit this is for the environment.
|
| You can say Nvidia is making a smart business decision
| (questionable) but to say this isn't anything other than a
| pr disaster imo is incorrect. The people who were the
| target of their press releases saw right through it.
| qqii wrote:
| The initial sentiment in hacker news and reddit threads
| was overwhelmingly positive for nividia and against
| miners.
|
| Now that some time has passed and Linus (from LTT) has
| released his video I'd say the sentiment is still mixed.
| I'm still seeing many tweets praising nividia for finally
| taking a step for gamers.
|
| Here's an austrilian tech Youtuber who should know
| better: https://youtu.be/jnoNryem-G8
| dahart wrote:
| > miners can now no longer recoup some money
|
| Ah, you're a miner? You're worried about their ability to
| make money?
|
| > gamers realize they're being screwed
|
| How, exactly?
| qqii wrote:
| > miners can now no longer recoup some money
|
| When it was no longer profitable miners sold their GPUs
| on the uses market, here is evidence of that:
| https://youtu.be/plrsxEGYO-A
|
| > gamers realize they're being screwed
|
| Linus Tech Tips' video and the /r/hardware discussion
| puts this best: https://youtu.be/plrsxEGYO-A
| dahart wrote:
| It's true that cheap cards were available when bitcoin
| crashed in 2018. I'm not arguing that cheap cards weren't
| available. I'm saying the feeling that cheap cards are a
| huge positive for the gaming community is missing the
| forest for the trees, and forgetting the pain of what
| happened before there were cheap cards. Cheap cards came
| around _eventually_ long after the cards had been
| unavailable and waaaaay overpriced. It was a relief for
| gamers that the bubble popped, but on balance, it was not
| a good thing that they had the bubble.
| josalhor wrote:
| > Does anybody else think that the "mining is bad for the
| environment and gamers can't buy the cards" argument is a bit
| weird? After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining
| but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same?
|
| I never had that specific opinion, but I have another point of
| view.
|
| Games bring inherent value to the table. That is, if you didn't
| play games you would be reading a book, going outside to play,
| browsing the web... Games fill a purpose and bring value.
| Whether or not I believe our current consumption of videogames
| is acceptable is irrelevant.
|
| I don't see tangible value in crypto. Crypto is worth what
| other people are willing to pay for it. If you wanted to invest
| in an asset that does not depend on the currency you could buy
| gold.
|
| (I had a paragraph here making a point about international
| transaction costs. I removed it because I started to find it
| offtopic. Long story short: I find the societal cost of crypto
| way too high).
| aemreunal wrote:
| > I don't see tangible value in crypto. Crypto is worth what
| other people are willing to pay for it.
|
| That's pretty much true for anything that has financial
| value, though. Setting aside the chemical properties of gold
| (conductivity, resistance to corrosion, etc.) that make it
| more valuable than some other metals, pretty much every
| financial construct in human culture is only valuable because
| we decided it was valuable. That's not to say everything is
| inherently valueless, but crypto is not too dissimilar to,
| say, digital coins for a game; you just can't usually swap it
| back in the latter case so it has little/no tangible value.
| Similarly, the value of stocks, foreign currency, even money
| itself fluctuates daily. As long as you can swap it back to
| "real" money, I see it as having tangible value.
|
| That being said, I personally choose not to get involved in
| any cryptocurrency because I would rather invest in more
| "established" forms of value, like stocks and bonds and
| whatnot.
| josalhor wrote:
| > That's pretty much true for anything that has financial
| value, though.
|
| Correct. Maybe a better statement would be "I don't see
| that the inherent value of crypto is bigger than that of
| the dollar or gold". This gets even more complicated when
| you take into account the cost of the transactions that I
| have discussed with another user.
| social_quotient wrote:
| How about mining diamonds? (Honest perspective check)
| josalhor wrote:
| But diamonds do have some pretty awesome mechanical
| properties [0]. They do have intrinsic value. Sure, the
| intrinsic value of diamonds < value of diamonds, but at
| least when you mine diamonds a percentage of it will go
| into use.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_d
| iamond
| qqii wrote:
| Although you may disagree with the current value of most
| cryptocurrencies would you at least agree that their
| inhenrant value isn't 0?
|
| Newer projects like Uniswap, AAVE and MakerDAO (for DAI) are
| uniquely new and novel concepts that can't be accomplished
| trustlessly without blockchain technology.
|
| Bitcoin has a lot of intangibles (name recognition, trust,
| hashpower) and for many is a more intersting asset (in what
| it represents) compared to gold.
| josalhor wrote:
| > Although you may disagree with the current value of most
| cryptocurrencies
|
| I would like to clarify something. I didn't say I disagreed
| with the value of cryptocurrencies (that is, its value in
| dollars). I said I find their societal cost way too high.
| In other terms, (Inherent Value of crypto < Societal Costs
| of crypto).
|
| > would you at least agree that their inhenrant value isn't
| 0?
|
| I agree with that. Although my previous answer stated "I
| don't see tangible value in crypto" I suppressed the
| paragraph that said that crypto may have some inherent
| value when it comes down to international transactions (or
| transactions in general). If international transactions in
| crypto are cheaper than with banks, clearly those who want
| to make these transactions do see some inherent value in
| the currency. That is, its value would emerge from its
| transaction properties.
|
| I did suppress the paragraph because I just don't know
| enough about the fees of such transactions. I think it is
| reasonable to expect Banks and Financial entities to offer
| transaction fees lower than Crypto for all use cases. If
| that happened, then I just don't see any value in crypto
| whatsoever.
|
| I have said it a few times on HN: I see more potential into
| a "Crypto Dollar" than in crypto in general.
| qqii wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you mean by Societal Costs of
| crypto?
|
| > I have said it a few times on HN: I see more potential
| into a "Crypto Dollar" than in crypto in general.
|
| This, and the potential of smart contracts that use the
| "Crypto Dollar" are where I see the most potential.
| josalhor wrote:
| > Can you elaborate on what you mean by Societal Costs of
| crypto?
|
| Here are some of the associated costs of crypto:
|
| - Environmental effects for the energy consumption that
| is not clean and the corresponding breakeven for clean
| energy.
|
| - Subsidized costs of energy are a direct cost into
| governments budget.
|
| - By increasing electricity consumption miners are
| increasing the demand and therefore the cost. This drives
| up inequality.
|
| I haven't found a better term than "Societal Costs" that
| summarizes all these costs.
|
| > This, and the potential of smart contracts that use the
| "Crypto Dollar" are where I see the most potential.
|
| Absolutely!
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Presumably people enjoy investing in crypto. It's a hobby for
| many, like gaming.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Presumably, gaming doesn't use as much electricity globally
| as the entire country of Argentina.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
| chrisseaton wrote:
| So how much electricity does gaming use?
| Tenoke wrote:
| Why do you think that? Any stats or are you just
| guessing? I wouldn't be surprised if it's within an order
| of magnitude of that.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> investing in crypto_
|
| Crypto is an investment the same way $GME or playing the
| roulette is an investment. Better term would be speculating
| or gambling. Nothing wrong with either, but let's call it
| what it is.
| qqii wrote:
| Comparing it to roulette is such a hyperbole. Would you
| say that penny stocks are playing the roulette? You may
| argue they have similar odds but there are fundimental
| differences between them.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> Would you say that penny stocks are playing the
| roulette?_
|
| Where did I talk about penny stocks? I was talking about
| volatile meme stocks like $GME being like playing the
| roulette.
| qqii wrote:
| There's still a difference between buying $GME and
| playing roulette. Volatile as it may be the chance of
| loosing all of your investment is greatly lower with meme
| stocks.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Isn't that what I already said? Investing as a hobby?
| Recreation? Like investing in Pokemon cards?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Investing involves spending money with the intent to make
| financial returns on your investment.
|
| Buying assets "as a hobby" that depreciate or generate no
| income, is just that, buying for a hobby, not investing.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| People invest in all sorts of things they don't seriously
| expect a financial return from. Like sports teams.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Yeah but that's just spending money, not investing.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well so what? I said people did it as a hobby. They see
| it as 'investing' like Fantasy Football people are
| 'playing football'. It's not some mystery!
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| You clearly have a very deep understanding of finance.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Not sure why you've decided to become personal, snarky,
| and sarcastic like this?
| josalhor wrote:
| Are you saying there are people out there that are happier
| investing in "crypto" than in "stock X" or "gold" or
| "bonds"? It just makes them happier that that particular
| name appears on the screen?
|
| I don't doubt that is the case, but that kind of reinforces
| my point. The societal cost of crypto is too high. If we
| have to justify the electrical consumption of crypto
| because people enjoy it more when they see its name on
| their screen, we are clearly doing something wrong.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think they enjoy being part of a community and seeing a
| number go up and down. Like Fantasy Football. It's a
| hobby.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| > I don't see tangible value in crypto. Crypto is worth what
| other people are willing to pay for it. If you wanted to
| invest in an asset that does not depend on the currency you
| could buy gold.
|
| Try convincing any crypto "enthusiast" of that, though.
| Literally none of them have ever been able to explain to me
| why cryptocurrencies should have value, but that doesn't stop
| them from proclaiming it the best thing since sliced bread.
| qqii wrote:
| It comes down to opinion but I'd argue there is inherent
| value in a trustless medium of exchange, a trustless
| explicit protocol for lending, market making (exchange) or
| gambling or the platform that powers them.
|
| I'd also agree that price bubbles happen and future
| speculation becomes a dominating factor in their price
| action, but this doesn't mean they don't have inherent
| value.
| salawat wrote:
| It isn't trustless. If it's finance, it's trust based at
| the very core. Somebody is trusting somebody else to
| recognize the value up for offer, and being capable of
| converting it to a utilizable form.
|
| This is what crypto-enthusiasts must be blind to. We
| could be using bottlecaps to do the same bloody thing.
| Nobody wants to though. Why? Because nobody else takes
| the value assertion of a bottle cap seriously. As long as
| people keep buying into the hype, and the enthusiasm is
| kept up through selective refusal to accept the realities
| and externalities of the process, then the gravy train
| continues.
| qqii wrote:
| It's not about trusting if the bottle caps are worth
| anything or are useful, but if the supply and exchange of
| bottle caps follows the financial rules that are
| dictated.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Finite resources have value.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Crypto isn't a resource. It's a certificate that someone,
| sometime solved a useless math problem.
| salawat wrote:
| That's because the value and effectivenesd of
| cryptocurrencies as an un or poorly regulated store-of-
| value is dependent on their not being any doubt as to their
| value.
|
| As with most things in finance, it's all trust at the
| bottom of it. If there is any doubt, no one will be around
| to be left with the bag.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I was reading your comment and thought 'The original Crysis
| release was very bad for the environment.'
|
| Does the efficiency with which a game utilizes system
| resources alter its value?
|
| Sort of the inverse of crypto.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There are plenty of good answers addressing the reality that
| gaming doesn't use anywhere near the same aggregate energy as
| mining, but to me, the more important difference is that
| currency of some kind is critical infrastructure. Civilization
| collapses without it. Right now, civilization won't collapse
| without cryptocurrency because we can just continue using
| government-issued currency, but in the crypto endgame where it
| is actually supposed to replace government-issued legal tender,
| we've suddenly become reliant on a tremendously inefficient
| power grid hog. Imagine something like what just happened in
| Texas happens on a larger scale. Well, now not only do you not
| have lights at night, but you can't spend money either.
|
| The basic fabric of society is much less reliant on the ability
| of citizens to play digital games, so losing that ability
| wouldn't matter much.
|
| Running with the Nascar/Formula One analogy, those things
| aren't such a huge deal because they're niche applications of
| vehicle technology. It would be far more disastrous for society
| at large, on the other hand, if we decided to make all commuter
| vehicles get 2 MPG and require high octane fuel and new tires
| every two hours.
|
| Similarly, cryptocurrency is (relatively) harmless right now
| because it is a niche speculative commodity. It would be a
| global disaster if it ever became widely used as actual
| currency. Cryptocurrencies are like castles, gaudy but
| interesting spectacles when only a few lords build them, but
| the world would quickly run out of rocks if we made them the
| universal unit of housing.
| A12-B wrote:
| To play one game for one day with your GPU - and I'm just
| guessing here - probably uses a small fraction of the power
| that mining 0.0001% of a bitcoin does, because blockchain is
| not the same thing as graphics.
|
| Besides, it's also the transacting that uses a lot of energy,
| not just the mining.
| thejosh wrote:
| Because when the crypto card is done it goes on the trash, when
| a gaming card is done it gets resold. People upgrading sell
| their old cards on FB market place etc
| robkop wrote:
| We can do some quick estimates to compare (using a 3090 because
| I helped a friend do a bit of mining on theirs and I know what
| figures are plausible):
|
| First some variables: RTX3090 idle power usage
| = 21 Watts RTX3090 mining power usage = 270 Watts
| RTX3090 gaming power usage = 350 Watts
|
| Mining energy usage: 270W \* 24H = 6.48 kWH per
| day
|
| Gaming energy usage: (low, 1 hour per day)
| 350W \* 1H + 21W \* 23H = 0.37 kWH per day (med, 4 hours
| per day) 350W \* 4H + 21W \* 20H = 1.82 kWH per day
| (hig, 8 hours per day) 350W \* 8H + 21W \* 16H = 3.14 kWH per
| day (ext, 18 hours per day) 350W \* 18H + 21W \* 6H =
| 6.43 kWH per day
|
| So even with someone who I'd consider a high volume gamer (8
| hours per day) uses less than half the energy of running a
| miner for a day. You'd have to game for over 18 hours per day
| to use more energy than a miner. Of course both the gamer and
| the miner end up using a chunk of metal and plastic that will
| end up in a landfill so that bit counts the same.
|
| Note: From what general figures I've seen online the energy
| works out roughly the same for the rest of the recent RTX
| series cards (some such as the 3060Ti work out a few % more
| favourable for mining as they are more energy efficient
| overall)
| deepakhj wrote:
| Why not both? I'm paying for my card by mining when I'm not
| gaming. I checked with a watt meter and I'm using 270-300
| watts mining total (cpu, gpu, etc). It also heats my room so
| it's more efficient than running a heater or using a space
| heater (1500 watts).
| Tenoke wrote:
| Good comparison though it misses some externalities.
|
| Gamers also use monitors(~40W) for many hours a day, and run
| the whole machine with 1 card while many miners minimize all
| other costs but the GPUs. Also gamers typically damage their
| cards a bit faster and change them for newer ones faster on
| average (miners keep mining with very old cards still).
| meibo wrote:
| How much bitcoin do you own?
| Bayart wrote:
| I think it's a pretty lazy and complacent argument, to the
| extent energy-constrained industries are the ones driving the
| adoption of renewable energy. The price of coal is much, much
| higher than solar, wind, hydro or geothermal.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I use my card during just during winter for mining and
| calculated the energy for mining just under "heating my
| apartment". So the coins are just some bonus from heating. So
| in future I couldn't do that with an Nvidia card.
| Merad wrote:
| > After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for
| gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same?
|
| I would assume miners keep these cards pegged at 100% 24/7. By
| comparison very few games actually push graphics cards to 100%
| utilization, especially when you're talking about top of the
| line cards like the nVidia 3000 series, and on top of that very
| few people play games for more than a couple hours per day. A
| card in the hands of a gamer probably consumes only a small
| fraction of the power that same card would in the hands of
| miners.
| znpy wrote:
| > After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for
| gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same?
|
| No. Really, no.
|
| Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released,
| pretty much immediately.
|
| OTOH, gaming hardware very often has a second life in the form
| of used hardware and lower-specced gaming computers. Don't be
| fooled by YouTube influencers, most of the real people won't be
| buying the latest and greatest hardware and drop their previous
| hardware. IIRC, valve stats showed that 1080-era cards are
| still very common and in use.
|
| And by the way: pretty much no one is running games 24/7.
| Mining hardware OTOH are specifically meant to be kept going
| 24/7.
| csomar wrote:
| > Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is
| released, pretty much immediately.
|
| How come? You can still game with these.
| qqii wrote:
| No you can't, as the article explains these cards don't
| have display outputs.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released,
| pretty much immediately.
|
| Except people are still mining with cards they bought 4-5
| years ago. This is not True.
| qqii wrote:
| Some people are, but we also saw a flood of both normal and
| mining only cards in the used market last time the mining
| bubble burst.
| Sonnen wrote:
| Gaming gives people enjoyment. They are not consuming other
| energy sources and to a certain degree, i think this is okay.
|
| It also combines and supports advantages in science by making
| this more affordable for the rest.
|
| You can still critizie it and there have been huge energy
| savings for idle GPUs which was not the case 10? years ago.
|
| Nonetheless, one thing doesn't make the other thing better or
| worse. Doing bitcoin is supporting a system which requires
| mining to make transactions. It also doesn't free me but
| potentially people who benefit from this directly. Like money
| washing, moving their millions from left to right or other
| things. And while doing that, taking my graphicscard, i wanted
| to play with, to sit somehwere, running 24/7 for what?
|
| What real problem solves bitcoin for me and most other people
| on the world?
| qqii wrote:
| Trustless prediction markets and gambling.
|
| Trustless exchanges and lending (including tokens pegged to
| real world assets like the dollar or stocks).
|
| NFTs as digital proof of ownership.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >They are not consuming other energy sources and to a certain
| degree, i think this is okay.
|
| Both are using energy, I don't know what the 'other' even r
| refers to.
|
| >It also combines and supports advantages in science by
| making this more affordable for the rest.
|
| .. Both of those apply for crypto. Better GPUs are developed
| because of usage, gaming usage doesn't necessarily give you
| more than crypto usage and cryptocurrencies are putting a lot
| of money into cryptography.
| leovailati wrote:
| Other people in this thread bring up great counterpoints.
| Namely, gaming is not nearly as intensive as mining and
| whatever value gaming brings to society is more than that of
| mining.
|
| I'd also say that gaming at least occupies the human who is
| playing. Mining would be running in the background: the human
| would still be consuming energy doing something else. So one
| doesn't replace the other. Therefore using the inefficiency of
| one to justify the inefficiency of the other is not a valid
| argument.
|
| One last observation: you're assuming that all these video
| cards would still have been produced. Maybe production of
| hardware has gone up to serve the mining demand.
| pornel wrote:
| I have no sympathy for miners, but purely from software freedom
| perspective this is maximally evil: closed-source software that
| decides what you can use your hardware for.
|
| The CMP version is a straight-to-landfill product. As soon as it
| stops being profitable for mining it will have zero resale value,
| and become e-waste.
| loceng wrote:
| As the counter point, I, as a consumer of a GPU for non-mining
| purposes, appreciates the effort so demand is reduced for a
| product by a certain market segment - and thus allows the price
| to not be influenced by the demand of a decentralized, global
| MLM scheme.
|
| Also, you just don't buy that hardware - so it's not "what you
| can use your hardware for" - unless they're retroactively
| updating drivers to prevent the same use of already purchased
| projects.
|
| I'd argue your concern is an issue only due to patents that may
| prevent a competitor from coming in and making a competing
| product if the main producers are engaging in bad behaviours.
|
| Edit to add: I love the downvotes - they're such a strong way
| to sway someone's thoughts on something, so much effort gets
| put into clicking a downvote too - it must be serious business!
| salawat wrote:
| You shouldn't be, as this is yet another example of a company
| exploiting cryptographic signing and information asymmetry in
| order to lock you out of functional capability that you paid
| good money for.
|
| That abusive practice is the only thing enabling this kind of
| business pivot. The pivot also doesn't even achieve what
| Nvidia claims to be setting out for, because they are
| splitting already limited capacity to support two distinct
| product lines thereby halving the overall supply available.
| If anything, this is just making sure everyone pays inflated
| prices due to scarcity.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| >global MLM scheme.
|
| What I'll say is that the absurdity of this trite dismissal
| presents a large undertaking for anyone to begin to try and
| teach you what cryptocurrencies are.
|
| Most of the silicon valley billionaires acknowledge it as a
| promising technology, if that doesn't warrant some serious
| (read: many hours of difficult reading) consideration than
| expecting strangers on a message board to help you do it
| seems a bit entitled.
|
| I'll grant you that trite dismissal of cryptocurrencies in
| general is quite common on HN.
| loceng wrote:
| "What I'll say is that the absurdity of this trite
| dismissal ..."
|
| Are you talking about your trite dismissal of my stating
| it's a global MLM scheme - which it fits the pattern for
| precisely? And also a Ponzi scheme because the final latest
| adopters are left holding the bag - meanwhile wealth was
| unnecessarily transferred weighted towards the earliest
| adopters.
|
| Blockchain is a promising technology, designing it like
| Bitcoin to align people through financial gain (of an MLM)
| has unavoidable-unfixable pitfalls. You're welcome to go
| through my comment history to read more about the actual
| solution. You're making assumptions too that my stating
| it's an MLM scheme isn't backed up.
|
| I find it hilarious, the irony, of you claiming my comment
| is a trite dismissal - as yours has exactly the same depth
| as mine, with the only truth you state is that blockchain
| is a "promising technology."
|
| Your holier-than-thou defensive comments, articulated
| almost poetically, is getting more common though - as the
| more intelligent sucked into the MLM scheme get defensive
| and their guard goes up - feeling the need to defend their
| position, needing the price of Bitcoin to go up and up and
| up; while you're financially incentivized to write and
| spend energy, and others like myself with counter-
| narratives aren't financially incentivized to do so.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| >meanwhile wealth was unnecessarily transferred weighted
| towards the earliest adopters.
|
| How many companies and technologies is this true or? Does
| this make them all MLM schemes?
|
| Nothing about your response indicates you're giving me a
| generous interpretation at all, especially given how much
| of this response is you dumping rhetoric on me. Being
| snarky and in the same breath elaborately calling me
| "holier-than-thou" seems like we're just going to have a
| name calling arms race.
|
| Similarly, the notion that more intelligent people are
| 'sucked in and defensive' is the true explanation, and
| you don't seem receptive to another interpretation to
| intelligent people thinking a technology is
| promising...it seems we may as well just leave it here.
| Thanks for your time.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's entirely possible to extract value from a stock if
| the company represented by a stock is doing productive
| work.
|
| Companies exist to make a profit and many of them do so
| by providing a service or by selling goods. The profit is
| paid out through dividends or stock buy backs. As an
| owner of a stock you have to do absolutely nothing to
| extract value from that stock. The company is
| automatically paying out money to you. There is no need
| to worry about finding a future buyer of your stock
| because you are assuming that people are analyzing the
| value of the company and buying it based on that
| analysis, because if the company keeps doing stock
| buybacks forever eventually your shares will be the only
| ones left and if you sell your shares you have cashed out
| your money without selling to a different investor.
|
| With Bitcoin there are no dividends or buybacks. The only
| way you can realize value from Bitcoin as an investment
| is by hoping another investor is buying it from you.
| These complaints apply to gold as well. It doesn't
| generate revenue, it produces little value beyond
| industrial uses, all it should do is track inflation and
| tracking inflation is a very low bar and in practice
| cryptocurrencies and gold are outpacing inflation. Stocks
| too but if you were to invest based on fundamentals there
| will be a day in the future when your analysis will be
| spot on. Fundamentals would tell you to stay away from
| Tesla stock.
|
| But this isn't where problems end, it's where they start.
| Currencies are not supposed to appreciate. They are
| supposed to stay the same over long periods of time with
| a small amount of inflation (around 2%). Bitcoin failed
| to become a currency and that's why it's worthless.
|
| >you don't seem receptive to another interpretation to
| intelligent people thinking a technology is promising
|
| I know you are not talking about me but I specifically
| stated that literally any other cryptocurrency other than
| Bitcoin is fine, even Ethereum is better than Bitcoin.
| The insistence that a single specific flawed
| cryptocurrency is worthy of defense is what really
| irritates me. There is no need to defend Bitcoin. Stop
| defending it. You can talk about any other
| cryptocurrency. You can talk about decentralized apps,
| you can talk about lightning, you can talk about defi,
| you can talk about uniswap or rubic, you can talk about
| prediction markets. Please, talk about anything other
| than Bitcoin and if you do talk about Bitcoin recognize
| its flaws and weaknesses.
| loceng wrote:
| I specifically even said blockchain is a promising
| technology - not receptive? LUL
| imtringued wrote:
| >I'll grant you that trite dismissal of cryptocurrencies in
| general is quite common on HN.
|
| The unfortunate reality is that Bitcoin advocates all sound
| like people who bought into an MLM scheme. They desperately
| convince others that it has value and should go up.
| lwhi wrote:
| I agree. It's a bad move.
|
| Provide a better product for mining .. don't cripple what's out
| there.
|
| This feels similar to when Nurofen tried to repackage generic
| drugs for different types of pain. I.e. ultimately a branding
| exercise.
|
| --
|
| Edit: spelling and s/paracetamol/generic drugs
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > Nerofen tried to repackage generic paracetamol
|
| Nurofen, and ibuprofen. I assume it's a winning strategy as
| the products have been on sale for an (un)reasonable amount
| of time in some countries now.
| throw14082020 wrote:
| I appreciate this move to make GPUs more available for non-
| crypto users. As someone who wants to buy an AMD GPU to run
| my Ryzen machine, I have been waiting 2 weeks because there
| is no supply of GPUs at the RRP price. I can only buy the 2
| year old models for double the price they sold for.
| deepakhj wrote:
| There's a global chip shortage due to
|
| 1) covid-19. Factory closures, employee, and supply chain
| issues. 2) 30-40% growth in gaming due to covid-19 3) trump
| tariffs (for the USA). Gpu exemption expired in January.
|
| Crypto is affecting prices but they aren't causing the
| supply issues. I don't think amd has produced many
| 6800/6900s. Ryzen 5800/5900 cpus are rarely in stock.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| We have a global chip shortage. NVidia isn't magically
| pulling more GPUs out of their asses. Yes as they claim
| some chips might be defective in a way that makes them
| unsuitable for a graphics card but still work as a mining
| chip, but if you believe that they won't redirect perfectly
| fine chips into mining card production if demand permits
| it, just because they care so much about gamers and not
| their shareholders, I got bad news for you.
| my123 wrote:
| The mining GPUs that they announced aren't based on
| Ampere but on Turing AFAIK from the hash rate numbers
| that they gave.
|
| Not even the same manufacturing process...
| reader_mode wrote:
| Mining demand is volatile and will use whatever gives
| them best hashing/$ ratio - pissing miners off might lose
| you some cash short term but gamers are much more
| susceptible to branding, and not to mention devs optimise
| for popular hardware - if AMD suddenly became a major
| market % holder in the gaming market because NV shipped
| their silicon to miners, once mining dips down they get
| slammed. And if they are hoping production will ramp up
| to match demand some time in the future they still want
| to have a winning product.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| How long until gpgpu isn't cost effective for mining? I
| know a lot of fpgas went on ebay for cheap when the new
| xilinx line came out. The watt per hash has to be lower for
| fpgas already. Will the cost of a coin always reflect the
| current price to make a new one and thus gpgpu will always
| be a cost effective technique?
| ryebit wrote:
| I think right now biggest earner for GPU mining is
| Ethereum. And (I think) it's aiming to move to Proof of
| Stake sometime in next 12-24 months, which kinda time
| limits the utility of both Eth-specific mining chips, and
| large investments in GPU mining (unless mining burns GPUs
| out really fast?).
|
| Regardless, most proof of work algorithms are already
| being optimized with ASICs (ala bitcoin)... Or, like
| Ethereum's ETHASH alg, they have a step requiring high
| throughput random access to large amounts of memory, ala
| scrypt or argon (5gb or so for ETHASH right now, and
| slowly increasing). That's what's kept ASICs from being
| profitable for Eth, and is probably limiting factor for
| FPGAs as well. Though maybe there are FPAGs with
| dedicated memory on par with a modern GPU?
| kortex wrote:
| Proof of stake is the fusion power of crypto. It's been
| 6-24 months away since what, 2016? I toured Consensys a
| few years back and at the time it seemed PoS was right
| around the corner.
|
| OTOH, it could be cracked tomorrow and value of dedicated
| silicon will go off a cliff. So I don't blame the GPGPU
| crowd for that, before even considering the engineering
| challenges of silicon/FPGA for eth.
| ryebit wrote:
| Ethereum's Proof of Stake "beacon chain" is already live,
| with around $6 billion staked (since launch in december
| 2020). Next year is just formalizing and testing it
| taking over from the miners. So despite timeframe,
| there's little uncertainty about the outcome.
|
| https://beaconcha.in/ is a nice explorer to see beacon
| chain running live.
| csunbird wrote:
| GPUs have a resale value on second hand market, ASICs or
| FPGAs usually do not, unless sold to other miners.
| throwaway-8c93 wrote:
| A question out of genuine curiosity: Doesn't the nonce
| puzzle difficulty adjust to the amount of compute the
| network has, making it a zero sum game? If every mining
| pool buys 20% extra GPUs, isn't everyone soon back where
| they started, wasting hundreds of millions in the
| process?
| ryebit wrote:
| I'm not an expert at the mechanism design, but yeah,
| that's my understanding. The network's goal is to have a
| block every X seconds; and the difficulty periodically
| adjusts if blocks come in too fast / too slow (due to
| hashpower coming on/off line).
|
| (Ethereum & Bitcoin both add some other year-decade
| timeframe factors to the difficulty, but don't think it
| affects this basic principle, which acts on week-to-
| minute timeframes).
|
| I view it as a race to the margins. Anyone who can do it
| cheaper, or benefit from economy of scale, will get a
| larger slice of the pie, but at smaller margins...
| creating a cycle of consolidation.
|
| I think original assumption was that folks running PoW at
| home on their GPUs would be able to compete, but due to
| efficiencies of specialized hardware and regional
| differences in electricity costs, that's just not the
| case.
|
| ---
|
| Others might disagree, but my personal opinion is that
| this isn't a sustainable way to maintain
| decentralization, since it seems to obviously trend
| towards a few large "just turning a profit" players.
|
| There might be some ways to adjust mining incentives to
| make it work, but this fundmental issue is why I think
| Proof of Stake has a much more viable future, as it
| sidesteps this (and the environmental) issues.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| So nvidia is releasing a line of crippled cards that will
| mostly only be used for one year amd then trashed? That
| is horrible! Glad it may be over soon I guess.
| ryebit wrote:
| Pretty much, from what I can tell!
|
| I sorta see this as Nvidia trying to create some market
| segmentation not for the miners, but so gamers can
| actually get their cards before Nvidia loses mindshare.
| (Not that I think that's likely)
| thangngoc89 wrote:
| The product is named Nurofen and its generic name is
| ibuprofen .
|
| If you want to talk about acetaminophen/paracetamol than
| brand names would be Efferalgan or Tylenol
| lwhi wrote:
| I'm a UK citizen. We don't have those brand here.
|
| You're right, Nurofen contains ibuprofen in it's main
| product range, not paracetamol.
|
| The point is a generic drug was branded to solve specific
| ailments, when it acts in exactly the same way in all
| cases.
| jon-wood wrote:
| With the exciting side effect that some people don't
| realise they're taking ibuprofen so they take ibuprofen +
| Neurofen Back Pain Relief, and end up overdosing.
| [deleted]
| boulos wrote:
| Is that true? I imagine it's going to be immediately reused for
| folks who just want cheap CUDA parts.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| You mean like having to login to Facebook to use Oculus
| hardware?
| vsareto wrote:
| >As soon as it stops being profitable for mining it will have
| zero resale value, and become e-waste.
|
| There's lots of old graphics cards no one sells or buys as well
| sandworm101 wrote:
| There are, but these could be thrown put in a matter of
| weeks. As soon as bitcoin prices crash again, these cards are
| junk. By the time the next boom happens there will be a new
| generation of cards and these will be unprofitable. Nvidia is
| simply leveraging this predictable boom-bust cycle to make a
| quick buck selling a polluting product. This is Captain
| Planet-style environmental arrogance.
| pmorici wrote:
| These cards aren't being used to mine bitcoin gpu mining
| hasn't been applicable to Bitcoin since at least 2014.
| These cards are being used to Ming alt coins
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Whatever the coin, it is all the same crypto market. The
| crash will come one day soon and these cards will be in
| dumpsters.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| This comment doesn't even make sense.
|
| What does "the same crypto market" mean?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The same as any other industry. The coins are all tied
| together in the same manner as something like the auto
| industry, biotech, aviation or real estate. Individual
| prices can rise and fall on their own merits, but there
| is a larger tide as investors choose to move their money
| in/out of the entire sector.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying, this makes more sense.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > The CMP version is a straight-to-landfill product. As soon as
| it stops being profitable for mining it will have zero resale
| value, and become e-waste.
|
| You are aware that this already happens to BTC ASICs when the
| new generation of ASIC comes out, right? Straight to the
| landfill. BTC is very wasteful, this is not new.
| jagger27 wrote:
| The difference being that NVIDIAs dies were otherwise usable
| for other tasks, unlike Bitcoin SHA ASICs.
| martinald wrote:
| Surely it would be worth the same as the normal RTX 3060? It
| will have the same use for gaming?
| Hedepig wrote:
| I might be wrong but I do not believe these are usable as
| "normal" graphics cards
| robkop wrote:
| They are removing all the display ports from the card so I
| can't imagine it can be used for gaming.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| It can be. NVDA's stance is utter bull. It is entirely
| possible to render video games and stream them to another
| display [1,2]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1nok2VlF1M
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfIibTBaoMM
| qqii wrote:
| It will be possible but as your third video suggests the
| number of cards that'll be used this way and not end up
| as landfill will be peanuts.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I don't disagree, but I suppose the structure of my
| comment didn't convey the message correctly, that is,
| that NVDA is just maximizing profits while screwing over
| gamers because a) they can get away with it and b) they
| are an ever decreasing portion of their revenue.
| dahart wrote:
| Wait, how did you arrive at 'screwing over gamers' when
| this whole thing was done to keep 3060 cards available to
| gamers at reasonable prices?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| The argument is simple really. By intentionally dropping
| the hashrate, you reduce the incentive to buy the GPUs
| for mining. This means that when or if the mining craze
| stops akin to 2018, there would be plenty of second hand
| 3xxx series cards to go around, which would only hurt
| NVDA's pocket. Recall that during the previous craze,
| NVDA was stuck with a huge inventory of GPUs after the
| craze ended, inventory that can not be recycled. IIRC
| they announced that they have more GPUs from 1xxx series
| available, iirc 1050tis.
|
| NVDA's stance is that miners are the reason for scarce
| GPUs, but it is not. There has been scarcity since the
| 3xxx series was announced, similarly for AMD. The reality
| is that there is simply not enough silicon being
| produced; with AAPL hogging TSM's 5nm for a year, AMD and
| NVDA competing for 7nm wafers for AMD's CPUs, GPUs, and
| the console's SOCs and for NVDA's GPUs, and soon to be
| joined by INTC.
|
| By cutting 3xxx production for gaming to accommodate
| crypto they ensure that there won't be second hand gpus
| flooding the market and eating their profits once the
| craze is over. Why is that? because it will not be as
| cost effective to miners to buy 3060s instead of the
| dedicated chips because of lower performance per watt.
| Once the craze is over, the miners won't be able to
| liquidate their dedicated cards, thus, the demand for
| GPUs for gaming remains intact, thus, they will be able
| to sell their 3xxx series and 4xxx series without getting
| screwed over by second hands and they will not be stuck
| with a huge inventory as was the case in 2018.
|
| Edit:
|
| Infact, the second hand 3060s would outcompete anything
| NVDA could offer in 1080p and 1440p gaming and anything
| NVDA could release with their 4xxx cards. In addition,
| there isn't enough incentive to even go beyond 1080p or
| 1440p for gaming. Which is why you will see NVDA pushing
| how great 4k and even 8k gaming is with their recent
| publicity stunt for 8k gaming on a 3090.
| dahart wrote:
| What you're asking for is to get royally screwed by
| miners now - _again_ - just so you _might_ have the
| chance to get a cheap and very-used card later. And
| you're blaming Nvidia for losing this imagined
| opportunity a year from now.
|
| Right, like you point out, in 2018, Nvidia was making a
| lot of money on leftover 1080s. And they're proposing to
| not do that this time. Are you suggesting that gamers are
| going to bypass a $330 card for a year in hopes that
| mining will crash and they can get a used one for $200
| that's been running hot for an entire year, and then
| after waiting, give up on that and buy a brand new GPU?
|
| > The reality is that there is simply not enough silicon
| being produced.
|
| You say potato, I say demand. You're hand-wavily
| suggesting that mining is not affecting supply at all.
| That's just not true. Mining demand is making an already
| bad problem (for gamers) much worse, just like it did
| last time.
|
| What is the huge profit windfall you're suggesting
| happens after this current mining bubble pops? Nvidia
| isn't going to have an oversupply of cards to sell, and
| they aren't hiking the price of the 3060.
|
| This all seems completely speculative too. You're
| complaining about a supposed future problem, and ignoring
| what this does for gamers today.
|
| And it's weird to frame this as gamers being screwed by
| Nvidia just because there _could_ have been some awesome
| second hand market later. The fact is that gamers were
| totally screwed by miners in the first place when cards
| weren't available for a year and the second hand prices
| were quadruple the list price. It's not a huge gift to
| gamers that the market is flooded with cheap leftovers
| after they were hosed and frustrated and extorted by
| miners for a year or two.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > What you're asking for is to get royally screwed by
| miners now - again - just so you might have the chance to
| get a cheap and very-used card later. And you're blaming
| Nvidia for losing this imagined opportunity a year from
| now.
|
| Re very used: no. Cards used for mining are a)
| undervolted and b) underclocked, both increase lifespan
| and I'd take them over an overclocked card used for
| gaming, plus they don't run that hot because at those
| scales cooling is expensive.
|
| > Right, like you point out, in 2018, Nvidia was making a
| lot of money on leftover 1080s. And they're proposing to
| not do that this time.
|
| I never said NVDA was making money off leftover 1080s
| because there weren't left over 1080s, it was 1050tis
| which they are selling off again. The same 1050tis that
| they held onto during 2018.
|
| > Are you suggesting that gamers are going to bypass a
| $330 card for a year in hopes that mining will crash and
| they can get a used one for $200 that's been running hot
| for an entire year, and then after waiting, give up on
| that and buy a brand new GPU?
|
| As I mentioned above, mining GPUs are usually in better
| conditions than in some dusty and improperly cooled rig
| and, simply put, there aren't $330 cards for anyone to
| buy. If people wish to buy $330 cards, they can buy them,
| but for me, at 21x9 1080p@60 there is no reason to
| upgrade from my used 1080ti, and had I really needed
| something better, I'd consider a used 3060.
|
| > You say potato, I say demand. You're hand-wavily
| suggesting that mining is not affecting supply at all.
| That's just not true. Mining demand is making an already
| bad problem (for gamers) much worse, just like it did
| last time.
|
| I never said mining isn't affecting demand but, a) the
| crypto rally started loooong after NVDA had supply
| issues, b) Amd has supply issues with their CPUs and they
| are utterly irrelevant to mining, c) this generation of
| consoles made with the same wafers can't meet the demand.
| The demand was there before this cycle of mining frenzy.
|
| > What is the huge profit windfall you're suggesting
| happens after this current mining bubble pops? Nvidia
| isn't going to have an oversupply of cards to sell, and
| they aren't hiking the price of the 3060.
|
| They won't because they are artificially limiting the
| hashrate, and they are producing more chips for mining.
| Last time around, people managed to get around the no
| display issue and could game on "mining gpus" (see Linus
| Tech Tips, they have 2 videos on the topic), but now NVDA
| is locking people outside with firmware making reusing
| mining gpus impossible.
|
| I am complaining exactly because NVDA is taking care of
| their shareholders and their bottom lines. I am
| complaining because it goes against my interests.
|
| Gamers are not screwed by miners, gamers are screwed
| because the pandemic caused a huge influx of people
| demanding chips, so much so, that even automotive
| manufactures can't find chips.
|
| I am tired of this conversation and you are either taking
| my sentences out of context and blow them out of
| proportion.
| dahart wrote:
| > I am complaining because it goes against my interests.
|
| So you are already certain you want to buy a used 3060
| next year?
|
| > I never said mining isn't affecting demand
|
| You said "NVDA's stance is that miners are the reason for
| scarce GPUs, but it is not."
|
| > the crypto rally started loooong after NVDA had supply
| issues
|
| This is irrelevant. You mean _this time_ , right? There
| wasn't a supply problem last time before bitcoin miners
| bought everything. It doesn't make any difference to
| gamers which contributor to scarcity came first, when
| you're talking about 3060 sales that haven't started yet.
|
| > I am tired of this conversation and you are either
| taking my sentences out of context and blow them out of
| proportion.
|
| I think you're taking this entire issue out of context
| and blowing it out of proportion. You claimed gamers are
| being screwed, when they're not, they're actually being
| helped. Many gamers here and on other threads are happy
| that Nvidia is taking steps to curb miner scalping of the
| 3060. The change here is to a single model, the 3060.
| Segmenting that market over this single model helps
| gamers today, and is not going to kill the second hand
| market for gaming cards. All other models will be
| untouched, and the 3060 will still be available second
| hand.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > So you are already certain you want to buy a used 3060
| next year?
|
| I wanted to buy a graphics card to run my models. I don't
| have the $$$ to buy a datacenter card for it and in
| general, I am affected by the demand and the scalpers. I
| was considering 3060 because my models are small and it
| is faster than my 1080ti, but at 21x9 1080p@60hz, it's
| not an upgrade for my gaming experience because that is
| capped by the monitor, and I am really not willing to buy
| a new monitor.
|
| > You said "NVDA's stance is that miners are the reason
| for scarce GPUs, but it is not."
|
| The reason is mentioned before, too much demand for
| chips, not enough fabrication. You instead, blame the
| scarcity on mining, mining is part of the demand but is
| not the main factor.
|
| Linus and many others, me included, disagree with your
| opinion that NVDA is helping gamers. NVDA does not care
| about gamers, they are a corporation, they care for their
| bottom line and their stock price.
| dahart wrote:
| > Linus and many others, me included, disagree with your
| opinion that NVDA is helping gamers. NVDA does not care
| about gamers, they are a corporation, they care for their
| bottom line and their stock price.
|
| This argument that Nvidia is a company is a straw man.
| Valve is as much a corporation that doesn't care about
| gamers as Nvidia. I guarantee that Nvidia cares about
| gamers, precisely because gamers have a huge influence on
| NVDA's stock price and bottom line.
|
| I love Linux, but Linus has a vested interest in opposing
| Nvidia in public, and has a long history of making
| inflammatory remarks, even to people he works with. Using
| his opinion as support of your claims here undermines the
| credibility of the discussion, as far as I'm concerned.
|
| To attempt to move the goalpost back to where _you_ first
| placed them, the question here is whether reserving 3060
| sales for gamers is good or bad for gamers. You claim it
| 's bad for gamers vs the second hand market next year,
| and I claim it's good for gamers vs the first hand market
| today. We haven't actually disagreed about this yet,
| because you haven't addressed how your opinion affects
| gamers right now.
|
| I agree that this might lead to a different second hand
| market next year. It is true that the second hand sales
| next year might not be as low without first having a big
| mining bubble that first prices gamers out and then
| crashes. I just don't believe that cheap cards later
| makes up for what miners have already done to you. If you
| do, it seems like you're ignoring some of the big
| downsides of what's happened before and what's happening
| now.
|
| > I am affected by the demand and the scalpers. I was
| considering 3060
|
| If you want to buy a 3060 now, I don't understand why you
| can't see the CMP announcement as a good thing for you
| and your own bottom line.
|
| If you want to buy a used, mined 3060 later, and give
| your money to a miner and not Nvidia, then I do
| understand your points.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I am referring to this [1] Linus, not Torvalds. Watch the
| video. You have already decided that it is the miners
| that are screwing you over, and even when presented with
| evidence, you to the contrary, you keep shilling NVDA.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfIibTBaoMM
| dahart wrote:
| Sorry, you're right, I misunderstood the Linus reference
| as Torvals not Linus Tech Tips.
|
| But so you count reductionist click bait opinion
| commentary on YouTube as "evidence"? Commentary that
| comes from a company who's profit motive is driven by
| clicks and attention? Saying that companies primarily
| care about their bottom line is tautological, it contains
| no information. It's still a straw man regarding whether
| or not segmenting 3060s is a net positive for gamers.
|
| Last chance... you still haven't addressed the first-hand
| market effect on gamers of trying to get miners to buy
| something else. You haven't yet backed your claim that
| this is bad for gamers right now. I've basically agreed
| with what you said might happen, that the second hand
| market won't look like what happened in 2018. I can only
| assume that if ad-hominems are going to be the response
| to an honest question to what you said, then you don't
| actually have an answer?
| qqii wrote:
| Gamers are getting screwed by Nivida today since the
| silicone they normally bin as gaming cards are being
| allocated to mining cards.
|
| In return they're only given the 3060 which is still
| profitable for miners and Nividia refuses to restrict
| mining on any other gaming Geforce series card.rxqy
|
| Miners are also screwing over gamers by buying their
| gaming cards today. In future miners will be a positive
| for games as they flood the used market with gaming
| cards.
|
| Neither are altruistic here.
| dahart wrote:
| > the silicone they normally bin as gaming cards are
| being allocated to mining cards.
|
| That's an _assumption_ , it's speculation. If true, it
| means there will be no 3060s for gamers because they'll
| sell out as CMP, in contradiction to what Nvidia said. We
| will see if your assumption comes true...
|
| I don't know why your speculative assumption makes any
| sense. If the chips that could be sold to gamers were
| being sold to miners instead and effectively "screwing"
| gamers, then it means that there's no point to segmenting
| the market, no advantage for Nvidia. It would be no
| different than letting miners buy the 3060s, and just not
| having CMP cards.
|
| > In future miners will be a positive for games as they
| flood the used market with gaming cards.
|
| That doesn't make up for the losses to gamers up front,
| it does not compensate by 100%, it can't. It would be
| better (for gamers) if there was no bubble.
| MAGZine wrote:
| If they just put these chips into regular cards then they
| could eventually be resold, to gamers, at a great price.
|
| Instead, during a global silicon shortage, nvidia is
| producing silicon that has one use and then into the
| trash.
| dahart wrote:
| You're making a huge assumption that they could be
| resold, even if they're the same chips. This could be an
| entirely new market for chips that have yield defects in
| the graphics units, that will not ever work for games,
| and were previously already put in the trash.
|
| And your theory doesn't explain two things: - how this
| hurts gamers now, and - why if Nvidia just wanted profit
| and the chips are useful for games, why wouldn't Nvidia
| simply do nothing and let the miners buy all the 3060s.
| Wouldn't that be the most profitable thing here?
|
| In fact, why wouldn't Nvidia just hike the price of the
| 3060? They could make a lot more money on miners if they
| wanted to, and really screw gamers. But that's not what's
| happening. So from a gamer's perspective, I just don't
| get being mad at Nvidia rather than being mad at the
| miners who caused this to happen, _again_.
| qqii wrote:
| > You're making a huge assumption that they could be
| resold, even if they're the same chips. This could be an
| entirely new market for chips that have yield defects in
| the graphics units, that will not ever work for games,
| and were previously already put in the trash.
|
| Chip binning is nothing new, the article even explains
| this phenomenon.
| dahart wrote:
| Fully agree. Didn't suggest otherwise. That doesn't mean
| that the CMP cards are binning in the exact same way. I
| mean, isn't it a guarantee that the binning criteria
| change here to accommodate CMP? Isn't it entirely
| possible that the new bins are opportunities to sell
| wafers that couldn't be sold to gamers at all? Nvidia
| already has market segments for compute cards with no
| video. Yes, I'm speculating. So is parent & the article.
| I'm not sure it even matters. What matters is that gaming
| supply is less destroyed by mining demand.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| > And your theory doesn't explain two things: - how this
| hurts gamers now, and - why if Nvidia just wanted profit
| and the chips are useful for games, why wouldn't Nvidia
| simply do nothing and let the miners buy all the 3060s.
| Wouldn't that be the most profitable thing here?
|
| No it is not. If they mis-predict when the mining craze
| ends, they will be stuck with a huge inventory and no way
| to deal with it. The reason they will be stuck with the
| inventory is because the miners will be able to sell the
| second hand cards at a rate that NVDA simply can't
| compete with, so they end up as the bag holders just like
| it happened with the 1xxx series.
|
| Infact, I'd wager that DLSS and RTX were used as a hacky
| solution to drive people away from the 1xxx series
| because the 1xxx series was more than sufficient for
| 1080p gaming - which is the most common resolution. The
| 3xxx series, even the 3060 is an overkill even for 1440p
| let alone 1080p.
|
| This, to me, suggests that had NVDA not gimped the
| hashrate of the 3060, once the craze was over and the
| market was flooded with 2nd hand 3060, people would not
| be incentivised to buy anything above a used 3060 because
| it is a) an overkill for 1440p@120hz and b) it has much
| higher perf/$ than anything NVDA could offer with the
| 3xxx or 4xxx series and it wouldn't make any sense to go
| with anything higher anyways because 4k gaming doesn't
| seem worth it unless you are playing on a TV.
| dahart wrote:
| Strange theories on top of strange theories. The GTX 1080
| is good enough forever? People are using 1080p forever?
| Games are staying put with the fidelity and textures and
| poly counts they had 5 years ago, and not improving any
| more? Last time I checked, there weren't all that many
| games that run at 60Hz 1080p and never dip.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| What are you talking about here? My argument is rather
| simple and you are wilfully misinterpreting it to make
| your statement. If you want to game, at 1080p, there is
| very little reason to spend money on a big upgrade, even
| going with 3xxx series is an overkill.
|
| > Last time I checked, there weren't all that many games
| that run at 60Hz 1080p and never dip.
|
| CITATION NEEDED.
|
| The 3060ti is benchmarked at 4k hitting mid to low 50s in
| high settings in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and hitting
| 100fps at 1440p with 0.1% minimums at 90fps.
| dahart wrote:
| > even going with 3xxx series is an overkill.
|
| Then why do you care at all about the 3060 segmentation
| into CMP cards?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I dislike companies that pay lipservice or are
| pretentious like NVDA. On the positive side, I own
| shares, so I am making money off of it.
| dahart wrote:
| > I dislike companies that pay lipservice or are
| pretentious like NVDA. On the positive side, I own
| shares, so I am making money off of it.
|
| Finally, the truth of the matter. ;)
| qqii wrote:
| You're taking his words out of proportion. Just by
| looking at the steam hardware survey you'll see that the
| majority of gamers buy mid range cards and own 1080p
| monitors. The most popular games aren't the latest AAA
| titles either.
|
| There isn't a game option survey but I'd bet most gamers
| with mid range cards run AAA games on medium as they
| value being able to play over a beautiful slideshow.
| dahart wrote:
| An Ampere mid-range card is different than a Pascal mid-
| range card, 3 or 4 generations older depending on how you
| count.
|
| > I'd bet most gamers with mid range cards run AAA games
| on medium as they value being able to play over a
| beautiful slideshow.
|
| Exactly, I agree. That statement supports what I said and
| contradicts parent's comment "the 1xxx series was more
| than sufficient for 1080p gaming".
| qqii wrote:
| The GTX 970 is just borderline whilst the GTX 1080 is
| "pretty much sufficient" for modern games according to
| this benchmark: https://youtu.be/bhLlHU_z55U
| Shivetya wrote:
| I am may be off base here, but isn't this how the Nvidia
| Geforce Now service work? Rendering on their systems and
| streaming to a dedicated client?
|
| I have used this service to play a few different games
| which I have licenses too where the developer no longer
| supports Mac; oddly this seems to have gotten worse with
| M1 chips.
| jffry wrote:
| > oddly this seems to have gotten worse with M1 chips.
|
| If a developer wasn't around or willing to recompile and
| test their game on x64 to support Catalina (which dropped
| support for 32-bit apps), then it's not surprising to me
| that they are also unable or unwilling to recompile and
| test and support the game on M1 ARM chips.
| gsich wrote:
| Not usable without display ports.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| You can still render without a display port and use the
| output image to for example stream it to another display.
| gsich wrote:
| You need another GPU for that. Not really practical.
| M277 wrote:
| I don't know about that. Plenty of people are using Intel
| non-F CPUs which have iGPUs.
|
| Honestly, the worrying part is that NVIDIA may block
| this. If I remember right, they did something similar
| back in 2017 with the P106 mining cards (GTX 1060
| equivalent) when people bought them for cheap.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| How do you think gaming streaming services work?
| gsich wrote:
| So I need two machines to used this GPU? Thats even
| worse. I know some trickery with an onboard CPU maybe
| works and thought you meant that.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > So I need two machines to used this GPU?
|
| No? Why would they need to be in different machines? You
| can stream from one GPU to another, whether they're in
| the same machine or not. One GPU may be a cheap little
| one built into your motherboard. You probably already
| have it anyway!
|
| And even if you did need two machines... again that's how
| gaming streaming services work. Cheap end-user machines
| or iPad or just TV, and then a gaming system streaming
| video output somewhere else.
| gsich wrote:
| >No? Why would they need to be in different machines? You
| can stream from one GPU to another, whether they're in
| the same machine or not. One GPU may be a cheap little
| one built into your motherboard. You probably already
| have it anyway!
|
| Thats not really called "streaming". So given that
| somewhere in this thread there was a youtube link on how
| to do that, which required testmode in Windows - it's
| still not practical.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Thats not really called "streaming".
|
| The data would literally be streamed along a bus from one
| storage to another. The name 'streaming' literally
| appears in some APIs you'd use to do it!
| gsich wrote:
| Then you need to use the word "streaming" correctly.
| Video streaming is not copying data to a different frame
| buffer. Nvidia with their Optimus technology doesn't call
| this "streaming". You used the same term for both.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > streaming is not copying data to a different frame
| buffer
|
| That's exactly what streaming means as a technical term:
|
| Examples:
|
| https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL_TextureAccess
|
| https://community.khronos.org/t/streaming-texture/60774
|
| https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Buffer_Object_Streami
| ng
| SXX wrote:
| Nvidia will make sure that no one can use "mining" cards
| like this.
| logicchop wrote:
| Agree on the "evil" part (or maybe "irritating"), but if I
| recall correctly from a few years ago, Nvidia has done this
| before with full access to the encoder only being available in
| the Quadro line.
| Havoc wrote:
| Good point re landfill - haven't seen anyone else raise that
| IMTDb wrote:
| So people are going to build entire data centers to look for
| combination of bytes that yield a hash that is funny looking.
| And when it doesn't become profitable to do so anymore, the
| e-waste issue it generates is somehow the fault on the chip
| maker ?
| asxd wrote:
| Well yeah, since if the chip maker didn't come up with this
| product strategy the extra e-waste would be further
| limited.
|
| I think we can probably all agree that corporations should
| have some responsibility in the ramifications of their
| products.
| swinglock wrote:
| Yes. When a chip maker takes a multipurpose product that
| can be reused when no longer fit for one purpose, and
| instead makes it single purpose and not reusable for market
| segmentation reasons, they are absolutely somehow at fault.
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| >And when somehow it doesn't become profitable to do so
| anymore, the e-waste issue it generates is somehow the
| fault on the chip maker ?
|
| Well yeah, because the alternative would be that the miners
| dump them on the secondary market to gamers.
| oakesm9 wrote:
| Gamers will generally try to avoid buying preowned graphics
| cards that have been used for mining. Running them 24/7 at full
| pelt tends to "age" they quicker than one that's just been used
| for gaming.
| vimy wrote:
| Can electronics actually wear out?
| agumonkey wrote:
| One phenomenon I know is electromigration, changes in the
| material structure that modifies its electrical property.
|
| Another less related to electronics, is simple heat cycles.
| mbajkowski wrote:
| Additionally, transistors can experience aging through
| various mechanisms [1], some of which are permanent and
| some of which can be fixed with a reset. Most manifest
| via a shift in threshold voltage of the transistors,
| which can impact the operating frequency of chips or
| stability of sensitive circuits such as memory cells.
| When ICs are designed they usually have a lifetime
| operating profile, i.e 5y or 10y with max voltage and
| operation for x% of that lifetime at a given temperature.
| Simulations are then run pre and post degradation to
| ensure requirements can be met. Different fabs such as
| tsmc and samsung will provide models/info for the
| transistor aging as part of their design tool kits.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_aging
| falcolas wrote:
| Yes. It's estimated that modern electronics have a lifespan
| of about 5 years. And they don't always fail in obvious (or
| obviously bad) fashion.
|
| Here's a fun report from NASA that I love to cite (it is
| also the citation for my lifespan claim).
|
| https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFai
| l...
| Delk wrote:
| In case someone goes looking for the source for that
| citation, it's on slide/page 37. It further cites another
| web page which no longer exists but is available at the
| Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20150906010
| 133/http://www.aerosp...
|
| Both pages are focused on aerospace engineering (and
| perhaps fault-tolerant systems in general), so I'm not
| sure how I'd rate them as authoritative sources for the
| lifespan of electronics in general. Possible faults in a
| gaming GPU might not be as critical if they cause
| something to fail once a year, for example.
| tw04 wrote:
| Absolutely, it's materials science. Most electronics like
| this aren't meant to be run full-tilt 24/7, especially not
| under the conditions that crypto mining typically occurs.
| Subpar cooling, potentially dirty air - so lots of dust and
| particulate.
|
| Not to mention crypto miners will often have the GPUs
| overclocked on top of running full tilt to get every last
| hash out of it. It's about as brutal of a situation as you
| can get for a GPU.
| gruez wrote:
| >Not to mention crypto miners will often have the GPUs
| overclocked on top of running full tilt to get every last
| hash out of it. It's about as brutal of a situation as
| you can get for a GPU.
|
| This is false because miners often undervolt to achieve
| better efficiency. The popular GPU mining algorithms are
| all memory-bound, so you can undervolt your core clocks
| quite a bit and still get >95% of the original
| performance.
| Retric wrote:
| That depends on how valuable the last 5% of your hash
| rate is and local electricity prices. Running an OC
| especially for memory can objectively be the correct
| choice.
|
| For collage dorms for example rarely charge based on
| electricity use. Some apartment complexes also include
| electricity as part of the rent.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Power cost is not typically something people consider
| when deciding to overvolt. Have you ever done any mining?
|
| Most people prioritize the longevity of the cards. Resale
| value is not negligible.
| Retric wrote:
| Yes though I stopped. At 22c/kWh it's 2$/year per watt.
| Which makes a huge difference when optimizing your setup
| and cooling.
| deepakhj wrote:
| I'm running at 50% gpu which lowers my tdp to 165 watts
| and gpu temp of 70C.
| gruez wrote:
| >For collage dorms for example rarely charge based on
| electricity use. Some apartment complexes also include
| electricity as part of the rent.
|
| Those situations are rare. A student in a college dorm
| isn't going to be able to afford multiple GPUs for a
| mining rig, and if he's mining with one GPU, he's likely
| going to keep it when the crash comes rather than trying
| to sell it into a flooded market. Apartment mining is
| more believable, but even then power consumption is going
| to be an issue for them because of noise. They're also
| going to be vastly outnumbered (in terms of GPUs
| operated) by professional miners because most people
| don't have a few thousand dollars to drop on generating
| highly speculative assets.
| miloshadzic wrote:
| Yes
| nottorp wrote:
| Dunno about the silicon, but the cooling system will be
| absolutely hosed after a year or two of running at top
| speed 24/7.
| bserge wrote:
| Not if you have filters set up and clean/change them
| regularly. I'm assuming miners monitor their
| temperatures, as well, as long as it's under 80 degC,
| chips will work for years under load. Though VRM
| components are of rather poor quality compared to GPUs,
| CPUs and RAM, that's a major failure point.
| rualca wrote:
| > Can electronics actually wear out?
|
| It depends what you mean by "wear out". Hardware does fail
| with time.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermo-mechanical_fatigue
| Toutouxc wrote:
| The second article mentions thermal cycling -- I always
| thought that running 24/7 is actually less damaging then
| cycling (i.e. a gaming rig or a MacBook that does
| 30->90->30 degC multiple times a day.)
| rualca wrote:
| For the wear and tear of thermal cycling to pile up, it's
| not required to have reboots or shutdowns. All it takes
| is to have temperature fluctuations that in turn developt
| stress fluctuations, which induce fatigue wear on
| materials. Low amplitude cycles are better and less
| damaging than high amplitude cycles, but the damage is
| still there building up.
|
| To put things in perspective, not so long ago it was
| believed that below a certain stress delta some materials
| were immune to fatigue and practically eternal. However
| it was soon apparent that that belief was not factual,
| and a phenomenon labelled very high cycle fatigue started
| to become a research topic. This type of fatigue is
| characterized by cracks being induced even at very low
| stress levels due to defects such as impurities and even
| crystal size in metal matrices.
| mckirk wrote:
| There is the effect of 'electromigration' at least, which
| causes atoms of conducting materials to be transported over
| time because of the current (if I understand it correctly).
| That might be an issue over the long term, especially at
| the ridiculously small scale of chip manufacturing we've
| reached now.
| atleta wrote:
| Not only that, there is also diffusion caused by
| difference of concentration, which is increased by heat.
| And you have that concentration difference at the p-n
| boundaries/junctions in an IC.
|
| Though I'm not sure how much actual damage you'd see in
| practice, whether the ICs tend to die with intense use
| before e.g. the capacitors mentioned above.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Takes 100yrs on current processes to break a particularly
| weak bond wire.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| But how big of an issue is that really in practice? You
| still see 20+ years old machines chugging along just
| fine.
| nitrogen wrote:
| That's a bit of survivor bias. I used to buy truckloads
| of old PCs and recycle them when I was a teenager. I
| initially thought that this old tech was just really
| built to last, but in reality I was selecting the 1% or
| less that could survive being shoved around a rat-feces-
| infested warehouse at freezing temperatures before ending
| up in my parents' garage, to their dismay. Those
| survivors seemed to last freaking forever afterward, but
| again, that's because they were the random fraction that
| just happened to have that perfect balance of durability.
|
| When I started buying new parts as an adult, the failure
| rates of e.g. GPUs were pretty disappointing in
| comparison to the biased expectations I had from those
| survivor PCs.
| bserge wrote:
| Haha, I also noticed that used parts that lasted ~2-4
| years have a lower failure rate than new ones. All the
| ones that fail, fail early, and the surviving ones go
| through a sort of "extended burn-in" so to say.
| megameter wrote:
| I have a longstanding habit of buying my laptops
| refurbished - so, a few months of wear and sometimes a
| "scratch and dent". To date, every one of them has been a
| winner on longevity.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Yes. Higher temperature leads to faster degradation of
| capacitors. My experience with running PC routers 24/7 in
| non-air-conditioned spaces (with ~40 degC in summer) is
| that after 5+ years systems that were rock-stable started
| to crash/reboot once per several days and must be replaced.
| dantillberg wrote:
| As someone with experience running a GPU mining farm for ~2
| years, my anecdote: I had about 5% of cards break down
| during that time, and the majority of those were just fan
| failures.
| ShinyRice wrote:
| That is not quite true. Miners that know what they're doing
| will undervolt their cards in order to improve power
| efficiency, which makes cards run cooler and at lower power.
| Retric wrote:
| You can't tell from an eBay listing that a given card was
| undervolt or overclocked. On average it's far more risky
| than buying a gamers card which, so their best avoided.
|
| Also, undervolting isn't always the correct choice it
| depends on how valuable the coin being minded is relative
| to energy costs. Someone mining in their dorm room for
| example may not be paying based on electricity useage.
| gsich wrote:
| With ETH you underclock core and overclock memory. Core
| will lead to vastly lower power consumption, while still
| maintaining hashrate.
| Sholmesy wrote:
| Citation needed?
|
| My understanding was that gaming cards are pushed far
| harder, at higher temps, with fluctuating power and
| thermals, which causes more issues than a single stable
| power limit and temperature
| dahart wrote:
| Where is your understanding coming from? There is no such
| thing as pushing cards "far harder, at higher temps" than
| when mining or doing other compute tasks that run the GPU
| at 100%. Failure rates land squarely on the side of
| higher temps, and the reasons are well understood https:/
| /electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/444474/can-i...
|
| You might be thinking of spinning disk drives rather than
| GPUs. A lot of people suggest that leaving an HDD powered
| up and spinning is better than spinning up and down
| frequently, due to the temperature going up and down a
| lot and the added wear on this mechanical device. This is
| completely different from a GPU though.
| mlyle wrote:
| Higher temps are bad, but thermal cycles are equally bad
| or worse. Different things on the card have different
| thermal coefficients of expansion. Getting warm and
| cooling makes everything flex and stresses solder joints,
| wire bonds, and thermal interfaces.
|
| Miner cards have longer, sustained high temps. This is
| bad for life.
|
| Gamer cards have lots of thermal cycles. This is very bad
| for life.
|
| Miner cards are more likely to be undervolted to improve
| power efficiency and thermals. This is good for life.
| (Lower peak temperature, less electromigration).
|
| Gamer cards are more likely to be overvolted and
| overclocked to improve peak performance. This is very bad
| for life. (higher peak temperatures, more
| electromigration).
|
| https://www.dfrsolutions.com/hubfs/Resources/services/Tem
| per...
| Retric wrote:
| That's testing for thermal cycling over wide temperature
| ranges or longer lifespans. GPU's are used indoors and
| don't have a very long lifespan.
|
| The major risk factor for GPU's is electromigration which
| is a major factor in GPU lifespan and directly relates to
| usage. A 40 hour a week gamer is extremely rare, but a
| mining GPU is pulling 168 hours a week.
| mlyle wrote:
| Electromigration is a small risk factor in any kind of
| reasonable life. Especially if not overvolted (which is
| something that mostly gamers do-- miners are more likely
| to undervolt).
|
| Solder fatigue breaking of solder balls is common. I have
| fixed lots of GPUs by reflowing them. GPUs do cycle over
| a large temperature range-- delta-T can be 50C+. While
| maps are loading, etc, you can have delta-T's of 25C+
| every few minutes.
|
| Indeed, you have lots of people doing this:
|
| https://turbofuture.com/computers/How-to-Fix-a-Dead-
| Graphics... https://www.instructables.com/How-to-repair-
| your-Graphics-Ca... https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Temporar
| ily+Repair+a+Lost+Cause...
|
| This is a thermal cycling induced failure mode. (Of
| course, a home oven doesn't accomplish proper reflow, so
| this is more of a "fix things for a couple months" trick
| as described in the posts).
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Mining cards are run near always, while gaming cards are
| usually pushed only a small number of hours per day.
|
| I have no data to back this up but anecdotally this makes
| a huge difference in wear.
| locuscoeruleus wrote:
| Huge difference in wear, yes. But not in the direction
| you think, I think. Warming up an cooling down is more
| damaging for a card than running constant temperature. It
| 'jiggles' parts more.
| AnHonestComment wrote:
| That seems true of structural components but untrue of
| silicon, where the heat output difference is _literally_
| the GPU being jiggled more aggressively inside by the
| miner.
|
| Heat dissipation is due to jiggling the tiny gates a
| little every time you fire one: which cycle much more
| often in the mining case -- at a higher temperature,
| where there's more likely to be damage.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| GPUs are not mechanical parts (well save for the fans but
| those can be replaced). I would imagine thermal stress
| from heating and cooling would be the biggest issue - you
| don't get that under constant load.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Heat = bad for silicon. Also electromigration. And
| probably a couple other effects I don't know about.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| Heat is bad, but MTTF at usually achievable temperatures
| is hundreds or thousands of years.
|
| Electromigration matters on the order of 100 years.
| namibj wrote:
| Well, tell that to my chipset's SATA controllers
| (Sandbridge generation).
|
| Intel messed up their life expectancy calculations, and
| thus they died after 2~3 years. I think 2 are still
| alive.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| The Sandy Bridge SATA issue did make big waves back then
| and Intel did a recall IIRC.
|
| Only the B2 stepping of chipsets should be affected by
| this tough.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-
| in-6...
|
| https://techreport.com/news/20326/intel-finds-flaw-in-
| sandy-...
| o-__-o wrote:
| Looks like you should have put a fan on that chipset.
| Like your GPU, which runs at extreme temperatures for
| extended periods of time!
| spyder wrote:
| Also, machines used for mining can be put in cooler places
| and with better cooling than an average home with a gamer
| PC.
| deepakhj wrote:
| Miners will under volt, under clock, and boost memory speeds
| in order to keep temperatures and fan speeds at a lower
| level. Card failures affect profits.
| trhway wrote:
| first they came for the miners... As Nvidia opens itself to
| those games, i can see how Russia or China say would legislate
| for the drivers to have to refuse to run say specific crypto
| algorithms or specific neural nets training if it includes
| specific names, terms, phrases.
|
| "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."
|
| open source drivers have been long due. Now there is real
| $Billions staked on that need.
| ezoe wrote:
| Yes. I am using Nvidia GPU even though I know it's so non-free,
| so unfriendly to the point Linus gave the middle finger and
| all. But I thought it's okay since I were to use it for
| proprietary video games anyway. But I have never thought they
| are this evil. With this move, Nvidia products are forever
| included in my boycott list.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| I assume it can still be used for other CUDA applications,
| although I doubt that miners will care much about that.
| qqii wrote:
| Who will be buying it though? Last time this happened mining
| cards without display output were sold much cheaper than
| their equivalent counterparts.
|
| The only saving grace they had were hacky Looking Glass style
| solutions.
| the8472 wrote:
| Machine learning? VFX shops?
| qqii wrote:
| These industries certainly didn't buy mining cards last
| time.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > The CMP version is a straight-to-landfill product. As soon as
| it stops being profitable for mining it will have zero resale
| value, and become e-waste.
|
| Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto mining
| technology. It's straight to the landfill every 6 months.
|
| Bitcoin generates 100 GRAMS of ewaste for every transaction.
| Every 2 transactions consumes as much energy as driving a Tesla
| from SF to NY [edit for clarity: round trip] and as much ewaste
| as throwing your phone out the window along the way.
|
| Don't hate the player; hate the game. Nvidia is maximizing
| shareholder value as per their charter, creating differentiated
| product offerings for different segments. Quadro, RTX, CMP.
| It's all segmentation, and better, likely binning. I wonder if
| CMP products are just failed RTX and Quadro parts they're
| offloading. For every card Nvidia doesn't sell, Ant will sell 2
| ASIC miners.
|
| Time to push back on proof of waste, and end the economic
| incentive.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > Like literally every other piece of Bitcoin or crypto
| mining technology.
|
| I don't get this comparison because Nvidia isn't a Bitcoin
| mining technology company. Or at least they weren't until a
| week ago. When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a
| set of 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to
| gamers. But these mining cards are just e-waste.
|
| > Don't hate the player; hate the game.
|
| Games don't exist without players.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| > When someone deems it not profitable to mine on a set of
| 50 GPUs they purchased, they can resell those to gamers.
|
| Except they can't. GPUs used for mining are trash - too
| much heat and stress continuously.
|
| Think about the average load on a consumer card used
| normally - maybe a daily 4 hour gaming binge max?
|
| Meanwhile a mining card is running near 100% capacity 24/7,
| probably without enough cooling.
| [deleted]
| threeseed wrote:
| No. It's time to push back on Bitcoin.
|
| It is disgraceful to watch people such as Elon Musk and most
| of the VCs put money ahead of the environment.
| ubersync wrote:
| I am sorry you did not buy it when it was cheaper. No need
| to hate it now because you were stupid back then.
| ardy42 wrote:
| >> No. It's time to push back on Bitcoin.
|
| >> It is disgraceful to watch people such as Elon Musk
| and most of the VCs put money ahead of the environment.
|
| > I am sorry you did not buy it when it was cheaper. No
| need to hate it now because you were stupid back then.
|
| You're obviously defensively making some false
| assumptions. The big one is probably assuming that people
| are primarily motivated by greed and jealousy, and that
| other motivations are fake and meant to disguise that.
|
| And for the record, I agree with the GP, and I've made
| quite a bit of money off of this bubble by selling some
| bitcoins _I mined_ a decade ago.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| This comment is in clear violation of the site's rules.
| Please don't be deliberately rude to others here and try
| to interpret comments in good faith rather than as some
| sort of veiled attack.
| caycep wrote:
| Given the energy requirements and how it's kind of morphed
| into this beast of greed, I'm inclined to agree....but how
| to pull this off?
|
| Fiat bans cannot really work well against just doing math.
| Taxation schemes/financial regs tamping down on bitcoin
| speculation, what you can spend it on? By design I don't
| think you can just pump money into bitcoin in order to
| "deflate" its value without similarly consuming a lot of
| energy?
| ubersync wrote:
| I am sick and tired of this bullshit logic, about how much
| energy per transaction Bitcoin uses. Bitcoin's blocksize is
| being forcibly kept low. It can easily be increased 100 MB,
| if not more, without causing any serious issues. That will
| increase the number of transactions per second to a thousand.
| Plus, comparing a Bitcoin transaction to a traditional
| transaction is like comparing apples and oranges. A Bitcoin
| transaction is completely different as it is irreversible.
| That energy consumption is the price we pay to make sure our
| transactions remain irreversible.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| On the other hand if you were a person who needed to make a
| transaction in person because you can't use banks for that
| (I.e. mafia) you would take that ride and probably spend even
| more energy commuting several people (arms, team of people)
| for a sufficiently large transaction.
|
| In the Wild West you would need maybe several horses each in
| order to exchange a certain amount of gold. What does the
| carbon usage be here?
|
| Bitcoin solves that problem in software, which is
| magnificent. For the same carbon footprint.
| hobofan wrote:
| > It's straight to the landfill every 6 months.
|
| Isn't that a trend that has mostly ended or is about to end
| now? It looks like that was mostly caused by nm process
| improvements for ASIC chips in the past. With 7/5nm ASIC
| chips it seems like it should now progress as fast/slowly as
| the nm process capabilities of chip manufacturers in general.
|
| Not pro-BTC, but this seem very much like faulty
| interpolation based on a past trend.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I was wondering the exact same thing a couple days ago,
| would be great if a more knowledgable person could confirm
| this
| Closi wrote:
| Technology continues to advance - I don't think there is
| enough evidence to say that we have hit a fundamental limit
| on computer/asic power/speed performance yet.
|
| 3nm will hit in 2024, but until then there will always be
| advances in chip design. It's not just about speed, it's
| also about thermals, power consumption and manufacture
| price to work out the TCO of mining.
| hobofan wrote:
| > 3nm will hit in 2024, but until then there will always
| be advances in chip design.
|
| I'm not an expert on chip design, but I would have
| assumed that there isn't a lot of room for improvements
| of ASIC mining chips, given that they are probably a
| straightforward implementation of the hashing algo used
| in Bitcoin (and that a few thousand+ times), in contrast
| to CPU design which is more dependent on other
| computing/hardware trends.
| Closi wrote:
| Well even without chip design, for instance if you
| decrease unit cost, that also has the impact of changing
| the mining landscape because many more ASIC miners can
| enter the game.
|
| Also remember an ASIC miner will generally use more than
| it costs in electricity each year, so a relatively small
| improvement in hashes / watt makes a big difference to
| overall profitability.
|
| CPU design is more complex, but also has more people
| working in the space and has been going for longer. I
| just get sceptical if someone says _this is as good as it
| is going to get_ because history shows usually those
| predictions end up being wrong. As a child I thought
| Super Mario 64 was as good as computer graphics were ever
| going to get...
| hobofan wrote:
| > for instance if you decrease unit cost
|
| That doesn't diminish the hashing power of the equipment
| you already bought though (and the topic was obsolete
| equipment).
|
| > so a relatively small improvement in hashes / watt
| makes a big difference to overall profitability
|
| Yeah, that's a fair point.
|
| > I just get sceptical if someone says this is as good as
| it is going to get
|
| And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past
| trends, assuming that they will continue to hold. I
| wasn't saying that it won't get better from here on out,
| just that the extreme growth that was mostly fueled by
| quickly going through the existing nm process steps can't
| be sustained, and that from now on it will follow the
| same slowish pace as all chip miniaturization.
| Closi wrote:
| > That doesn't diminish the hashing power of the
| equipment you already bought though (and the topic was
| obsolete equipment).
|
| It means even more equipment to go obsolete when
| improvements come through - and more equipment deployed
| does not equal more bitcoins generated, so it is an issue
| of more hardware that will ultimately end up in landfill
| / being scrapped.
|
| > And I'm skeptical if people blindly extrapolate past
| trends
|
| Well I'm also sceptical of people who blindly assume
| progress won't be made. To quote someone in 2014
| predicting what would happen to ASIC design...
|
| > As an emerging field of IC design, bitcoin mining ASICs
| have experienced rapid evolution over the past two years.
| However, they cannot keep evolving and developing at the
| current rate.
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-can-longer-
| ignore-mo...
|
| Well, still, try see how profitable your 3 year old ASIC
| miner is today...
| roter wrote:
| I checked your numbers against [0]. Road distance NY -> SF =
| 2900 miles [1]. Model S mileage is 290Wh/mi [2]. That is
| 840kW for Tesla against 657kW for a _single_ transaction.
| This is all order-of-magnitude stuff but... wow.
|
| [0] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=road%20distance%20s
| an%...
|
| [2] https://www.zeviecars.com/browse-cars/tesla-model-s
| autocorr wrote:
| Can someone explain how transactions are not insanely cost
| prohibitive for Bitcoin with power consumption figures like
| those? Those numbers would suggest something like >20 USD.
| Is it because most transactions in practice actually happen
| internally on exchanges that avoid putting every individual
| transaction on the blockchain?
|
| I have limited knowledge of Bitcoin so maybe not _quite_
| "explain like I'm five"... but close. :)
| arcticbull wrote:
| Oh that's inflation.
|
| The cost is socialized across the block reward. So long
| as there's more new money coming in than block reward
| paying electric bills on the way out, the cost of a
| transaction is socialized efficiently.
|
| Elon's $1.5B investment only lasted a total of 4 weeks.
| It's already gone. It's in the hands of Chinese coal
| produces now.
| robbiep wrote:
| That is roughly what transaction costs are. In some camps
| this prohibits the technology ever becoming a widespread
| method of payment. If we're going for decentralised
| currency and 10 exchanges control all the low fee
| movement stuff...
| mrb wrote:
| << _Can someone explain how transactions are not insanely
| cost prohibitive_ >>
|
| Because the comments above yours are misleading.
| Transactions don't consume mining energy. Miners expend
| the same amount of energy regardless if they are
| validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.
| paulgb wrote:
| > Miners expend the same amount of energy regardless if
| they are validating 1 or 1000 transactions in a block.
|
| This ignores the transaction fees. Even though they are
| only 10-20% of the total fees a miner collects, 10-20% of
| a round-trip from SF to NYC is still a lot of energy.
| arcticbull wrote:
| That's some high class mental gymnastics though. Because
| if you divide the energy spent across the number of
| transactions you land back where you started. And if the
| energy was burned for 0 transaction capacity then the
| underlying would be worthless. Secure but worthless. So
| it doesn't take much inference to realize that the value
| is in transactbility.
|
| You'll have to explain to me why when mining a block of
| transactions, it doesn't make sense to break that down on
| a per transaction basis with division.
|
| If the number of transactions in a block ever changes
| I'll change my divisor. Until then the proof is on you
| isn't it?
| tuankiet65 wrote:
| The whole point of Bitcoin mining is to produce a _block_
| , which contains a bunch of transactions. The Bitcoin
| network dictates that each block's SHA256 hash starts
| with a certain number of zeroes, so the only way to
| achieve this is to brute force the block data until you
| find the "winning" block which hashes to a number of
| zeroes.
|
| Once someone finds a winning block, they're rewarded with
| a number of Bitcoin. This subsidies the cost that goes
| into mining that block. However the reward halves after
| every 210k blocks, so as the reward goes down, miners
| will prefer to only include transactions with high fee.
| Eventually the true cost of mining will reflect in the
| transaction fee.
|
| And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a
| transaction": energy is used to produce a _block_ , which
| contains an _arbitrarily defined_ number of transactions.
| Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which
| works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin
| Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy
| used to produce a block doesn 't change, but the energy
| used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.
| mlyle wrote:
| > And to add to the "it costs 657.6kWh to process a
| transaction": energy is used to produce a block, which
| contains an arbitrarily defined number of transactions.
| Right now, Bitcoin Core limits each block to 1MB, which
| works out to about 2k transactions per block. If Bitcoin
| Core were to increase the limit to say 10MB, the energy
| used to produce a block doesn't change, but the energy
| used to process a transaction goes down tenfold.
|
| Oh, it could be somewhat improved. Then it'd be "only" 65
| kilowatt hours, compared to ~1 watt-hour for conventional
| payment networks.
|
| (And, this assumes that the increase in bitcoin price
| doesn't cause more mining).
| mlyle wrote:
| kWhr, not kW. It's also 1/2 to 3/4th the electricity used
| in a month by a typical US household.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| kWh, if we're going to be pedantic, which I approve of.
| :)
|
| It bugs me that even quality newspapers frequently
| mistake _power_ (watt (W)) for _energy_ (joules (J) or
| watt-hour (Wh, often with the usual metric prefixes)).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| arcticbull wrote:
| Yeah the distance thing was ball parked, based on the last
| time I ran the numbers. To your point, I accidentally
| omitted to say "round trip from SF to NY" - I also used the
| great circle distance (2586mi) and ballparked a phone at
| 200g, roughly the weight of an iPhone.
|
| Thank you for going through the numbers and adding the
| sources. I was on my phone and meant to circle back.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Bitcoin transactions use almost no power. Bitcoin SECURITY
| uses an immense amount of power, in order to make a 51%
| attack difficult.
|
| I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying its not
| the transactions that use power.
| SSLy wrote:
| No one mines bitcoin on GPU's anymore, since 8? years.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Which cryptocurrency of the day is mined does not matter to
| the argument.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Yeah this just isn't true. Given the rally in coin prices
| GPU mining has come back to the black if you have
| cheap/free access to electricity.
|
| With a 3080 you can make over $12/day in BTC and the
| electricity costs required are less than $2 in a majority
| of the US [0].
|
| [0] https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-
| calculator/nvidia-rtx...
| deepakhj wrote:
| Btc mining only works on asics. You can mine ethereum on
| gpu's.
|
| NiceHash rents your hash rate to buyers, you mine
| ethereum, while they pay your rewards in btc.
|
| If you want ethereum directly, you can mine for a pool
| like ethermine or flexpool.
| undersuit wrote:
| >Btc mining only works on asics.
|
| No, you can mine Bitcoin on your GPU or CPU. It will
| work.
| lawn wrote:
| Yes it will work. But it will be so slow that you won't
| ever do anything useful with it, so in practice it
| doesn't work.
|
| Go mine Ethereum or Monero instead.
| undersuit wrote:
| They said it didn't work. That's all.
|
| I was just correcting that. Bitcoin isn't unable to be
| run on GPUs or CPUs.
|
| I think that's important to point out.
| Karunamon wrote:
| The link directly contradicts this. Pooled mining with
| BTC (ETH too, but also BTC) on a GPU is something you can
| do and make a modest amount of money right now, to the
| tune of around $5/day at current prices.
|
| There's a profitability floor on hashes/KWh. When coin's
| price goes as sky-high as it has been, it pushed GPU
| mining back into the black. This is likely a temporary
| state of affairs; either the network difficulty will
| increase to where only ASICs can break through, or the
| price will decline.
| deepakhj wrote:
| The link shows paying in btc because they don't give you
| what you mine. You rent your hash rate and people bid on
| it with btc. You're not mining btc directly. I use
| NiceHash at the moment. Your gpu mines ethereum (or
| whatever the most profitable coin is as NiceHash has a
| profit switcher.)
| hobofan wrote:
| Could you explain to me why someone would offer their
| hashing power on NiceHash vs. just directly working for a
| pool?
|
| The main cases I image are:
|
| 1. The miner doesn't want to deal with price fluctuations
| and wants to prevent arbitrage risk
|
| 2. It might be more profitable to outsource smallish
| coins that have to buy hashing power to stabilize their
| network (though that would probably also be covered by
| the profit switcher)
|
| 3. Money laundering <--- Which I assume is the biggest
| portion
| deepakhj wrote:
| I honestly don't understand who's buying the hash power
| on the other side. I think people start with Nicehash
| because it's PnP and easy to use. From there you can look
| at Minerstat which mines directly on pools and offers
| features like triggers and fancy graphs.
|
| Setting up a miner yourself doesn't take much work but it
| won't have profit switching or extra cloud features that
| Nicehash or Minerstat have.
| christoph wrote:
| Weirdly I can somewhat answer this as I've just got into
| NiceHash since this Friday night, mainly as a learning
| experience more than a money making endeavour. I have a
| load of my own company PCs with GPUs like 1080s and 2070s
| we used to rent for VR usage at events that have
| basically been sitting in boxes, idle for the last 12
| months due to COVID. No idea how I ended up down the
| mining rabbit hole on a Friday night, maybe a comment
| here...
|
| Anyway, I now have six machines set up in my
| (previously... freezing cold garage), generating around
| PS20 to PS25 day total, after electricity costs. I'm on a
| metered power supply that is much cheaper at nighttime.
|
| The benefits of NiceHash are:
|
| - super simple set up. Literally an installer, it
| benchmarks the machine and gets to work in minutes. They
| have their own OS as well. That's a rabbit hole for a few
| evenings this week to have some fun with.
|
| - mobile app for monitoring all your rigs - temperatures,
| profitability, etc.
|
| - pretty decent web front end for tracking progress,
| crypto prices, rig stats, etc.
|
| - automatic switching between the most profitable
| algorithms in real-time. If the market are paying money
| for a specific currency/algo, it will swap to where the
| money can be made quickly and automatically without you
| needing to be involved.
|
| - easy to disable specific algorithms that don't work
| well. First day it kept jumping to KawPow, but for me
| this was really poor for profitability on my hardware, so
| it's literally a click to disable that algorithm in their
| software.
|
| I guess it just works, is largely set and forget, but
| offers lots of tweaking, monitoring for those with the
| desire to do that. Is it the most efficient or
| profitable? I'm starting to think not, but I'm still at
| the bottom of the curve for all of this, however,
| NiceHash has provided the perfect springboard into a new
| (to me) world.
|
| BTW, I am fairly anti crypto in general. I'm kind of
| doing this as a learning experience while I have some
| free hours to burn each week on learning about something
| I feel I should know a lot more about while having a bit
| of fun in the process.
| hobofan wrote:
| Thanks for explaining! I would have assumed that there
| are some cross-coin mining pools out there that have a
| similarly good UX, where you would end up with the mined
| coins directly, but it kind of makes sense that it exists
| on that abstraction level.
| christoph wrote:
| There's other mining software and native OS's out there,
| like minerstat that you can seperately link to NiceHash
| or other pools, that abstract it all a level further,
| swapping between pools based on profitablity and probably
| over a year offer a better pay out, but I've not started
| diving into that yet. Minerstat charge 1.65eu per
| worker/per month after the first rig, but seem to offer a
| lot more options/flexibility (more stats, more pools,
| etc.).
| jrrrr wrote:
| [citation needed]
| arcticbull wrote:
| Here ya go: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-
| consumption/
|
| And here: https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-much-
| does-it-cost-to-c...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is it impossible to game on these?
| Hendrikto wrote:
| That's the intention at least. They lack output ports, for
| example.
| solarkraft wrote:
| While officially impossible, theoretically it should be work,
| in the same way as laptop GPUs (the dedicated GPU gives the
| rendered image back to the integrated GPU for seamless
| switching instead of outputing it directly).
|
| It has been tried 2 years ago on LinusTechTips:
| https://youtu.be/TY4s35uULg4
|
| TL;DW: Very weird and extremely unofficial, but it can be
| done.
|
| These might still be some cheap rendering cards on Linux when
| they're used up.
| Animats wrote:
| Depends on what NVidia takes out. If they remove the
| triangle fill units, they're unsuitable for graphics but OK
| for "mining". That leaves the more general purpose parts
| that let you do arithmetic in parallel. Those might also be
| useful for machine learning.
| bserge wrote:
| There's used Tesla M6 cards (top of the range Maxwell GM204
| cores, 8GB of RAM) going for really cheap sometimes. They
| have no video output, but you can use them in laptops with
| hybrid graphics thanks to the output being routed through
| the CPUs IGP as you said.
|
| Needs quite a bit of driver fuckery to have it recognized
| as either a GTX 980m or a Quadro M5000m, and you lose
| HDMI/DP output, but it's not a bad card for an upgrade if
| you only use the internal display.
|
| I'm surprised there are no MXM to PCIe x16 adapters, these
| kinds of cards are cheaper than desktop ones (due to the
| market/pricing being totally screwed) while providing
| similar performance.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Imagine the PlayStation was able to be used to mine crypto.
| Game developers depend on gamers to actually play their games,
| what would you have Sony do? Encourage it or do nothing? Pretty
| sure their obligations to any shareholders would be to limit it
| so more gamers can play and buy games for it.
| RyEgswuCsn wrote:
| One alternative could be for Sony to launch a new line of PS
| that is optimised for crypto mining but way less cost-
| effective for gaming.
| jbay808 wrote:
| They'd be competing for the same production resources.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "See, the truth is, they can do whatever they want with them.
| They bought them motherf**ers." Eazy-E
| bretpiatt wrote:
| "Running on more than 1,700 PS3s that were connected by five
| miles of wire, the Condor Cluster was huge, dwarfing Khanna's
| project, and it used to process images from surveillance
| drones. During its heyday, it was the 35th fastest
| supercomputer in the world."*
|
| Back at PS2/PS3 they were used for computing, Sony actually
| released a kit and had paid staff helping people who wanted
| to build PS2 supercomputers -- a good friend from college
| worked on the project at Sony. They had amazing vector
| processing units in them.
|
| * https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-
| supe...
|
| Article from 2003 on PS2 setups
| https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/05/28/ps2-supercomputer
| friedman23 wrote:
| Sony disabled this functionality later on
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
| derefr wrote:
| Sure, but this still only consumed a tiny fraction of the
| Playstations in production at the time, rather than ~all of
| them. There are only so many HPC labs in the world (and an
| HPC lab using PS3s is a font of good press coverage for
| Sony!) while there are as many crypto-miners as the market
| will bear (and they generate only _negative_ press coverage
| on top.)
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| This example makes no sense to me.
|
| I would have had Sony and friends not create a closed
| ecosystem in the first place.
|
| You're replying in a thread about (compared to consoles)
| general purpose computers, which developers depend on gamers
| actually playing their games on, being effectively DRMed.
|
| I don't particularly care about shareholder obligations in
| this case. I'm glad this incentive structure exists, and it
| doesn't necessarily inform my ethos.
|
| This is being received well by people who are practically
| triggered by the notion of cryptocurrency operations.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| They are obligated to shareholders. But i am not a
| shareholder. I am a gamer who wants to buy a new graphics
| card. So i am going to scream, boycot and lobby government
| against them until the needs of thier shareholders bend a
| little closer to those of thier consumers. Free speech is a
| necessary part of a free market.
|
| Maybe nvidia should be held responsible for thier products.
| Anyone else up to support a law imposing disposal obligations
| on single-use products designed to kill secondary markets?
| When the boom slows, the miners can give these cards back to
| nvidia for environmentally friendly recycling.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| > So i am going to scream, boycot and lobby government
| against them until the needs of thier shareholders bend a
| little closer to those of thier consumers
|
| This line of thinking scares me. It's basically saying
| "they aren't doing what I want so let's use the government
| to make them do what I want!" How is this freedom? Forcing
| people to bend to your will though government is the
| opposite of freedom, and should be used very sparingly
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Unlike certain politicians, i do not consider publicly
| traded corporations to be "people". I dont really care
| about thier feelings, even thier rights. Corporations are
| a legal fiction created for a specific purpose, not
| persons with emotions.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| Why is Free Speech necessary to a Free Market? I thought a
| consumer choosing to spend their dollars was the "speech"
| in a Free Market environment. And when you lobby the
| government, you've kind of thrown out the Free Market
| paradigm.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"And when you lobby the government, you've kind of
| thrown out the Free Market paradigm"
|
| "Lobby the government" that's what bigger corps do to the
| point of buying some. So it is only fair game.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Free speech is also product review, such as LTTs recent
| video on this subject.
|
| Regulation of a market by government doesn't mean
| abandoning free markets. Regulation is an essential part
| of sustaining a free market. Totally non-regulated
| markets quickly devolve into monopoly and other anti-
| consumer evils such as devices, like this, designed to
| kill secondary markets.
| anothernewdude wrote:
| They literally did that with the PS3 for clusters (though not
| for crypto mining) and shut down the ability to do it.
| robert_foss wrote:
| And were sued for doing so. Removing functionality from an
| existing product is not acceptable.
| michaelt wrote:
| which is why they've announced this limitation before the
| 3060's release
| bretpiatt wrote:
| To my knowledge they didn't shut it down, PS4 architecture
| moved to standard x86 PC so no longer advanced vector units
| available through PlayStation that you couldn't get
| separately in an easier to work with way. This led to the
| rise of the current Top 500 which are a mix of CPU and GPU.
| rincebrain wrote:
| No, they famously shut down the ability to use PS3s for
| this and got sued for it.[1]
|
| Not ever having the functionality in the PS4 and later
| doesn't imply they didn't remove it in prior cases.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS
| josefx wrote:
| At least some consoles are sold at a loss to keep the entry
| cost within an acceptable range and expect to recoup that
| from game sales. One PlayStation generation came with a
| somewhat crippled other OS feature. By the time Sony killed
| the feature people already build quite a few PlayStation
| powered compute clusters.
| gruez wrote:
| >Pretty sure their obligations to any shareholders would be
| to limit it so more gamers can play and buy games for it.
|
| It's not really the same because playstations are sold at
| break-even or at a loss with the expectation that follow-up
| revenue would make up for it. On the other hand no such
| dynamic exists for nvidia. For them, sale to a miner is the
| same as a sale to gamer.
| paulie_a wrote:
| I thought this was long ago disproven. That at very early
| stages yes breakeven or small loss happens. But rapidly
| becomes mildly profitable per unit
| gruez wrote:
| Is this as a result of how the r&d expenses are deducted
| against revenue, or manufacturing process improvements?
| M277 wrote:
| Mostly software subscriptions, actually.. things like PS
| Plus, etc. On consoles, you need to pay money
| (subscription) to be able to play multi-player for
| instance (whereas on PC it's free), and games in general
| are more expensive compared to PC (last time I checked).
| johnday wrote:
| This may look true from the perspective of a single sale,
| but in the long term this just doesn't hold up. NVIDIA
| builds a strong and long-held reputation with gamers, and
| are a well renowned name in the field. If they made cards
| for miners at the detriment of gamers, they risk losing
| that valuable market position.
| gruez wrote:
| This is a common sentiment I see on discussion forums,
| but I think it's wishful thinking at best. Most consumers
| aren't enthusiasts that follow these types of news, and
| even the ones who do probably won't care/remember a few
| years down the line. After all, nvidia seems to be doing
| just fine despite their long history of anti-consumer
| practices over the years.
| comex wrote:
| Which anti-consumer practices? That is, given that we're
| talking about gamers.
|
| There's Nvidia's longstanding allergy to open source, but
| that only affects the tiny fraction of gamers who use
| Linux.
|
| There's this hash rate thing, but from a gamer's
| perspective that's pro-consumer.
|
| I suppose you can count their price increases for recent
| GPU generations. But I don't know if that rises to the
| level of "anti-consumer". Especially when they've been
| delivering performance to match.
|
| The best example I can think of is their policy of
| requiring servers to use their more-expensive
| 'professional' line of GPUs. This does hurt gamers, since
| it forces game streaming services using Nvidia cards to
| charge higher prices. That said, among the major
| streaming services, Stadia, xCloud, and PlayStation Now
| all use AMD GPUs, while GeForce Now can skirt the policy
| since it belongs to Nvidia itself. The remaining services
| are relatively obscure - though perhaps they'd be less
| obscure if Nvidia didn't have that policy.
| j1dopeman wrote:
| I think they run the risk of people giving up on pc
| gaming completely or never getting into it in the first
| place. A market that has and should be growing will
| shrink instead.
| Filligree wrote:
| This is already happening. I have friends who would, in
| other circumstances, be building gaming PCs right now, so
| we could play games together, but-
|
| It's simply not possible.
| noxer wrote:
| Would be true if there is healthy competition. And if a
| significant percentage of potential buyers would know
| about it and thus avoid NVIDIA. However in reality most
| customers wont know and they still get the GPU its just
| expensive which they most likely see as a result of the
| pandemic.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Not trying to pick on your comment but I'm always frustrated
| when someone points out "obligations to shareholders". I wish
| people would push back on this more. Sony's obligation when
| building and selling the PlayStation is to the end user
| customer. Not the shareholder. Because if Sony has _only_ the
| shareholder in mind then a gaming console is probably the
| wrong market to be in from a pure profit perspective. Sony 's
| obligation is to the gamer who wants a competitive,
| performant console. If they put out a next-gen console that
| has no games to play nobody will buy it and end up with no
| profits. Organizations have it backwards if they think they
| should be catering to their shareholders. Shareholders
| expectations should be that Sony has expertise in the field
| of consoles and I'm investing in Sony with the understanding
| that I want to invest in that. When I buy Sony stock I don't
| think Sony has bringing me a few more points in profits first
| over doing the right thing and building the best product for
| the end user. I hope that my investing in them allows them to
| better continue to innovate and bring compelling products to
| the market.
|
| Milton Friedman's doctrine was a failed turning point in
| business thinking [0] and unfortunately pervasive in people's
| perspective today. Prominent shareholders often have
| different motives than that of delighting the customer.
| Motives that are very short term profit driven. Such a toxic
| way to purport value.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
| kergonath wrote:
| Thanks. There should be such a comment every time someone
| mentions "but they have to maximise profit" and "think of
| the shareholder". This point of view is not rooted in any
| law or legal principle and is just the Wall Street version
| of "might makes right".
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Of course it is rooted in law, natural law. Imagine a
| company makes a decent profit and then decides its goal
| is not to make so much profit anymore? What do you think
| would happen? I would vouch for Parkinsons Law kicking in
| instantly. This would just end up in a waste of resources
| and misery overall
| kergonath wrote:
| I think I see what you mean, but natural law is something
| else entirely. Under that framework, maximising profit
| for the few at the expense of the rest of society is
| unjust.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Ah didn't know that, thanks! (was translating literally
| from german)
| kergonath wrote:
| There's a bit more here, also interesting:
| https://acoup.blog/2019/12/12/collections-a-trip-through-
| cic...
|
| We could use a revival of these ideas (which were the
| foundation of the enlightenment) in our era of blase
| cynicism.
|
| Then, if I understood, your point goes back to "might
| makes right", as in, we have the power, we might as well
| take the money, and to hell with long term prospects or
| society. It is unfortunate that these people have so much
| influence over the rest of us. It is also a demonstration
| that optimising private interests does not result in
| public good, that is, the invisible hand of the market is
| utter bollocks.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I read this "Motives that are very short term profit
| driven." everywhere but never came to an explanation why
| that would be the case (something above anecdotal level).
| In my understanding DCF is just the natural way to put it.
| Maybe the discounting rate can depend a bit on the
| shareholder, but in large the investment horizon of most
| players should be quite far, given the current "risk-free"
| return.
| windexh8er wrote:
| I don't think you need to look much further than the
| ridiculous analysis of quarterly earnings to support that
| idea.
| A12-B wrote:
| On the contrary, this is the one example of a company doing
| something for the public good even when no one asked them to.
| qqii wrote:
| How so? Take this excerpt from the article:
|
| > Nvidia does state that these GPUs "don't meet the
| specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't
| impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Frankly,
| that doesn't mean much. What does Nvidia do with a GPU that
| normally can't be sold as an RTX 3090? They bin it as a 3080,
| and GA102 chips that can't meet the 3080 requirements can end
| up in a future 3070 (or maybe a 3070 Ti). The same goes for
| the rest of the line. Make no mistake: These are GPUs that
| could have gone into a graphics card. Maybe not a reference
| 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, or 3090, but we've seen TU104 chips in
| RTX 2060 cards, so anything is possible.
|
| Combine with their after market value (see
| https://youtu.be/XfIibTBaoMM), this is no more than Nividia
| trying to spin goodwill whilst padding their bottom line.
| DoctorNick wrote:
| Because cryptocurrency mining is now one of the biggest
| contributors to climate change. It is killing the planet.
| It is a moral imperiative to shut it down by any means
| necessary.
| gruez wrote:
| gp's point is that even though it might have a positive
| effect on climate change, the decision was likely not
| made for altruistic reasons. It's like the apple charger
| debacle from a few months ago.
| imtringued wrote:
| That's neither true nor the reason why Nvidia is doing
| this.
|
| What Nvidia is doing is like a dad making his kids share
| their sweets in a 50:50 ratio by taking advantage of the
| fact that one of his kids has a peanut allergy and the
| other has a walnut allergy and therefore 50% of the
| sweets contain peanuts and the other 50% walnuts.
| kortex wrote:
| It's 121 TWh/y, world total is on the order of 160,000
| TWh/y (primary energy supply), so crypto is less than 1
| part per thousand.
|
| It's huge for pushing numbers around, but hardly "one of
| the biggest contributions".
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
| qqii wrote:
| The source for the BBC article
| (https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons) even gives it as
| 0.48% of total electricity production and 0.55% of total
| electricity consumption. The graph it and the article
| shows us misleading as it only compares electricity and
| not total energy consumption.
| amarshall wrote:
| Sure, but Nvidia is now selling cards specifically
| marketed towards miners (CMP). Their goal appears to be
| profit, little more.
| kamranjon wrote:
| 'One of the biggest contributors to climate change' -
| this is so far from being even remotely true
| _jal wrote:
| Perhaps overstated, but it is a noticeable percentage of
| global electricity use spent on what is at best an
| enabling technology for the somewhat quixotic pursuits of
| a tiny fraction of the population.
|
| You should of course make your own judgments, but many
| people do not consider that a good tradeoff.
| glogla wrote:
| It's not quixotic, it's capitalism in it's purest form.
| They are literally destroying the planet for money and
| don't give a fuck.
| qqii wrote:
| I'd assume you're referring to this source
| (https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons) which gives 0.6% of
| total electricity production.
|
| Out of total energy production that's closer to 0.07%
| (~170,000 TWh in 2019
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-
| substitutio...).
| SXX wrote:
| Keep in mind that bulk of crypto mining is quite
| centralized around the places with cheap elictricity so
| it's also mean cheapest source give highest advantage.
|
| Unlike actual people mining farms can be placed right
| next to power source so it's easier to use Nuclear / Wind
| / Solar / Hydro for such purposes.
| danhor wrote:
| > Unlike actual people mining farms can be placed right
| next to power source so it's easier to use Nuclear / Wind
| / Solar / Hydro for such purposes.
|
| While electricity transportation is an issue, it's not a
| huge one compared to the likes of storage and actually
| having something generating electricity. And, as it turns
| out, a lot of the mining farms just use coal
| (https://decrypt.co/43848/why-bitcoin-miners-dont-use-
| more-re...), with only around 40% of the energy coming
| from renewables. Even _if_ they were only using
| renewables, it 's still not zero carbon, since renewables
| also need to be built & since the total power consumption
| is increased, older coal plants might be used for longer.
|
| For something, where the economic value is comparatively
| low.
| qqii wrote:
| The link in your article to the primary source of the
| Cambridge University survey is unfortunately dead. The
| alternative metric given
| (https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/)
| currency predicts 36.95 Million Tonnes of CO2.
|
| That's 0.1% of total CO2 emissions per year
| (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-
| by-re...) and 0.074% of global CO2eq
| (https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector).
|
| I'd probably agree that this is still pretty high for
| what amount to digital hording.
|
| On the other hand the seccond most popular blockchain
| Ethereum is estimated at half the energy consumption
| (https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption),
| has a plan to move to proof of stake and has a lot more
| economic value.
|
| The space is still new and bitcoin has first mover's
| advantage, name recognition and trust (most hashrate,
| most reviewed codebase, etc).
| qqii wrote:
| How did you reach this conclusion? Do you have some
| sources and numbers?
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-
| substitutio... puts the latest number at 173,340 TWh in
| 2019. This is an underestimate for the current value as
| energy consumption has been increasing.
|
| https://cbeci.org/ estimates the annualised consumption
| based on a 7 day moving average of 120.87 TWh for
| bitcoin. To be generous let's assume all cryptocurrency
| mining is double that for 241.74 TWh.
|
| That's only 0.14% of the total energy production, a lot
| of which comes from renuables (abundant cheap electricity
| means more profits for miners).
|
| Even if you assume the worst case of 1100 gCO2eq/kWh (htt
| ps://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/post/postpn
| ...) that's 265.914 Million Tonnes and
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-
| per-... shows the 2019 value at 36.44 Billion Tonnes
|
| That's a grave overestimate of 0.73% assuming the most
| pollution energy production and even then it doesn't even
| compare to any other sector:
| https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
| Azeralthefallen wrote:
| https://cbeci.org/cbeci/comparisons
|
| Right here it says `20 863 TWh` which is nearly 10 times
| your worst case.
| tyingq wrote:
| I suppose people cracking passwords might buy otherwise
| outdated CMP cards. Could be a boon for that space.
| dheera wrote:
| NVIDIA should instead just require people to take an exam about
| either games or machine learning in order to be able to
| purchase a GPU. Problem solved.
| social_quotient wrote:
| Yeah, imagine if this applied to trucks. No one could use one
| for non truck bed usage. Ford disables ignition if it detects
| the bed is empty after X concurrent uses or miles.
|
| Trucks generally are often wasted (from a green perspective)
| because people like them not for their intended design utility.
|
| Same for single passenger SUV usage etc...
|
| (I drive an SUV - not trolling those that do)
| thgaway17 wrote:
| Yeah it would suck, but if Ford F150s were selling for
| $100,000 because drag racers were buying them up, I don't
| think I'd mind.
| gruez wrote:
| That's not exactly the same because vehicles are essential
| for everyday life (commuting), whereas GPUs aren't.
| ratww wrote:
| GPUs are essential for a few jobs that are essential to
| our society. They're not just for games.
| myself248 wrote:
| We must have different definitions of "essential". I'm
| curious which jobs you're referring to, because to my
| understanding, every aspect of society that I consider
| essential, has existed since before the advent of GPUs.
| marcooliv wrote:
| well, it's fundamental for my business, GPU overpriced
| can affect people's life.
| o-__-o wrote:
| I just want to upgrade my 9 year old pc. I'm not looking
| forward to spending $400 for what should cost $170
| Shared404 wrote:
| Contact local small-scale computer repair shops.
|
| We often have used GPU's for around the price range
| you're looking for. They won't be fantastic, but probably
| an upgrade for a 9 year old machine.
|
| Edit: I should also add, a lot of the really small scale
| shops also don't list 100% of their inventory online,
| with the benefit that it doesn't get scalped up like
| everything else.
| [deleted]
| apricot wrote:
| > Yeah, imagine if this applied to trucks. No one could use
| one for non truck bed usage.
|
| John Deere has entered the chat.
| s3cur3 wrote:
| I think it's important to note that the 3060 is not for sale
| yet. Nvidia is telling everyone up front that this is how
| it's going to work.
|
| The analogy is improved like this: Ford announces in advance
| that their upcoming truck requires a certain usage, and if
| you want whatever special commercial usage, you need to pay a
| premium. You might be grumpy about the upcharge, but this is
| a very different situation from them changing the terms of
| the deal _after_ the sale.
| social_quotient wrote:
| Yeah I thought about commercial usage. And they do
| generally need a specific license types. Eg I can't drive a
| dump truck. But then I started thinking the analogous Tesla
| v100 or something which is higher priced for commercial
| application. Wouldn't it be fair to say nvidia makes the
| 3060-3090 for gamers and not for commercial rendering
| farms. So why is using a gaming gpu for autocad really any
| different than using it for mining.
|
| Implicit somewhere is the economics and supply is that
| nvidia has made these ans knows people use them for work.
| What would be our collective thinking if they made the gpu
| not work for non games?
|
| This would probably increase supply further for the gamers.
| Commercial users should and would pay more since they are
| literally profiting from their use.
|
| Miners would buy the edition now meant for them.
| MikeUt wrote:
| The key difference is a manufacturer exerting control over
| what you're allowed to do with property that is supposedly
| "yours". That the terms were announced ahead of time will
| mean little once this becomes commonplace.
| jowsie wrote:
| This has been commonplace for a long time. See consoles,
| phones, etc.
| ta988 wrote:
| Try scanning a dollar bill and importing it in Photoshop.
| hoppla wrote:
| I am hoping to repurpose the gpu/cmp for a hashcat rig once
| cards no longer provide income for miners. I fear I no longer
| will be able to use GPUs for this, and are crossing my fingers
| for cmps
| [deleted]
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