[HN Gopher] The GPU Sadness Index: Tracking eBay Pricing
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The GPU Sadness Index: Tracking eBay Pricing
Author : rbanffy
Score : 79 points
Date : 2021-02-26 10:44 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| christiansakai wrote:
| EIP1559 and ETH2 will kill miners, hopefully, and I have no
| sympathy. Miners can go to hell.
| zokier wrote:
| I still think it would have been neat experiment for nvidia to
| auction 3000 series instead of attempting traditional sale
| channels. At least then the profits would go in the pockets of
| nvidia instead of scalpers. And if miners are willing to bid
| exorbitant sums then let them fund more gpu r&d then, eventually
| nvidia should be able to push the production quantity higher one
| way or another.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Indeed, I hate that the MSRP is far below the market determined
| pricepoint. The invites shortages and opens the door for
| scalping.
|
| I have been trying to get an Xbox Series X for months. I would
| like to have a new one, with a warranty. However, I finally
| gave up and "won" one with a $606 bid on stockx.com. After
| fees, shipping, etc, its close to $170 over the unrealistic
| $500 MSRP, which just shows how out of touch the MSRP really
| is.
| Proven wrote:
| That recipe should get you a lot of upvotes in topics related
| to the recent price of electricity in Texas :-)
| tw04 wrote:
| And then what happens to their channel sales partners who
| survive off events like GPU and CPU launches? They just go out
| of business?
|
| Also: Nvidia couldn't increase production quantity if they
| wanted, this isn't a money problem. The only way for them to
| produce more GPUs at this point is to build fabs, and that will
| take years. TSMC isn't going to break their contract with Apple
| regardless of how much money Nvidia shows up to the table with.
| zokier wrote:
| > Also: Nvidia couldn't increase production quantity if they
| wanted, this isn't a money problem. The only way for them to
| produce more GPUs at this point is to build fabs, and that
| will take years. TSMC isn't going to break their contract
| with Apple regardless of how much money Nvidia shows up to
| the table with.
|
| That is very short-term thinking; taking years is still
| eventually.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Of course it's short term thinking, the spike in demand is
| short term. If it's raining out, people will want
| umbrellas. That doesn't mean that you should invest your
| life savings and 10 years into building an umbrella factory
| because it's rainy for two days in a row. Consistent demand
| spikes result in supply increases over the long run, but
| bumps in the road like this just don't.
| tw04 wrote:
| Nvidia doesn't need more money for R&D, the limited supply
| has absolutely nothing to do with lack of resources to
| invest in manufacturing capacity. They have a combination
| of two things:
|
| There's no planet on which they are going to base their
| future plans on crypto mining. End of story. The market is
| far too volatile for them to bet the company on it. Another
| couple million in the bank from auctioning off cards isn't
| going to change that. You're talking 10s of BILLIONS of
| dollars for fabs all to meet crypto mining demand? And oh,
| by the way, the faster they ramp up supply, the faster
| demand for the GPU goes down due to increased complexity of
| mining.
|
| They have yield issues with the current generation chips.
| The only way that solves itself is through time, money
| won't improve the process, experience is the only fix.
|
| You also failed to address what happens to all their retail
| partners who you've conveniently decided should be cut out.
| Exmoor wrote:
| I'm assuming they don't want to look like they're profiting on
| a shortage, which could also make the shortage look
| intentional.
|
| One workaround would have been to set up a system where the
| additional profit from auctioned GPU's went to charities.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Which is such a very good idea since they'll often capture a
| significant percentage back on their taxes.
| cronix wrote:
| Off topic, but for those still wanting a new GPU the trick to
| still buying these cards at MSRP, and actually get one, is to
| utilize a custom built PC service and buy a new PC. Cheap out on
| all parts except the GPU. Then keep the good GPU, slap your old
| one in the "new" computer and sell the machine on ebay. That's
| how I got my 3090 in November. It was actually a bit cheaper than
| MSRP as I made a bit more on the PC on ebay than I paid for it
| and it took less than a week to get the custom pc and 2 days to
| sell the new one.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| This is a market inefficiency. These companies could be
| reselling the video cards without doing the extra work of
| putting together a full PC and everyone would be better off -
| you don't have to resell parts as "used", the company doesn't
| have to ship you parts you don't want, both of you don't have
| to pay taxes on stuff nobody wants.
| 0xy wrote:
| There's a 0% chance that Nvidia would allow them resell
| graphics cards. These cards are earmarked for specific OEM
| purposes. None of those companies want to bring down Nvidia's
| wrath on them, either.
| salawat wrote:
| They can't actually stop them can they? Right of first
| sale.
|
| Or is there some custom in the supply chain by which these
| firms waive that right for priority in sourcing? In which
| case, this sounds like an unethical buisness practice
| solely intended to create market inefficiencies...
|
| Or is there something else to it?
| smichel17 wrote:
| They can stop selling to them.
| salawat wrote:
| >There's a 0% chance that Nvidia would allow them resell
| graphics cards.
|
| There is a difference between unilateral refusal to sell,
| and selling on condition of non resale. As far as I am
| aware, the practice of conditional sale like that isn't
| actually backed by any legal teeth outside the realm of a
| contract. Once you buy the thing, it is yours. Now the
| contract could cover the primacy of sourcing, but not the
| item itself, which would have the same badic effect I
| suppose.
|
| Believe it or not, "we just won't sell to them" is a
| surefire way to stir up trouble, because then people
| start asking pesky questions like "why?", and if the
| answer given isn't satisfactory, leads to going about and
| collecting data; turning it into a public interest sort
| of thing. There is no way that blacklisting sales without
| a darn good reason is ever a good thing.
| yuliyp wrote:
| > Believe it or not, "we just won't sell to them" is a
| surefire way to stir up trouble
|
| Companies are free to negotiate terms (prices, delivery
| guarantees, priorities, etc.) for selling things how they
| like, generally. If it's in their best interest to not
| sell to someone, or to charge them higher rates / offer
| fewer discounts, that's what they'll do.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| They can stop selling GPUs to these OEMs or just
| deprioritize their contracts as a less extreme option.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| That's really solid advice, thanks for sharing it! I'm not in
| the market for a new card at the moment but I'm sure there will
| be many other people here who can benefit.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| You can also do this somewhat risk-free if you either _first_
| sell on ebay, before actually buying the computer, or if you
| sell on ebay within the return period of wherever you bought
| the computer.
|
| That way if you don't find a buyer at the desired price, you're
| just back to square one, and not stuck with hardware you don't
| need.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| How does that work with shipping times though?
|
| I bought an art skateboard that had production problems (wont
| ship out to original buyers TBD) but it's already listed on
| ebay from scalpers.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But how are the system integrators able to get GPUs at listed
| prices when nobody else is?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| They get them the same way Alienware or Best Buy does, rather
| than buying them at retail
| Qworg wrote:
| Delivery contracts make them first in line.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why don't scalpers or miners sign up for the same
| contracts?
| travmatt wrote:
| I saw a picture on Reddit of a wall stacked high with
| 3060's. In the comments, the poster mentioned he placed a
| bulk order, the downside was it took a while.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Right - if they're reselling easily for massively over
| manufacturer price why isn't everyone placing these
| orders?
| kube-system wrote:
| It probably took a while for the person on Reddit to get
| their order because they got it from a distributor who
| was filling all of their higher priority customers first.
| I bet Dell isn't even getting theirs from a distributor,
| I'd guess they get them directly from the manufacturer.
| There's a hierarchy to retail sales, and I'm sure even
| large miners aren't near the top of it.
| xur17 wrote:
| Yup. I imagine it's similar to the inventory shortfalls
| ledger experienced a few years ago during the
| cryptocurrency price runup. I made a nice chunk of change
| placing bulk orders from Ledger, waiting a month for them
| to ship, and forwarding them to Amazon to resell.
| thesteamboat wrote:
| Presumably they (scalpers and miners) are not buying in
| large enough bulk orders, far enough in advance.
| KETpXDDzR wrote:
| Ah, good advice. That gives me an even better ROI for my eth
| mining!
| dangwu wrote:
| That's a lot of work. And shipping PCs is pretty risky and
| expensive. I've found buying the cards from Facebook
| Marketplace for a little over MSRP to be easier - although
| you'll likely be supporting a scalper.
| amelius wrote:
| Thanks, Elon.
|
| By the way, doesn't Tesla use GPU cards in their cars for the
| autopilot functionality?
| 0xTJ wrote:
| This isn't Elon Musk's fault.
|
| It doesn't make sense to use off-the-shelf graphics cards.
| They're not designed for the environment of cars, and aren't
| made to have that reliability. The medium older Tesla Autopilot
| uses Nvidia platform meant for self-driving. The newer
| Autopilot uses Tesla-designed SoCs that have fancy neural
| network accelerators.
|
| Everything important in cars needs to be high-reliability.
| Between that, the form factor, added redundant cost, and the
| reduced integration of having a separate PCIe card instead of
| something integrated in an SoC, it doesn't make sense to use a
| graphics card.
| cwhiz wrote:
| Tesla is famous for using off the shelf parts.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I have no idea why people speculate this kind of stuff so
| much, when a 5 second google search will find the answer
| for you https://www.zdnet.com/article/nvidia-takes-aim-at-
| teslas-cus...
|
| So no, the claim that Elon is somehow responsible for the
| scaling/shortage of Nvidia gaming cards does not seem to
| hold up.
|
| I dont even understand why the claim that Tesla uses off
| the shelf parts even matters when its simply verifiable
| either way.
| cwhiz wrote:
| I didn't say they use off the shelf video cards. But they
| absolutely do use off the shelf parts.
| wmf wrote:
| Tesla's future infotainment will have an AMD 6xxx GPU so that
| will take some supply away from gamers.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Nvidia could easily fix all this by allowing customers to
| preorder cards at MSRP and ship them when they become available.
| We can blame the scalpers and miners all we want, but nvidia is
| at best complicit.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Why would scalpers and miners not order years of production
| ahead?
| BinaryIdiot wrote:
| Scalpers are always a short term thing. None of them ever
| order supply that will last years, usually 3-6 months at
| most. If you end up being caught holding the bag with a
| normal amount of demand, you then break even at best or
| likely lose a little re-selling them at the prices you paid
| for.
|
| A year from now nvidia will have new GPUs and the 3000 series
| will be relatively easy to buy.
| gizmo385 wrote:
| Limit to 1 card per person and requiring a deposit might help
| address that.
| twic wrote:
| Require customers' Steam usernames and validate that they
| are true gamers. Oh, you just play pixel art indies? Back
| of the line.
| tvb12 wrote:
| I thought it would be cool if you could pre-order one
| through a local library. Here, at least, getting a library
| card requires visiting in person, so scalpers would have
| trouble getting multiple unless the librarian were in on
| it.
|
| I don't think that sort of relationship between
| manufacturers and libraries exists, though, and I'm not
| sure it should.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| If this were easy, it would have been solved already. It
| has not been solved.
| cwhiz wrote:
| Unique fingerprinting is completely solved. Retailers
| just have no motivation because the craze is driving huge
| traffic to their sites.
| fjkjf67457 wrote:
| how? i have seen zero implementations of this.
| shmerl wrote:
| They should offer places when you can buy cards in a queue using
| normal pricing instead of these fleecers trying to make a profit
| on shortages.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Ethereum moving to full proof of stake (vs. proof of work which
| is what mining is) should fix a lot of this. So hang tight if gpu
| prices have you down. What is the timetable for that?
|
| There will be a glut of graphics cards the likes of which has
| never been seen, once Ethereum is no longer mined.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Never"?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| The Ethereum PoS chain is already active today and giving
| "staking" rewards. PoW is still active too but both chains
| are mining ETH at the moment and the plan is to switch to PoS
| only.
|
| As the PoS did actually launch and is actually working, I'm
| not sure it's going to be "never".
|
| They may be late like so many software projects, but they
| seem to be serious about the switch to proof of stake.
| enko123 wrote:
| For those that don't know, staking is a dedicated computer
| + 32 ETH in escrow, then you get your ETH back + 1/2 ETH
| payment at the end of the month but fewer if you were
| offline including possibly losing some of your escrowed
| ETH.
| Cacti wrote:
| What is the computer doing during that time?
| [deleted]
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Validating or creating blocks, which to be clear is
| _significantly_ less work than mining.
| melolife wrote:
| Voting on block proposals as part of a randomly assigned
| committee.
| nerdponx wrote:
| So it's not possible to stake without 32 ETH to stake?
| That's a sizeable investment.
| gruez wrote:
| staking pools are a thing
| pjc50 wrote:
| So at what point do they throw the switch that invalidates
| millions of dollars of investment in mining Etherum? Or is
| it all transferrable? And who is the "they" that throws the
| switch?
| cwhiz wrote:
| Proof of stake is a quarter away. It's been that way since
| 2018, and it'll probably be that way at the heat death of the
| universe.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| It is already partially implemented now. Just waiting on the
| full rollout.
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
| im3w1l wrote:
| Sometimes it feels like these processes work like radioactive
| decay. They don't make progress, they just suddenly happen.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| As an outsider, what's stopping further progress in this? I
| would have thought, proof of stake is "it", why hasn't it
| taken over?
| cwhiz wrote:
| An incentive for anyone to switch.
| wmf wrote:
| It's very new technology so it has taken years to refine
| and test.
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| It is highly controversial and plagued with unsolvable
| security drawbacks compared to Proof of Work.
| xur17 wrote:
| As someone that's been watching the process fairly
| closely, that's not my read on the situation. I think
| it's moreso just a new technology that takes time to
| perfect, and Ethereum is a large ship, hence "changing
| course" take a lot of effort.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Why is it people think Ethereum mining is what's driving this?
|
| The mass mining farms don't give a shit about Ethereum. They
| literally mine whatever coin is most profitable to then be
| exchanged into Bitcoin. Everyone's going after BTC. There's a
| Bitcoin ATM in a service station convenience store near my
| house.
|
| No one is going to give a shit when Ethereum moves to proof of
| stake, because they'll just switch to some other coin that
| still uses proof of work and thereby mines easily on their GPU
| farm and can then be exchanged for BTC.
| [deleted]
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| If there is a significant gap between Ethereum and the second
| most profitable coin, taking Ethereum out of the market will
| make the whole mining business less profitable.
|
| (This will in turn make some operations no longer
| economically viable, dropping GPU demand)
| wmf wrote:
| It's possible that soon _whatever coin is most profitable to
| mine_ won 't be profitable enough to justify buying more
| GPUs. There's always a limit.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > whatever coin is most profitable to mine won't be
| profitable enough to justify buying more GPUs
|
| This is exactly where I'd like to see it all go.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Well Ethereum has massive hash rate and is still mined on
| GPUs largely. No one mines btc on GPUs.
| cwhiz wrote:
| The only thing I don't understand is why Nvidia isn't raising
| their prices. The supply and demand is clearly out of sync.
| Prices should rise until there is an equilibrium between demand
| and supply. Why is Nvidia content to feed the eBay market?
|
| If we aren't going to be able to buy GPUs I would at least prefer
| Nvidia make a profit instead of scalpers.
| mathattack wrote:
| Same reason baseball teams don't raise season ticket prices to
| the levels sold by scalpers.
|
| They want to preserve the long term revenue stream which is
| more important than what they may perceive is a short term
| demand spike.
| hahahahe wrote:
| They can't because they're locked in with their partners. And
| if they raise it for consumers it will be considered price
| discrimination.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Dunno about Nvidia, but the usual approach here is to keep MSRP
| the same on paper, but distribute more devices to your
| distributors that jack up their price and get a rebate from
| them or some other favour.
|
| And you can bet every other vendor is paying MSRP with possibly
| 0% markup, but shutting up about it unless they want 0
| deliveries. Maybe even paying more than MSRP and expected to,
| on paper, treat it as a loss-leader.
| fjkjf67457 wrote:
| That's called a backdoor and it happens a lot. You sell it to
| a buddy that kicks back 150% then he sells for 200% on ebay
| you both win.
| KETpXDDzR wrote:
| NVIDIA is fighting against it while pushing their own mining
| products: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/geforce-cmp/
| cbozeman wrote:
| They're not fighting against it at all.
|
| That's a load of horseshit and anyone familiar with both PC
| gaming and cryptocurrency mining knows it.
|
| Why would you divert chips that could be powering GeForce
| GPUs into mining cards and then also disabling the ability to
| mine on your gaming cards?
|
| Unless, of course, you were scared shitless about an enormous
| secondary market forming for 3000 series cards when you
| release the GTX 4000 series... Why spend $699 for a GTX 4080
| when you can buy a gently used GTX 3080 for $299-$399. Decent
| miners know you need to undervolt and underclock for maximum
| watt/hash performance - in other words, these chips weren't
| stressed intensively for months / years - they are the
| equivalent of a luxury car driven by a 70 year old Grandma to
| and from the grocery store and the department store.
|
| I can guarantee you if NVIDIA had the capacity with Samsung
| to pump out a load of 3000 series cards, they'd do it, but
| they can't, so they're doing the next best thing - creating
| artificial scarcity.
|
| Once these "mining cards" are no longer profitable, they
| _have no secondary market_. They go off to the landfill, or
| the e-waste processor.
|
| This is about profit, pure and simple.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Why would you divert chips that could be powering GeForce
| GPUs into mining cards and then also disabling the ability
| to mine on your gaming cards?
|
| Because you're using parts with defects which are
| irrelevant to mining (e.g. faulty video output, texturing,
| etc).
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Why would you divert chips that could be powering
| GeForce GPUs into mining cards and then also disabling the
| ability to mine on your gaming cards?_
|
| The current cryptomining chips are actually based on Turing
| (RTX 2000), not Ampere (RTX 3000).
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-repurposes-
| turing-s...
| newsclues wrote:
| Not all, the high end is ga102 ampere
| suifbwish wrote:
| Unless they make the other GPUs less capable of mining or the
| mining hardware reall cheap no one cares
| stu2b50 wrote:
| They did make the other GPUs less capable of mining.
| cwhiz wrote:
| Software is easily defeated.
| salawat wrote:
| Not when cryptographic signature verification is built
| into and enforced through the hardware. See Nouveau. The
| can't reclock post Maxwell GPUs because their firmware
| blobs would have to be signed by Nvidia. Think of it as
| Nvidia holding back the steering wheel to a car.
| devwastaken wrote:
| The prices are raised. The rtx 3060, released a few days ago,
| was not selling for MSRP. The only time there is an MSRP is for
| nvidia FE cards, but the majority of cards are not. The 3060
| was called a "non existent card" by GamersNexus because the
| $320 price tag never happened.
|
| What I don't understand is why gamers aren't petitioning their
| government to stop the trade tarrifs responsible for the price
| increases.
|
| Gamers rise up /s
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _The rtx 3060, released a few days ago, was not selling for
| MSRP._
|
| Anecdote: I actually got a 3060 for MSRP (well, MSRP + 6
| euros with no separate charge for shipping). But the store
| was selling it as an "introductory offer while supplies last"
| and it sure isn't at MSRP anymore.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Right, there were some but effectively the MSRP was more
| around $500 usd, manufacturers like Zotac were selling for
| that as I recall.
|
| But if you're buying in a different country you don't have
| the tariffs I would assume.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| PR. Gamers would crucify Nvidia if they did it. All the hate
| towards scalpers would go to Nvidia doubled.
|
| Right now there is a small chance to buy at MSRP. I managed to
| do it by calling around small stores in the area that didn't
| have a functioning online store - scalpers didn't bother with
| those..
| juskrey wrote:
| This is funny observation. Before some recent hurricane,
| thousands of cars were shuttling between empty network gas
| stations, presumably guided by their apps, to no avail, while
| I was able to top the tank by going several streets into
| nearest small village and finding standalone "mom and pop"
| station.
| cwhiz wrote:
| Gamers are already crucifying Nvidia. Nvidia is leaving
| billions on the table. I feel like they could win gamers back
| with that cash.
| falcolas wrote:
| Personally, I have absolutely zero faith that any
| additional revenue would go towards improving their
| products or availability. It would go to their
| shareholders; NVidia (Intel) treats its customers like
| consumers.
|
| If their prices aren't responding to supply/demand now,
| they weren't before either. The price of a NVidia GPU isn't
| set by market forces; never has been.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| Given the spike in demand right now, traditional supply
| and demand would suggest raising prices and using the
| money to produce more chips, which in the end would net
| more money and bring the price down. The reason that
| won't happen has more to do with the feasibility (or lack
| thereof) of scaling production of GPUs by throwing money
| at it and the transient nature of the spike than Nvidia
| being helmed by a shadowy cabal that responds to neither
| their own incentives nor the market.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > NVidia (Intel) treats its customers like consumers.
|
| nVidia's customers are literally consumers.
| malwrar wrote:
| Those words aren't synonymous in denotation--who wants to
| be called a consumer? I think the term customer implies
| respect for those you do business with rather than
| viewing people who buy your product as numbers on a
| spreadsheet.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I _am_ a consumer; it bothers me exactly zero as it's
| literally and figuratively true.
|
| "Treat like transactions" or "treat like cash flows" or
| "treat like wallets" would give me the pejorative meaning
| presumably intended.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| These are luxury items, where 95% of people will be using
| to play AAA video games at nice but but pretty
| extravagant 144hz 1440p/4K or as space heaters.
|
| Its the very definition of a consumer
| bombcar wrote:
| Hell, raise prices and then rebate back if their drivers
| see you just running normal games and crap. Win/win.
| salawat wrote:
| Nope. You're still enshrining post facto control
| mechanisms by which the manufacturer controls what you do
| with the hardware after you recieve it.
|
| Why is it so hard for businesses to just sell things? Why
| must they encroach? I'm not even a miner, but I'm not
| inviting anyone into my system to make a judgement call
| on whether my use of something I paid for is consistent
| with what they want. They sold it. They should not only
| have to part with the drivers, but with any semblance of
| software enforced binning too.
| mountainb wrote:
| Price definitely impacts reviews as well. If you want to
| boost customer reviews on any product, cutting the price
| resets customer expectations to the downside. Raising prices
| for any reason also raises customer expectations.
| suifbwish wrote:
| What you mean is there is a small chance for a bot script to
| buy them that checks the sites for the 24/7 . There is no
| chance of a human clicking on the pages with a mouse of
| buying them
| c2h5oh wrote:
| Smaller shops get some stock too. Smaller shops often don't
| have an online store or the one they have is broken or
| doesn't represent current their stock. Scalpers don't
| bother with those stores.
|
| I literally entered "computer store toronto" into Google
| and started calling every small one in the results. I found
| what I needed in fewer than 15 calls and picked it up an
| hour later.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How about increase MSRP but offer a redemption via the web,
| one per user (ie only one per bank account OR email OR
| phone). Individuals could buy and get $X00 off, once.
| Scalpers would need a fresh email, bank account, phone number
| every time they wanted to get a GPU or would be stuck selling
| at $X00 above the true retail price?
|
| I think there's a VAT penalty, but could it work??
| fjkjf67457 wrote:
| Not enough, its super easy to create fresh email, card
| phone numbers. Only difficult thing to change is shipping
| address but only if that's strictly enforced to only USPS
| valid addresses which ive never seen anywhere
| blowfish721 wrote:
| Good of Nvidia to split their product line in the future with one
| made for gamers and one for miners. That should help drive the
| price back down for the gaming crowd.
| throwaway-8c93 wrote:
| Sorry, that's just not how it works.
|
| What makes a card good at gaming (floating point operations per
| second) makes it good at mining, and vice versa. If the
| price/performance of the gaming variant is more favorable than
| the mining variant, why would any miner _not_ buy the gaming
| one? They 'll also have better resale value.
|
| Real world equivalent: if Toyota made a special car for dog
| owners that costs 10% less but is useless for anything else,
| why would the dog owners bother with it?
|
| Nvidia is trying to limit the hashing rate of the gaming
| variant, but it won't take long before someone figures out a
| way around it. There are billions at stake here. Also, the
| limitations only affect Ethereum hash rate, altcoin mining is
| untouched.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Actually, what matters isn't FLOPs, but rather the memory
| bandwidth.
|
| GPU mining is just 10% slower than the theoretical memory-
| bound maximum (if compute was infinitely fast) -
| https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-
| memor...
|
| A more interesting thing for mining would be to hook up a
| (relatively) cheap ASIC, with cheaper voltage regulation, to
| the same high-bandwidth GDDR6X memory.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| It's actually not. It's just yet another anti-consumer tactic
| masked as being consumer-friendly.
|
| First, it doesn't change the fact that the amount of available
| silicon is limited. Instead of every card potentially becoming
| a gaming card now only a subset of them will, with the rest
| going exclusively to miners. How is that a good thing?
|
| Second, it kills the second-hand market. Remember a few years
| back when used mining cards flooded the market and you could
| get a decent GPU dirt cheap? Yeah, NVidia didn't like that.
| Well, this won't happen anymore with those mining-only cards,
| since they're useless for anything other than mining. More
| e-waste, yaaay.
| 01100011 wrote:
| https://www.pcinvasion.com/nvidia-mining-cards-turing-
| lineup...
|
| Mining cards look to be Turing and 12nm. This should resolve
| concerns that it will affect 3000 series(Ampere)
| availability. People will still hate on Nvidia tho because
| why not...
| derefr wrote:
| The GPUs going into the mining cards, are GPUs that would
| have become e-waste anyway--just at the chip validation step,
| before they ever got used for anything, because they had
| flaws that made them unsuitable for gaming on.
| zionic wrote:
| This is false, many are just lower binned ampere
| tvb12 wrote:
| There's a sliver of hope that the mining cards will be
| reusable as general purpose gpus by having the card stream
| its output to an integrated gpu.
|
| I first heard about using the p106-p90 cards on Windows with
| a modified driver via a LTT video [1]. I later read a blog
| post where someone claimed that the card was plug-and-play on
| Pop!_OS (a Linux distro) [2].
|
| I think this is fairly well known at this point. I would be
| very curious to see how many were actually reused, though. I
| remember seeing a listing for a large number of p100 cards a
| few months ago, but I don't see any listings now. Were they
| scooped up and reused, or did the sellers give up and trash
| them?
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
|
| [2]https://ncrmnt.org/2019/08/04/linux-gaming-with-p106-100/
| (search for "following up")
| magic_quotes wrote:
| > Remember a few years back when used mining cards flooded
| the market and you could get a decent GPU dirt cheap?
|
| No, not at all. Any references?
| cbozeman wrote:
| You don't remember when GTX 1080 Tis could be had on eBay
| for as cheap as $400-$450??
|
| Because I sure do... I should have bought two. Now you can
| sell one - today, right now - for $700-800. I haven't seen
| an auction with a final bid less than $650, and I've been
| watching. Most "Buy It Now" options are $700-800, and
| aren't having all that much trouble selling.
|
| We're talking two generations old cards, released almost
| four years ago, that are selling for what brand new GTX
| 3080s are supposed to MSRP at.
| magic_quotes wrote:
| > You don't remember when GTX 1080 Tis could be had on
| eBay for as cheap as $400-$450??
|
| That's slightly above half of its retail price (when it
| was new) and roughly in the same ballpark as RTX 2070
| MSRP. Is this really "dirt cheap"? Do you expect video
| cards to never depreciate then?
|
| More to the point, I don't remember the market being
| saturated with used video cards in way that could put a
| dent in retail prices. They always seem to sell at
| comparable performance/$ ratio to new cards. I'm
| genuinely curious if I missed any trends.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > I'm genuinely curious if I missed any trends.
|
| Yes, you genuinely missed the trend. When BTC prices
| cratered awhile back, a lot of miners starting dumping
| their cards because they couldn't even break even on
| power consumption / mining costs.
|
| eBay was flooded with cards.
| segmondy wrote:
| I want to experiment with deep learning by training on the GPU,
| but the price even for used cards just makes me put it off. :-O.
| If it doesn't come down soon tho, I might cave and buy one.
| dgellow wrote:
| Have you considered cloud services? For example you have GCloud
| compute engine: https://cloud.google.com/compute/gpus-pricing
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| vast.ai is also an option, which is cheaper (though also not
| as nice as GCP)
| indiv0 wrote:
| The GCE free tier is nice but ran out for me after just about
| a month of continuous use of one (cheap) GPU. Maybe some
| people have deeper pockets than I do but I can't afford to
| pay $300 CAD/month on a single cloud GPU for hobbyist
| purposes.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Well how much VRAM do you feel you need for your projects?
| Because there's a lot of 16 GB cards out there that are still
| perfectly serviceable for that.
|
| Vega Frontier Editions (16 GB HBM2) are going for around
| $600-700 on eBay and Craigslist, also Facebook Marketplace in
| some areas.
|
| Radeon VIIs (16 GB HBM2) are going for around $650-1000 on the
| same platforms.
|
| You can easily put two of those into a machine and have a
| pretty impressive deep learning rig.
| segmondy wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion, will check those out!
| cbozeman wrote:
| My pleasure and happy hunting.
|
| Here's the original article that reminded me of this. Its
| four years old, but I still feel its a worthwhile read: htt
| ps://medium.com/intuitionmachine/building-a-50-teraflops-..
| .
| T-hawk wrote:
| It's kind of amazing, the macro view that's going on here.
|
| Computational capacity has become so much of a commodity, that
| gamers can't get it for their graphics, because they're being
| crowded out in the market by someone else (cryptocurrency miners)
| who can use it for something more profitable.
| piinbinary wrote:
| Here's a crazy idea: What if Nvidia raised the prices to the
| current scalper prices, but every additional dollar was returned
| as credit that you could spend on indie games or hardware?
|
| (You would probably have to restrict the hardware to just
| hardware that's not useful for mining, e.g. monitors)
| azornathogron wrote:
| That is an interesting idea, but I assume you'd see things like
| scalpers using the credits and selling the "useless" extra
| hardware or games to recover much of the cost. Maybe the extra
| friction and losses for the scalpers would be enough to push
| things in the right direction?
| piinbinary wrote:
| Yeah, good point.
|
| Maybe it could be restricted to physical goods sent to the
| same address as the card (which miners could still flip, but
| it's better than nothing)
| driscoll42 wrote:
| Huh, well that's cool that they took my source code and modified
| it! Glad to see it's being used!
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I remember during the last run in GPUs, my friend was going to
| "throw away" an "old" computer. I pulled the ancient GPU and sold
| it for $40.
|
| Good times.
| PurpleFoxy wrote:
| Rather than throw out this stuff, I list it on a buy/sell site
| for free and then when someone asks if they can pick it up I
| stick it out on the curb so I don't have to put any effort in
| to meeting them.
| 0xbkt wrote:
| Maybe unrelated but is it really possible to automatically grab a
| graphics card with the use of scraping bots? I have been seeing a
| number of 24/7 livestreams on Twitch.tv that are literally
| tracking the latest stock status from major e-shopping platforms.
| I'm not sure though if they're doing this to grab one before
| anyone else or about its chances of working as intended. I'm
| really curious about it.
| A12-B wrote:
| If there's money to be made, you can guarantee someone has a
| bot to capitalise on it. Doesn't matter if it's stocks, domain
| names, or ecommerce, there's a bot out there doing most of the
| work.
| gvhst wrote:
| Yes. Take a look at https://twitter.com/SnailBotIO
| tvb12 wrote:
| Huh... Bots are making it difficult to purchase a gpu, so the
| solution is for everyone to bot. But presumably a retailer
| would block you if you constantly pinged their site, so the
| solution is to pay someone else $99/month to bot for you.
|
| All of this seems so strange.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Am I the only one who couldn't get their mobile browser to
| actually view the graphs at a legible resolution? Tom's hardware
| is not a small blog, they should have that figured out.
|
| I turn my phone sideways and the video jumps to full screen
| (which I didn't request) and I hide the video and the graphs are
| half-cropped. I refresh in landscape and the graphs are still
| small. I click the graphs and they pop into modal view, still
| small.
|
| I have to fuss with View Image to actually read them.
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| I couldnt even get past trying to set the cookie preferences,
| spent several minutes then gave up on viewing the page on
| mobile
| Animats wrote:
| How much of world semiconductor fab capacity is cryptocurrency
| mining using?
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