[HN Gopher] Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 an...
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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards
Author : wglb
Score : 246 points
Date : 2021-05-18 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
| superbaconman wrote:
| I'm on the fence about switching from console to pc, but I've
| still been trying to get a 3000 series card anyway. The ability
| to use the cards for ml and crypo in addition to gaming is
| appealing, but moves like this just make me think sticking to
| xbox and my gtx560 is best.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| > I've still been trying to get a 3000 series card anyway
|
| ...I think I know why you can't get one. In all seriousness
| though, using GPUs for mining has trashed the gaming market and
| made entire realms of PC gaming inaccessible to lower income
| people, it's an incredible shame.
| icoder wrote:
| Is there some merit in comparing this to regulating concert
| prices? There too one might argue to let the market determine the
| price, but there too that might lead to a very unequal situation
| for many, that may eventually backfire.
| hosh wrote:
| In other news, Nvida has cards specifically designed for
| professional miners: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
|
| https://hothardware.com/news/msi-cmp-30hx-card-debuts-for-et...
| o_p wrote:
| How hard can it be to reverse engineer the drivers and remove the
| protections? Theres economic incentive now after all
| MauranKilom wrote:
| "remove" how? The card BIOS is not going to let you just flash
| any random driver you cooked up.
| nyjah wrote:
| I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't
| understand the answer.
|
| Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the
| cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?
| 0x5f3759df-i wrote:
| The best way to get rich during a gold rush is to sell the
| shovels.
|
| They're right where they want to be.
| rocqua wrote:
| Because in the long term, they probably can't rely on mining
| for income. And if they stop selling gpus for a while, they are
| going to destroy their customer base. Gamers will get angry,
| people who use CUDA will look for alternatives, enterprise
| supply chain managers will look for more reliable manufacturers
| (AMD).
|
| Essentially, this move would wreck their basic business. And
| dropping that business for crypto is very risky. It is also
| probably not what investors would expect.
| warent wrote:
| Probably because it's just not their business. They don't need
| to confuse their objectives with bitcoin to get rich, they're
| doing exceptionally well without it
| amelius wrote:
| Then why is Elon Musk trading Bitcoins? Tesla makes more
| money trading Bitcoin than selling cars.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-
| trading-...
| rvanlaar wrote:
| Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin.
| https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/tesla-stop-
| accep...
| amelius wrote:
| This was about trading Bitcoin, not accepting it as a
| payment method. Plus, it doesn't really change the
| question.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Because Tesla's most valuable product aside from the cars
| is the memes.
|
| I am not kidding. It seems a substantial proportion of TSLA
| buyers aren't really interested in its fundamentals but
| like what Elon tweets out.
| throwaway292893 wrote:
| In addition to the revenue from selling cars. The GP was
| asking why Nvidia doesn't stop selling their cards and use
| them to generate bitcoin as a mining company.
|
| Tesla simply took some of their cash and invested in
| Bitcoin, they didn't shift production or pivot their
| business.
|
| The fact that they made money off of the investment and
| whether or not it was more than their revenue is
| irrelevant, the move didn't affect their core business, it
| was just lucrative.
| contravariant wrote:
| This is just an uneducated guess but is it possible that
| Tesla is just a company investing heavily in R&D of cars,
| and hasn't really begun to run a profit yet alongside some
| somewhat profitable speculative Bitcoin venture that Elon
| Musk's somehow put under the same roof?
|
| According to that article if you split out the emission
| credits as well then they've made around -200% more profit
| selling Bitcoin and -600% more profit with emission credits
| than selling cars.
|
| The fact that both are negative should tell you something's
| gone awry.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Tesla and Nvidia are entirely different from each other.
| Tesla's business model has been built on government
| subsidies, while Nvidia's business model is to sell
| product. One needs to create profit somehow, and the other
| is able to alienate one segment of purchasers in preference
| of another.
| lottin wrote:
| Just because Elon Musk does something it doesn't mean it
| has to make sense. Tesla's shareholders can trade bitcoins
| themselves. They don't need Tesla to do that.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I would suspect the reason is marginal electricity cost. Nvidia
| likely has to pay full marginal price on electricity whereas
| miners maybe geo located with cheaper electricity, or
| marginally free electricity (such as so called stranded energy
| or used in places where heat is already being created by
| electric heaters, but one could get marginally free computation
| done)
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| It would destroy their business?
|
| They'd have short term massive gains but it wouldn't be
| sustainable.
| CPAhem wrote:
| Nvidia want to charge more for cards that can mine crypto
| currencies. Just like they want to charge more for the same
| product if it is used in data centers.
|
| It's a way of artificially segmenting the market.
| est31 wrote:
| Actually that's what some companies in the ASIC supply chain
| have done when the first bitcoin ASICs came out (2014ish I
| think?). That's probably because of the kinds of people in
| those companies, and the kinds of markets those companies
| operate in, i.e. solely in the bitcoin mining market. Nvidia
| and AMD mainly sell their GPUs for various other use cases
| other than mining, and the mining uses are quite recent. Nvidia
| is also known for building different products for different
| market segments, and they do have dedicated GPUs made for
| mining. I.e. in 2018 they forbode machine learning uses in
| datacenters of their consumer hardware in their EULAs, to push
| people to their professional hardware instead.
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...
| gspr wrote:
| For the same reason that many companies that happen by chance
| to have real estate as their most valuable asset don't wanna
| pivot to being real estate companies.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Can you imagine? They could do anything, they could create a
| corporate utopia.
|
| I wonder if the corporate psychology is similar to human
| psychology. In which, far from being run by a green field
| thinker like you, they are short-term oriented, and mainly
| backwards-looking for the sake of emotional security--we
| already know best what works for us.
| patrickk wrote:
| Because they're in the business of manufacturing and selling
| GPUs, not speculating on volatile crypto markets which could
| nosedive 90%+ in short order and drastically cut the
| profitability of mining.
|
| If they suddenly changed strategy like this, their stock price
| would be hammered instantly and there would be a clamour to
| replace their CEOs and boards.
| smaddox wrote:
| Because the value would tank when they tried to sell off all
| the Bitcoin, etc., that they mined.
| valuearb wrote:
| Because BTC is down 30% in the last month?
| 988747 wrote:
| No one mines BTC on GPU, and Etherum is up 100% from two
| weeks ago.
|
| Ok, I understand that NVidia does not want to mine
| themselves, but why on Earth won't they just raise the prices
| to the level miners are willing to pay?
|
| "We want to sell to gamers, not miners" is the stupidest
| excuse ever. Isn't capitalism all about selling to the
| highest bidder? Why do they even care about who buys their
| product?
|
| EDIT: Also, think about this: gamers that are considering
| upgrading their hardware get additional incentive - Etherum
| mining makes buying this new, shiny GPU basically free.
| Typically, after 9-12 months the initial investment is paid
| off. Without the possibility of mining many gamers will delay
| the decision about buying a new GPU, hurting NVidia sales
| further.
| rurp wrote:
| >Isn't capitalism all about selling to the highest bidder?
|
| Capitalism _can_ be about that, but there 's a lot more to
| it than simply charging the highest price possible on every
| transaction. For example, loss leader products and free
| trials are common across industries. I don't have any
| insight into Nvidia's thinking specifically, but they might
| believe that cultivating the gaming market by not pricing
| gamers out of their product in the short term has much more
| longterm value than going all in on of the most volatile
| industires in the world.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Gamers are the reason why Nvidia exists, it's a hard thing
| to let go of.
|
| It would be like FB shutting down the blue app and pivoting
| to Tinder.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Hah, this comparison very much feels right.
| Androider wrote:
| They do, the mining specific cards are more expensive /
| hash rate. It's just market segmentation.
| slver wrote:
| > Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep
| the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?
|
| Bitcoin costs more to mine than the power bill you'll receive.
| This is why increasingly most malware happens by stealing power
| one way or another. And I don't think NVidia and AMD are in the
| stealing power business.
| edave64 wrote:
| People are buying these cards for other coins that are still
| profitable to mine on the GPU.
| gruez wrote:
| >Bitcoin costs more to mine than the power bill you'll
| receive
|
| he's talking about cryptocurrencies in general, not bitcoin
| specifically. Mining ETH with recent-ish is currently
| profitable unless your electricity is very expensive (50+
| cents). Besides, bitcoin mining is dominated by ASICs and
| there really isn't really any point in using hacked computers
| to mine it because there are more profitable coins (ones
| using ASIC resistant algorithms).
| saurik wrote:
| While having the cards is tablestakes, and newer cards can do
| more for less, in the end--even for Ethereum--you really still
| are spending more on electricity than hardware, and so you can
| have all the cards in the world and still not be able to mine
| crypto effectively. Most mining is thereby done in other places
| in the world where the externalities on power generation and
| use (clean or dirty, both) are less well tracked, with the
| occasional place in the US--such as the plants in NY that are
| being booted back up just to mine crypto--where people are
| actively trying to make it illegal. I would imagine a lot of
| the mining done in the US ends up being either to "launder"
| (not quite the right term) money (buying lots of power and
| converting it to untraceable crypto for illegal activity...
| kind of a reverse laundry ;P) or with "stolen" power (as is the
| case of a college student mining in their dorm room).
| willhinsa wrote:
| With today's ETH prices, electricity costs are a fraction of
| the revenue from mining. Like, on the order of less than 10%.
| root_axis wrote:
| Cryptocurrency value is extremely volatile, businesses need
| stable income streams to plan for development and growth.
| Further, just owning cryptocurrency isn't enough, it has to be
| converted into spendable money so that the business can pay
| employees and fund other business expenses, at Nvidia's scale
| this creates a lot of financial friction and undesirable
| complications.
| chongli wrote:
| Why mine gold when you could make a fortune selling shovels?
| xwdv wrote:
| Why sell shovels when you can just buy shares in the company
| selling shovels?
| fassssst wrote:
| Why buy shares when you can just go outside and be happy?
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| Risk. When crypto inevitably crashes again they will be left
| holding the bag on a huge set of cards that may not have great
| resale value. Selling the cards is safer and also aligned with
| their core business competence.
| fay59 wrote:
| I absolutely despise cryptocurrency, so this may not be
| accurate, but my understanding is that they're only reliable if
| many independent people mine. If NVIDIA kept all its GPUs and
| mined Bitcoin instead of selling them, it could control more
| than 50% of the hashing capacity. This could allow NVIDIA to
| double-spend bitcoins, the possibility of which would probably
| crash confidence in the asset.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| GPUs are no longer used to mine Bitcoin. They would lose lots
| of money trying.
| lukifer wrote:
| > they're only reliable if many independent people mine
|
| Sort of. It's a matter of establishing trust with buyers,
| holders, and the ecosystem. If a hypothetical 51% owner
| behaved as a good citizen (which is to say, their incentives
| were publicly aligned towards preserving value rather than
| exploiting double-spends), the confidence wouldn't
| necessarily erode. (Contrast with a nation-state or other
| hostile actor who performs a 51% attack with the express
| intent of theft or undermining trust, which has happened with
| smaller cryptos.)
|
| The three largest BTC miners combined have been well over 51%
| of the hashpower for years now, and they could collude to
| crash or exploit BTC if they wanted; it's simply not
| currently in their interest. Yet more evidence that while
| Proof of Work was a clever hack in the original BTC
| whitepaper, it doesn't inherently lead to decentralization,
| and is functionally indistinguishable from Proof of Stake
| with extra steps.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Are you saying that GPUs are now competitive with ASICs when
| mining bitcoin?
| fay59 wrote:
| I have no idea what people use to mine cryptocurrency these
| days and quite frankly I would rather it all stop, so no,
| I'm not saying that.
| amelius wrote:
| They could start a bunch of subsidiary companies.
| lottin wrote:
| They would always be suspicious of collusion.
| LASR wrote:
| Same reason why they are not an investment bank investing in
| stocks, or building skyscrapers in Dubai.
|
| It's not their business. They've built over the many years, a
| very defensible business out of expertise (and IP). That
| expertise is unique and resilient to the whims of a speculative
| investor hive-mind.
|
| More practically, they just wouldn't be able to compete.
| Against companies that build ASICs specifically for mining, the
| tech they have, while is viable for the small-time gamer-miner
| demographic, does not have good returns on a larger economies
| of scale.
| FinanceAnon wrote:
| "In a gold rush - sell shovels."
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, but don't sell crippled shovels.
| yoz-y wrote:
| There are more than enough people out there that want to
| just play games or do research. Miners are only making
| nvidia look worse. Their core demographic is getting
| disenchanted because what good is a great cheap graphic
| card, if you can never buy one.
| IncRnd wrote:
| There are more purchasers than cards available, so they are
| intentionally limiting purchases by miners with this method
| in preference to gamers. They don't want to sell their
| shovels to miners right now.
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| How do you know they didn't?
| bumbada wrote:
| Because cryptocurrencies are basically a pyramid scheme, the
| money for early investors is made by huge amounts of new people
| entering the pyramid.
|
| Lots of people enter the pyramid because they have seen early
| investors benefit greatly and they want to benefit too. It
| works very well until people start getting out of the
| pyramid(selling) and the same thing happens in inverse, people
| want to recover the money they invested and price plummets.
|
| There are two main reasons a big company like Nvidia can not
| mine for themselves:
|
| 1. Nobody will enter the pyramid in the first place just for
| enriching Nvidia. People enter a pyramid because they have seen
| their neighbor making money "out of nothing" and they get the
| Gold Rush themselves. Like a virus the Rush is contagious by
| people between them.
|
| 2. When prices go up everything is happiness and good feelings.
| When prices go down the people that have lost their savings
| will get mad at the company that benefited from their own
| ignorance or greed.
| social_quotient wrote:
| "Because cryptocurrencies are basically a pyramid scheme, the
| money for early investors is made by huge amounts of new
| people entering the pyramid."
|
| I think your viewpoint could use some revision. You've either
| described any typical investment but I Uber it as a pyramid
| or you misunderstand the goals of crypto.
| [deleted]
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| jokes on them. Next crypto currency will be mined as a roblox
| mod.
| rsuttongee wrote:
| I mean, the cards are selling at 3-4x MSRP right now. Won't
| halving the hash rate just cause the price of the cards to drop
| to 1.5-2x MSRP and miners just buy twice as many?
|
| Possibly good for NVDIA I guess (selling twice the units assuming
| the can make enough), but I don't see this helping gamers get
| cards in hands.
| Zandikar wrote:
| Nope. These are new SKUs (LHR variants), not a patch that
| retroactively applies to existing stock/sales. If anything, so
| long as crypto demand persists, this will result in a upward
| influence on the scalping price of the currently existing non-
| crippled 3070's and 3080's. Technically Nvidia has existing
| mining SKU's (their HX skus) so new supply is still entering
| the market, but its unclear exactly how things will balance
| out. In the short term (assuming demand remands high for crypto
| cards), I'd expect scalped pricing to go up, not down. And
| that's assuming these LHR's arent compromised like the original
| mining-crippled 3060's have been.
| sp332 wrote:
| I think it's less about the upfront cost and more about hashes
| per kilowatt-hour.
| rsuttongee wrote:
| Ah that makes sense, I forgot about power usage.
| throwaway879 wrote:
| Using a made up but probably good enough analogy, if scientist
| created a blackhole in the lab that could end up sucking in the
| entire planet and the solar system, would it be OK for someone to
| jam the mechanism that sustains it? I think of PoW gambling
| casinos slash Ponzi schemes (Bitcoin) in the same way. If the
| governments don't have any motivation to stop the mayhem, then
| the company whose products are being used to create that
| blackhole should step in. I never liked Nvidia, but this is a
| necessary decision.
| bobviolier wrote:
| Note that unfortunately they actually have a set of cards that
| are better suited for crypto.. they just don't want you to use
| these.
| webinvest wrote:
| I can't blame you for using a throwaway account for a comment
| like that. Many cryptocurrencies provide value while video
| games suck time and value.
| koluna wrote:
| I'm sorry, spit my coffee over the keyboard. What value does
| cryptocurrency provide other than sucking the world's
| electric energy for meaningless calculations?
| mrkramer wrote:
| Like I said for electricity, aren't you free to do with your GPU
| whatever you want?!
|
| This is anti-consumer they should be sued.
|
| Just like ISPs wanted to slow your traffic for services they
| don't like and didn't succeed hardware producers can not limit
| what you do with your purchased hardware.
| kaldorf wrote:
| Other people doing research etc. _need GPUs_. If rich people
| started to hoard all food or ffp masks, shops would intervene
| first (they did during the hoarding last year) and the
| government would follow if that wouldn 't help.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I guess you are referring to the Tragedy of the Commons[0]
| but in the market efficient economy there should be enough
| producers(supply) to serve high aggregate demand. This action
| by NVIDIA only shows that GPU industry is highly concentrated
| and that more competition is needed. It seems like NVIDIA is
| a victim of its own success since it can not produce enough
| GPUs.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
| 988747 wrote:
| And if they simply raised prices and made huge profits,
| they could afford building their own fab, or at least
| outbidding other companies for TSMC/Samsung/whoever fab
| capacity...
| lvl100 wrote:
| Too little too late? I think mining has peaked with ETH POS shift
| weeks away. We will soon find out how much of Nvidia's business
| was truly driven by crypto versus what they conveyed to investors
| in the past.
| agilob wrote:
| >Too little too late
|
| Just on time for ETH to move away from PoW! It's almost like
| NVidia waited for ETH
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Does this mean my pre-crippled 3080 is now going to be worth even
| more on the secondary market?
| pvarangot wrote:
| I would say yes.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Read Adam Smith.
| [deleted]
| Havoc wrote:
| > company's dedicated GPU for professional mining
|
| What a world. What do you do for a living? Professional miner. oh
| no not that kind of miner.
|
| Anyway...I'm guessing it's again only the eth hashing algo that's
| crippled.
| badkitty99 wrote:
| Nvidia contributing directly to the energy waste
| jacquesm wrote:
| NVidia has a supply problem. Imagine making something that is so
| popular that you continuously run out of stock for the people
| that you originally intended your product for. The normal
| solution would be to crank up production to the point where you
| can supply all of your customers. Might even get some better
| economies of scale out of it too.
|
| This is the dumb way to deal with the problem. Besides the fact
| that it will get hacked it alienates a good chunk of their
| customers who would be happy to drop more $ if there were more
| product.
| mjlee wrote:
| I'm not sure this really is all that good for gamers. It'll solve
| the short term problem of lack of supply, sure, but in a years
| time we'll instead have a whole bunch of e-waste mining cards and
| a very thin second-hand market for gaming cards. All upside for
| Nvidia though!
| Grimm1 wrote:
| Can't drive people to the mining cards they've released if you
| have everyone using the consumer hardware.
|
| As someone who really likes the performance and ecosystem around
| NVIDIA cards this makes me happy, because I'll probably be able
| to own one sometime before the heat death of the universe if
| trends like this continue. But,
|
| "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers,"
|
| Is a load of crock. They have a new mining focused product line
| they want miners purchasing and they get the convenience of the
| nice gamer PR from this to run it behind.
|
| Company gonna company. I'm not saying it's a bad thing by the
| way, just don't think they're all pro gamer or doing it for
| reasons besides money.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Their stated purpose is still true. They want to get these GPUs
| to gamers and their mining GPUs to miners.
| dheera wrote:
| I think there are better ways than intentionally crippling a
| general purpose compute platform.
|
| On the surface, the easiest, cheapest way to alleviate the
| situation would be to require government ID for purchases and
| limit it to 1 GPU per person, and relax the limitations for
| educational institutions doing ML research.
|
| A more serious way to do it would be to administer a test
| that you take in person (similar to the DMV); you pick either
| a gaming skill test or a machine learning test, and if you
| pass, you get to buy 1 GPU. This takes a bit more resources
| though, logistically, and although it sounds silly I think it
| would work.
| neither_color wrote:
| This is what my local microcenter does. They have a sign
| when you walk in saying ONE gpu per customer per 30 days,
| and they write down your license number to make sure. I
| still was never able to get one(because people camp outside
| the store the night before deliveries) but I appreciate
| their effort.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| It really isn't a load of crock. For whatever reason NVIDIA has
| a real interest in making gamers happy. You hear this as being
| a serious motivation for them even from employees not on the
| record. The most cynical take on it would be that they want to
| do this for long term growth. Which if so, is fine. An example
| of capitalism working.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Either proof-of-stake or ASICs are gonna make GPU Ether
| mining rather short lived.
|
| Nvidia fears that all those customers will vanish over night.
| SXX wrote:
| They only fears that those consumers gonna sell their used
| hardware which gonna cause drop demand for GPU for a long
| time.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Well if the invisible hand off the market works in favour
| of me for once, I'm not gonna complain
| ericmay wrote:
| Can't it be both? Seems like a win-win for Nvidia and gamers.
|
| I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of
| customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that
| gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards.
| erjiang wrote:
| It makes sense to me that gamers as a market are more likely
| to be brand-loyal and gaming is also more moat-able than
| hashing.
|
| For miners, they just want whatever does more hashes per
| second. There's no loyalty there and the hardware is
| competing solely on hash/power/cost. For gaming, you have
| proprietary software and APIs like "RTX"-branded stuff, game-
| specific driver optimizations, etc. where you can better
| defend yourself against AMD.
|
| So for Nvidia, if they're going to sell X GPUs either way,
| they'd rather sell to gamers than miners to help preserve
| their gaming market share which plausibly has more long-term
| value. Just my guess, at least.
| gruez wrote:
| I think the cynicism is akin to apple removing the
| charger/headphones from new iPhones. They claim it's for
| environmental purposes, and maybe they really do care, but
| many think it's just a cash grab.
| rundevilrun wrote:
| companies are people too!
| munk-a wrote:
| It is legitimately difficult to get a 3080 right now and I
| suspect that Nvidia is actually eating a lot of bad PR for it
| now. That said, if society turns around and starts viewing
| mining as a significant climate change issue then building
| hardware to specifically support that market is likely going to
| be another PR disaster.
|
| I suspect Nvidia's marketing team has grown too comfortable on
| consistently edging out AMD for ray tracing and isn't the
| sharpest bunch of tools in the shed.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It doesn't seem like a load of crock to me. I don't know why
| they would even bother creating a separate line for miners
| unless they were worried about essentially telling the whole
| gaming market "too bad" indefinitely. That might be more
| lucrative in the short term because miners are willing to pay
| more than gamers for the same card, but nvidia probably don't
| want to just burn their bridge to the gaming community.
| NazakiAid wrote:
| A major bad point with this is when the mining cards become
| obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a
| computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So
| realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to
| gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used
| graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card
| instead). Short term fix, long term problem.
|
| I was thinking they could maybe get a second use in industry
| however they mostly buy new cards (from my limited knowledge on
| it).
|
| Nvidia knows the strats to make $$$ in the long term under the
| guise of the good guy.
| bentcorner wrote:
| How big is the used market for graphics cards though? Common
| advice is to avoid buying used unless you also price in the
| risk that the card was used as a miner and hasn't been taken
| care of.
|
| Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you
| could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform
| higher-end previous-gen parts.
| ollien wrote:
| I don't have a citation for how massive the used market is,
| but I can tell you without a doubt that people in my circles
| buy used cards, and that I commonly heard it as advice to
| save a buck.
| loeg wrote:
| My most recent card purchase was used. I bought a used GTX
| 1070 for $230 in 2019, when the 2000-series was new. I've
| been happy with the price and performance; it hasn't died or
| anything.
|
| > Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness,
| you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform
| higher-end previous-gen parts.
|
| This wasn't true at the time. The high-end parts just have
| many multiples of the compute units of the low end cards.
| Nvidia 3xxx isn't 100% faster than 2xxx or 1xxx on a per-unit
| basis, and the x080 cards have several times the compute of
| the x030 or 50 parts.
|
| Another relevant concern is GPU RAM; the lower end parts just
| have less RAM. Game performance completely falls over if more
| RAM is needed than the card has. Very large displays need a
| ton of GPU RAM.
| paxys wrote:
| There are tons of use cases for GPUs outside of output to a
| display: audio/video encoding, render farms, scientific
| computing.
| rubito wrote:
| This is incorrect since the onboard HDMI output can be used for
| that as well (or a secondary GPU).
| justaguy88 wrote:
| Graphics cards without display outputs are still useful, you
| can use them for VFIO and gpgpu workloads
| gruez wrote:
| What's the market for second hand GPUs for scientific
| computing, compared to second hand GPUs for gaming?
| kevingadd wrote:
| NV sells tons of cards used for things other than mining and
| video output already. The mining cards can be repurposed for
| those use cases (compute, machine learning, etc)
| wbraun wrote:
| Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that
| its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an
| attack on general purpose computing.
|
| Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer
| and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of,
| such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can
| run is a whole new level.
|
| I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this
| behavior by Nvidia.
| hosh wrote:
| I remember reading about this earlier in the year. What may not
| be apparent from this article is that Nvida is also selling GPU
| cards specifically designed for miners.
|
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
| creato wrote:
| It is unfortunate, but it is less unfortunate than the behavior
| of crypto miners. Freedom is great when people aren't using
| their freedom to infringe on other people's freedom.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| How is someone mining on GPUs they bought themselves
| infringing on your freedom, pray tell?
| munk-a wrote:
| I suspect this definition issue is partially due to
| cultural issues - freedom means different things in
| different parts of the world. Outside of the US societal
| freedom and the freedom from pain are valued over the
| individualistic freedom valued in the US.
|
| I don't think either view is absolutely correct after
| having lived in a few different' societies - but there are
| valid points to support a view where individual freedom to
| act isn't the primary freedom to protect (i.e. protecting
| the freedom for everyone to live a healthy life better
| enables all individuals to achieve a greater degree of
| freedom as a society than being individually focused).
|
| I really think there's a philosophical disagreement on what
| freedom is at the core of a lot of the libertarian vs.
| socialist arguments.
| belltaco wrote:
| The extra power usage is destroying our planet all for
| someone to try and make a quick buck, and causing shortages
| of GPUs during a pandemic where mental health from
| entertainment like gaming is valuable and stops people from
| going outside and getting/spreading the virus. The
| incentives for crypto all are f'ed up right now. The ETH
| PoS switch can't come soon enough.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| So earning income is less important than letting people
| play video games? Let's just say I'm unconvinced by this
| argument.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think it's quite fair to say earning income is less
| important than allowing people to achieve happiness and
| video games are a pretty well known way to accomplish
| that.
| knorker wrote:
| Would you say the same if you could mine bitcoin by
| buying up as much medicine as you could, and burning it?
|
| Because if you think the above behavior isn't "earning
| income" clearly better than "play video games", then your
| argument falls completely flat.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| this is a total false equivalence. you're really
| comparing computing hashes to buying medicine and
| destroying it?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I don't know any gamers who can game 24/7, 7 days a week
| with multiple GPUs.
|
| Mining and gaming aren't even close to comparable in
| power usage.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The moment Trump and Covid just don't deliver the current
| ROI of clicks for the media, suddenly we started hearing
| about how terrible crypto electricity usage is.
|
| The same way plastics are suffocating the fishes got
| forgotten the moment everyone started to litter the world
| with masks and packaging from food delivery.
|
| It is manufactured news story the same way that next one
| will be.
| fastball wrote:
| What if you're only mining with renewables?
|
| And I'd actually like to see a study on the positive
| mental health benefit of gaming, because I'm skeptical.
|
| Also the idea that you need a primo GPU in order to game
| is a bit silly. And if you're the kind of person that
| absolutely _needs_ the best graphics in order to enjoy
| gaming, please see my point no. 2 about mental health.
| shagie wrote:
| > What if you're only mining with renewables?
|
| The issue isn't the "we're using renewable energy - see,
| this doesn't make things worse." It also doesn't make
| things better. Whats more, its increasing the consumption
| of energy which is at the core of the problem.
|
| It would have been even better to push that renewable
| energy out onto the grid (and also not increase the
| consumption of power for crypto mining).
|
| Switching all new power consumption to renewable doesn't
| improve things because the baseline of non-renewable is
| still there. We need to reduce existing and switch
| existing to renewable.
|
| I suspect a bit of Parkinson's law is in place with
| energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
| -- The key is to stop making it worse (by mining crypto
| and trying to justify it with "but its from renewable").
| onethought wrote:
| I mine on renewables and with 3000 series gpus. I didn't
| want to do any of this, I ended up here because my energy
| retailer decided to tax me for exporting too much energy
| to the grid. So short of earthing the electricity, my
| solution was to burn it up in mining, and improve my
| solar roi.
|
| The 3000 series gpus are the most efficient hashes/watt.
| So actually by disabling this, you are driving people
| towards less efficient/worse for the environment ASICS
| machines.
|
| Yes I batteried my home, and use my solar on everything I
| can first... there is still excess... especially at peak.
|
| Pretty sure this dismantled most of your argument.
| icoder wrote:
| This is a bit of a two wrongs don't make a right: the
| fact that your energy retailer is taxing you doesn't (by
| itself) make it 'right' to use that energy for mining.
|
| Ofcourse I totally understand you do as you do, on an
| individual basis, but that just stresses the point that
| this can only be regulated at the group/population level.
| Axien wrote:
| Out of curiosity, has the mining yet payed for the
| rig/card?
| istorical wrote:
| You are the exception of all exceptions. What percentage
| of GPUs being purchased for the purposes of crypto are
| for reasons like yours vs being bought by already wealthy
| conglomerates and mining groups to further enrich the new
| crypto multi-millionaire/billionaire class.
| fastball wrote:
| It's not anyone's responsibility to make things "better"
| for you or anyone else.
|
| The person I was replying to said that mining was
| destroying the planet. This doesn't seem particularly
| true to me if you're mining on renewables.
| whydoibother wrote:
| Aren't most miners in China and use coal power? Seems
| like it is contributing to destroying the planet then.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > increasing the consumption of energy which is at the
| core of the problem.
|
| How is consuming energy a problem? There is a blob of
| infinite energy on the sky and practically all of it is
| wasted.
| henriquez wrote:
| I'm not sure how crypto mining infringes on anyone's freedom?
| bl0b wrote:
| Could you explain how you see crypto miners as infringing on
| other's freedoms?
|
| I certainly agree with your first sentence, and think NVIDIA
| crippling hash rates on their GPUs is the lesser of two evils
| - just because I think crypto miners are a) wasting massive
| amounts of electricity and b) messing up prices in the GPU
| market.
| Valmar wrote:
| Let's see... crypto-miners hoarding GPUs by the tens,
| hundreds, even, driving up GPU prices for the non-miner.
| Also, when the cycle busts, hoards of cheap, abused mining
| cards flood the second-hand market, making it difficult for
| companies to sell fresh cards, and also possibly hurting
| the company's reputation when an abused mined-on GPU fails
| prematurely.
|
| Miners can whine, all they want, but something needs to
| happen to hamper their greed for virtual money.
| seneca wrote:
| > Freedom is great when people aren't using their freedom to
| infringe on other people's freedom.
|
| Other people driving up the price on something you want is
| not "[infringing] on other people's freedom". It's an
| inconvenience, but you're still completely free to buy at the
| inflated price.
| dorkwood wrote:
| Could the price ever reach a point where you would say it
| infringes on the general public's freedom to purchase? Or
| are all prices simply greater and greater inconveniences?
| Vrondi wrote:
| No. There is no constitution of any nation which says you
| are owed the freedom to be guaranteed that a luxury good
| (like gaming graphics cards) will be available when you
| feel like buying it. Market scarcity of luxury goods has
| no infringement on anyone's freedom. Just like market
| availability of luxury cars or gold jewelry in no way
| infringes on anyone's freedom.
| Siira wrote:
| People hate competition. It's not like the big tech is made
| out of bricks. The small timer says competing users of GPUs
| are evil, the Apple lawyer bullshits on how they can't even
| allow mentions of alternative payment gateways less the
| security gods become angry.
| willis936 wrote:
| Indeed. I buy fast computers because they are fun toys. What if
| I want to play around with password cracking on my gaming
| machine? Is the hardware going to detect that I am running hash
| algorithms and throttle it? Is this a game reserved for state-
| level players behind closed doors?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > What if I want to play around with password cracking on my
| gaming machine?
|
| Currently, you'd have to pay $2500 or more to buy a scalped
| card anyway unless you get really, really lucky with
| something like the Newegg Shuffle.
|
| If they break the mining incentive, they're going to drop the
| price of these cards and also make them more available.
|
| I'd rather have a hashrate limited card that I can actually
| buy at a reasonable price than a fully unlocked card that
| can't be obtained for anything less than 3X MSRP.
| willis936 wrote:
| Well, the article does say that it will only be in a future
| revision of cards. I already bought a new 3070 from a
| friend for a mere 10% over the (already ludicrous) MSRP.
|
| What about when ETH moves to PoS or the crypto market
| crashes? The concern is that this feels more like a ratchet
| in a bad direction rather than a temporary fix.
| kemonocode wrote:
| It angers me too, and most people are definitely getting upset
| with the wrong party- it is not to say crypto miners are
| magically devoid of guilt or that there aren't issues with
| scalpers, but these are all, deep down, supply issues that have
| sprung due to an over-reliance on Just-In-Time manufacturing.
| Pandemic-induced shortages merely compound what was already a
| problem.
| barrkel wrote:
| It's market segmentation, and it's not a new strategy.
|
| The market is bimodal. There's the crypto miners and there's
| the gamers. Right now, gamers are getting starved out and
| middlemen are pocketing the surplus selling gaming cards to
| crypto miners.
|
| Nvidia want to capture more of that surplus for themselves,
| while also taking money from the gamers. Satisfy both markets
| with different products at different prices, prices that leave
| less money on the table.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| a succinct, correct explanation imo. if your angry, it should
| be at crypto before anything else. a largely useless tech
| that has lots of negative externalities, like this one.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Given there is just more demand than supply. With this model
| they are still sitting customers who are willing to pay less
| for the same good. If there wasn't such a tight supply
| constraint right now, this strategy would make 100% sense to
| me. Right now they should just auction the cards off from
| their website. Keep all the margin and get the cards to the
| buyer for whom the goods are worth the most
| smoldesu wrote:
| I dunno, the freedom fighter in me thinks this is a terrible
| idea, but my rationale says that it doesn't make much of a
| difference. Nvidia's hash rate limitation is really their way
| of telling miners that they aren't interested in their
| business. I _suppose_ I could see Nvidia taking a hard left
| turn here and stopping acceleration for other things (like ML
| and physics calculations), but why would they? CudNN and PhysX
| are already such massive investments to them that throwing it
| out would break comparability with several games /apps and
| outrage the professional/consumer market.
|
| So given how few choices Nvidia has, I think I trust them to
| call this. At the very least, it should reduce their hardware
| demand to tolerable levels, so they can focus on securing
| better silicon rather than simply _more_.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Don't these hardware manufacturers already deliberately reduce
| the performance of some chips just so they can sell them for
| cheaper without actually developing and manufacturing an
| additional line of chips (i.e. price discrimination)? This
| doesn't seem much different.
| Siira wrote:
| Price discrimination is evil. Perfect discrimination leads to
| products having zero economic worth to the consumer.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's easy to think of it that way. But here's another way
| to think about it: a manufacturer has two assembly lines
| for two different products which are sold at two price
| points. As they scale up production, they realize that they
| could realize significant economies of scale if they
| combine their assembly lines and only produce the more
| expensive product, but then apply an "artificial"
| limitation to half of those products so they can still sell
| to both markets. Is it somehow wrong for them to offer the
| same two product lines to the same two markets, but just
| with a more efficient manufacturing process?
| nickff wrote:
| De-rated units are usually chips that didn't perform as well
| as they could have. A variety of manufacturing discrepancies
| (defects) can cause excess heat dissipation or non-functional
| cores.
|
| Selecting what a given unit should be rated to (clocked at or
| enabled to do) is often known as 'binning', and is common
| throughout the electronics industry.
| neither_color wrote:
| That's called binning but it's not as bad as it seems and it
| reduces waste. The way chips are manufactured all the high
| end and lower end variants come from the same process, but
| the company can only guarantee the performance of the higher
| binned ones.
| neither_color wrote:
| While I wholeheartedly agree that nvidia should do this, what
| bothers me is that they take functionality away without adding
| anything in or lowering the price. They are selling a
| "technically" inferior SKU for the same price.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > While I wholeheartedly agree that nvidia should do this,
| but bothers me is that they take functionality away without
| adding anything in or lowering the price.
|
| Vendors are selling cards at 10-50% above MSRP and scalpers
| are selling them at 200-300% of MSRP precisely because
| they're usable for mining.
|
| By breaking the mining incentive, they _are_ dropping prices
| for consumers. Considerably.
| CardenB wrote:
| Due to supply constraints, retail does not represent the true
| price. 3080s are generally going for $3k on eBay right now.
| Their move is allowing the price of the card to LOWER back to
| retail price.
| lacker wrote:
| They aren't really "selling" the unlocked RTX 3080, though.
| They go for $2500 on ebay, and you're essentially winning a
| lottery if you manage to get one at the advertised $800
| price. In practice acquiring a restricted RTX 3080 is going
| to be a lot cheaper than acquiring an unrestricted one.
| exmicrosoldier wrote:
| I work in SaaS. Availability is a key feature.
|
| A service with more features that I can't use is less
| valuable than one with less features that I can use whenever
| I want.
| Scarblac wrote:
| In an abstract sense, yes.
|
| But crypto with proof of work is such a huge energy wasting
| uselessness that any action against them is welcome. Besides if
| they don't, then their old markets will disappear because they
| can't get cards anymore and start doing other things, and then
| when crypto is made illegal or crashes for good, they suddenly
| lose their whole market.
| saurik wrote:
| But this isn't an action "against" mining: this is just so
| they can use DRM techniques to build the computational
| equivalent of a network neutrality violation to price
| discriminate a high value use case to their CMP HX line.
| bb88 wrote:
| If I were a chip manufacturer like NVDA, I would pursue the
| crypto market with a special chips for each different crypto,
| to move the crypto market off their gamer line.
|
| Then let the crypto people pay 6x for 4x performance using half
| the power, e.g, meanwhile using that income to fund the
| research for the the 3nm, 2nm, 1nm production lines.
| emsy wrote:
| If we didn't have such a dire chip shortage I would be upset on
| principle, but I see this as a move that's supposed to help
| long time customers get a hand at a _Graphics_ card at a
| reasonable price. Once mining will ebb off, those customers are
| unlikely to keep buying Nvidia products so it's entirely
| understandable why they would do this. Also, it's not like on
| iOS where the company whitelists apps, this is a very specific
| blacklisting.
| varispeed wrote:
| What is the business case for prioritising casual non-tech
| customer over bulk order specialist customer?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| The casual customer will still be buying GPUs 10 years from
| now.
|
| The bulk order GPU miners will stop ordering GPUs the
| minute mining becomes unprofitable. With proof-of-stake and
| ASICs on the horizon, this could happen rather abruptly.
|
| When miners are done with GPUs, they're going to unload
| them on the secondary market. The used GPU market is going
| to be flooded with GPUs that have been overclocked and run
| with the demanding synthetic workloads 24/7, which is going
| to create a high failure rate. This is going to sour a lot
| of people who buy those used mining cards and experience
| failures later.
|
| In short: They're gaining goodwill with the long term
| customers at the expense of the short-term customers. This
| is fine, because the short-term customers will disappear
| soon and the long-term customers can consume all of their
| production anyway.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| This doesn't really make sense to me. What would the
| "casual customer" do if nvidia didn't introduce this
| segmentation? Would this completely halt the gaming
| industry such that 10 years from now no one would even
| consider buying a GPU? I don't believe that.
|
| Also, if they're able to produce both consumer GPUs and
| miner GPUs to meet both demands, what's stopping them
| from doing it now? Is it not worth their while at current
| prices, so bumping the miner GPU prince by a significant
| amount would change that? Why not just increases prices
| as it is? It seems to me that the actual price charged by
| amd and nvidia isn't that outrageous, it's just that the
| cards are bought well in advance and possibly scalped
| later.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Nvidia does not want to hike the prices because last time
| they did this in the same circumstances they lost a lot
| of goodwill.
| patrickk wrote:
| Actually GPUs used for mining are typically undervolted
| to keep power costs down, and by running them 24/7 there
| is less thermal expansion and contraction so they're not
| expected to fail at higher rates than other GPUs.
|
| Source: I used to mine ETH years ago on used AMD GPUs
| when that was still profitable. From perusing mining
| forums this is still standard practice. I eventually sold
| all the GPUs and all of them worked flawlessly.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Doesn't really matter. Running a card 100% 24/7 is still
| harder on it that gaming a couple hours per day.
|
| GPUs are relatively reliable, but fans less so. The
| failures are usually an early death of the fan, which
| can't be replaced without strapping something else to the
| shroud with zip ties or watercooling it.
|
| Miners aren't usually impacted because the failures
| happen after several years. It's the downstream buyers
| who lose out and then associate the brand with premature
| failure.
| mdoms wrote:
| They're also instantly selling every single GPU they can
| produce either way, so there's no downside.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| This - plus if all the new GPUs are going into ETH miners
| rather than gaming rigs, what incentive will game
| developers have to target new features or optimize for
| them?
| bee_rider wrote:
| And it is a pretty common complaint that companies
| sacrifice long-term interest for short term concerns. It
| is interesting to see a company apparently intentionally
| make the opposite decision (and have people still
| complain).
| dlp211 wrote:
| Isn't this true of any and every decision? There will
| always be people with different opinions, so when a
| decision is made, those on the "losing" side of that
| decision will complain.
| capableweb wrote:
| "If we didn't have such a dire X I would be upset on
| principle, but I see this as a move that's supposed to help
| ..."
|
| What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it
| get challenged? Then it's just a opinion, which is fine by
| itself and it's ok to change opinion, smart people do it all
| the time. But don't call it a principle.
|
| Unlikely that mining will disappear because NVIDIA limits a
| specific algoritm/client software/however the limit is
| implemented. It will, like most "limit for your self-
| protection" systems, eventually be broken. Miners are already
| not afraid of picking apart the components they are using, so
| neither software nor hardware is safe.
| emsy wrote:
| I think your criticism is valid, but I don't think it's
| sensible to adhere to principles in a black and white way.
| For me, the minor restriction put in place by Nvidia is the
| lesser evil when you consider that they could just as well
| sell out to the miners and drastically increase their
| margins. In fact, I think it's a very sympathetic move. I
| don't think "it will be broken" is a good argument, because
| the intent displayed by Nvidia does matter.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Their intent is to limit what people can do with their
| hardware. That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell
| the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do.
|
| I think cryptocurrency is a scam and I'll be glad if/when
| it goes away and graphics cards become cheap again.
| However, I will never support hardware manufacturers
| infringing on the idea of general purpose computing for
| the sake of their business model.
|
| If they want gamers to get more graphics cards then make
| so many graphics cards that everyone will be able to
| afford them. Don't try to artificially limit what the
| hardware can do.
| istorical wrote:
| If it suddenly became wildly profitable to buy all of the
| bread and rice and any form of carbohydrate from food
| manufacturers and grocery stores and burn it in a field,
| would it still be morally wrong for food producers to
| figure out a way to cripple the utility of their food
| products by making them unburnable? Is there some
| capitalist principle or moral principle of the free
| market that overrides all other human needs and values?
|
| What is the principle you are defending and at what point
| does it become less important than other principles?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| If the choice was between restricting food - i.e making
| it less profitable to burn, to make it more available to
| the hungry and letting food be free and the hungry
| starve, then that's a pick between the best of two bad
| options. Clearly it's better to feed people than let food
| be unrestricted.
|
| In this case though the choice is between restricting
| hardware to give gamers more affordable GPUs. The benefit
| doesn't match the cost.
|
| The principle is something like freedom or ownership.
| Arbitrary restrictions are bad because freedom is good.
| By definition arbitrary restrictions aren't needed
| (arbitrary) and reduce freedom (restriction).
| nitrogen wrote:
| Freedom is only good until an incentive aligns that
| causes harm to the long-term stability of an industry or
| society. Right now, people who want to create value
| cannot do so because a paperclip maximizer has found a
| way to exploit the system for its own gain. Nvidia's
| move, futile as it may be, aims to maintain the stability
| of the GPU market for professionals and consumers, the
| actual value producers of society. Crypto mining does not
| produce true value commensurate to the burden it is
| currently placing on all other industries that use
| computing power.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Their intent is to limit what people can do with their
| hardware.
|
| Not really. The intent is to get graphics cards in the
| hands of gamers and professionals, instead of in the
| hands of crypto miners.
|
| That is the end goal here. If you have a better solution,
| of how to do this without people getting around it via
| reselling, ect , please suggest it.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| My solution is not to do that. Make and sell the cards to
| the people who will buy them. If you're selling out make
| more and/or raise prices.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > If you're selling out make more and/or raise prices.
|
| What if you want to raise prices only to crypto miners,
| and not raise them for gamers/professions, in order to
| support your long term customers?
|
| There are lots of very good business reasons to provide
| preferential treatment to a specific customer base, and
| to raise prices on a different customer base.
|
| It is called price discrimination, and is very useful.
|
| Do you not support companies making obvious business
| decisions like this, with their own company, that have
| large benefits to their existing customer base, as well
| as being perfectly rational from a business perspective?
|
| Having crypto miners subsidize an existing customer base,
| makes a lot of business sense, and helps out a lot of
| people.
|
| And it is all done, with people making voluntary
| decisions with the products that they choose to sell.
| Don't buy the product, if you don't like it.
| gpanders wrote:
| > Their intent is to limit what people can do with their
| hardware. That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell
| the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do.
|
| If you need to run millions of hashes per second then buy
| one of the non-LHR models. No one is forcing you to buy
| one of these chips and Nvidia is not taking anything away
| from you.
|
| This is like saying that Intel limits what people can do
| with their hardware because they make both i3 and i9
| chips. There is a spectrum of options to fit more
| people's needs.
| emsy wrote:
| >If they want gamers to get more graphics cards then make
| so many graphics cards that everyone will be able to
| afford them. Don't try to artificially limit what the
| hardware can do.
|
| If there are poor people why don't they print more money?
| But seriously, I addressed this in my reply: there is an
| ongoing chip shortage in the industry (besides the fact
| that it may not make sense to scale a production line for
| a demand surge).
| tshaddox wrote:
| > What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when
| it get challenged?
|
| Huh? To me, refusing to even acknowledge or entertain
| criticism for one's principles is one of the worst things I
| can imagine. Principles ought to be routinely subjected to
| criticism, no different than scientific theories.
| capableweb wrote:
| > refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism
|
| I'm not advocating for you not listen to criticism aimed
| towards your principle. But if your principle gets put to
| the test and you abandon it, it's no longer something you
| fundamentally agree on, it was some "light belief" that
| you had.
| mdoms wrote:
| This is nonsense. Principles should adapt to the context
| they're applied in. In principle I'm against big
| government intervention into our personal lives, but you
| bet your ass I'm in favour of lockdowns when thousands of
| lives are at stake. I'm not going to let thousands of my
| compatriots die out of principle.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| This is just imprecise statement of principle. It's more
| like you're against the government intervening unless
| they're credibly doing it to save lives. If someone
| discovered how to turn a microwave into a nuclear bomb,
| presumably you'd support government intervention to
| collect all the microwaves, even if they had to intervene
| a lot in our lives. Likewise, you support government
| intervention to reduce covid deaths, etc.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Sure, you could just say that your "principles" are
| simply the entire exact sequence of actions you take in
| your life. That way you could by definition never change
| or violate your principles.
|
| But usually people use "principle" to refer to a
| relatively concise statement that can be applied to a
| large variety of situations.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I'm not familiar with any definition of the word
| principle that includes the idea of "concise".
|
| Principle as I'm using it here is a moral belief or
| guide. It's less a description of what you do and more an
| explanation for why you do what you do.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I just mean that it must be more concise than a lookup
| table from every possible situational input to the
| recommended output. The same is implied by the term
| "explanation."
| tshaddox wrote:
| Replace "principle" with "scientific theory." Why
| shouldn't principles be subject to tests and criticism?
| just-ok wrote:
| In the same way that a scientific theory was meaningless
| if it failed a test, a principle was meaningless if it
| needed to be adjusted when actually put to use.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Superseded scientific theories aren't all "meaningless."
| Newton's laws of motion are superseded, but they aren't
| meaningless, and you presumably wouldn't say that
| scientists who updated their beliefs in the face of new
| evidence and explanations were doing anything wrong.
| void_mint wrote:
| > What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when
| it get challenged?
|
| The realities of life make most principles less finite than
| one would hope. If Nvidia doesn't want to rebrand as a
| crypto-hardware company, they're going to take action so
| their products and brand match _their principles_.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| How big is each of your principles (in terms of information
| complexity) that they cover significant enough number of
| all possible conditions and circumstances?
| just-ok wrote:
| I'm sure plenty of people would agree to an absolute "I
| don't steal" principle--one that covers a pretty
| significant number of conditions & circumstances-and yet
| not go back to the register when they accidentally walked
| out of the grocery store with something, or compromise it
| more significantly under stress of hunger. In this case,
| one could argue "I don't steal" was never a principle
| they actually held.
| renewiltord wrote:
| A principle is a moral heuristic so you don't have to scan
| to root of your moral argument tree on every moral
| question. As a heuristic, it attempts to compress the moral
| space down and will naturally have exceptions.
|
| As a compressed form of your moral judgment, it is also
| useful for you to quickly communicate your position on the
| moral space, and it is up to participants in social
| interactions to decide whether or not someone is good at
| this moral judgment compression.
|
| For instance, I have a principle not to lie in general.
| Most social participants know that this does not constrain
| me from lying in specific situations. After repeated
| interactions they can tell whether this principle of mine
| is held in a manner that's useful to them.
|
| The same principle also allows me to quickly judge
| situations that require me to lie. Is it okay for me to
| tell this person that their house is painted poorly? Well,
| I have this anti-lie principle so that pulls me toward
| "yes". I might have other principles that pull me in other
| directions.
|
| Of course you can treat principles as immutable moral rods.
| This presumably has some value to you. In general, people
| do not act in this manner, however.
| just-ok wrote:
| I think your loose definition of "principle" does not
| meet many others': it's definitely intended to be
| stricter than a heuristic.
|
| Of course even though you can have _relaxed_ principles,
| e.g. "I usually don't lie" vs. "I don't lie," I think the
| point here is that if you believe or preach a particular
| "principle," but then adjust it for yourself when it's
| convenient (for example a "just this once" scenario), it
| was never a principle to begin with.
| vehementi wrote:
| No. Only the miners. All for this.
| cortesoft wrote:
| You can still buy unlocked GPUs. What is wrong with creating a
| new product people want? I want a gaming GPU that is powerful
| and reasonably priced and actually available to be purchased.
| Unless Nvidia does this, how else can they provide that product
| for me?
| nucleardog wrote:
| And unless Nvidia does this, what does their market look like
| in 5 or 10 years?
|
| People won't wait around not upgrading their systems forever
| because the price of their cards has been bid up by crypto
| miners to unaffordable levels.
|
| At some point Nvidia simply won't have a consumer market
| anymore. They'll let go of a market-leading position in
| favour of the crypto miners.
|
| What are they going to do when the crypto mining goes away?
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Yes, it sucks, but the tragedy of the commons is real[0]. Not
| that I defend NVs solution, but I think the problem is worse
| overall.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Not at all, part of the reason is crypto miners buy up all the
| supplies and gamers can't buy them. Then when crypto prices
| fall they dump old cards back onto the market. It hurts both
| sides
| NortySpock wrote:
| It looks like this is tied to the hardware, so miners should
| look to avoid a particular manufacturing run of a SKU.
|
| Personally, I'm ok with this approach as it's tied to the
| hardware, and can be researched by everyone ahead of time to
| avoid "Model X, manufactured from Y to Z dates". Hopefully this
| can be determined from the SKU + serial number easily by a
| human reading the serial number.
|
| It's not a software driver change nerfing the card remotely,
| which I would be absolutely against. It appears it could be
| eventually reverse engineered and bypassed, which I'm also ok
| with.
|
| It's also not immediate e-waste as miners will avoid it anyway,
| and gamers can just use the card as normal regardless of the
| manufacturing run -- this isn't hardware that lacks video
| ports.
| wpietri wrote:
| I'm all for it. My system with a 3080 had a hardware issue so I
| needed to swap it for a new one. It took me weeks of
| shenanigans with the vendor because they couldn't get a new
| card to send me a new system. And that was after a month's wait
| to get the original system, also due to supply constraints. I
| have actual work to do, and am fine with NVidia making it
| harder for make-money-fast potlatchers if that means I can
| actually buy their product to do useful work.
| colordrops wrote:
| I bought an MSI desktop with a 3080 specifically for gaming.
| I didn't even know you could mine ethereum with a 3080 until
| after buying it. I've been running a miner using power from
| my solar cells when I'm not gaming. I don't deserve to have
| my card crippled. Fuck NVidia.
|
| EDIT: Ok, I bothered to read the article. This is a hardware
| measure for new cards, not existing cards.
| knorker wrote:
| No matter if you think of what's happening here, NVidia is
| _clearly_ not the bad guys in this story.
| _vertigo wrote:
| It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on
| here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect,
| I would expect people on HN to object to this move on
| principle.
|
| Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in
| principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare
| example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free
| to run at their max capability, not deliberately hamstrung,
| etc. etc. - to me, this kind of ties in with the "software
| should be free" principle) conflicts with a more immediate
| desire to play the latest video games (lol).
|
| Harder to take the principled approach when you've been waiting
| "like 11 whole months for the 3080 I mean seriously dude".
| aeternum wrote:
| How do you feel about laser printers and color photocopiers
| refusing to photocopy government currency?
| _vertigo wrote:
| What, you mean because they are legally obligated to refuse
| to do so?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| The free market and personal liberty aren't magical tools
| that when combined produce a functional system. From the
| outside the GPU market is probably unfixably broken. Capacity
| to manufacture is an extremely expensive investment that will
| be wasted if cryptomining on GPUs becomes merely somewhat
| less effective. Meanwhile GPUs are being driven out of the
| price range where their natural market can actually afford
| them.
|
| Imagine if it were so profitable to haul small trailers of
| goods around for amazon that basic passenger cars went from
| 20k to 70k and nobody was interested in expanding car
| manufacturing to meet the new demand because the capacity
| might well go to waste next year. It would be untenable.
|
| If car manufacturers started selling cars that were
| deliberately shitty at towing but still worked great for
| moving people from A to B I think they can be forgiven.
|
| We want freedom to use our hardware but we need to have a
| functional market as well and this one has been broken for
| years with no sure end date.
| gruez wrote:
| > It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many
| people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I
| would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this
| move on principle.
|
| Sounds like free speech. People were all for unrestricted
| free speech... until the right wing started using it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think it's hard to take the principled approach when you
| see that the result of sticking to principles results in
| large organizations enriching themselves while ignoring the
| myriad externalities.
|
| At least, it makes you re-evaluate your principles.
| _vertigo wrote:
| What, externalities like energy waste? If that's the case,
| why target ETH, isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon?[1]
| I admit I don't really know if what Nvidia is targeting
| applies to both pre-merge and post-merge ETH
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon?
|
| Ethereum is going proof of stake soon for a few years
| now.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| > I would expect people on HN to object to this move on
| principle.
|
| I cannot think of any principle that would cause me to object
| to this.
|
| Blind fealty to general purpose computing here conflicts with
| the very real world impact on non-crypto consumers. If we're
| being utilitarian, it seems to me that it would be obvious
| that this is a good move.
| _vertigo wrote:
| I mean, why are non-crypto consumers better than crypto
| ones from a utilitarian POV? (I play video games and
| dislike crypto - I'm just asking). I suppose that people do
| things other than gaming with 3080s, because I would be
| hard pressed to make a convincing argument that gaming is
| somehow so much more valuable of a hobby than mining crypto
| that it's worth the hit to general purpose computing to
| specifically ban crypto
| istorical wrote:
| I think the missing factor here is that mining groups are
| sort of like neo-feudalists.
|
| If crypto ends up becoming the de facto world currency,
| then mining groups that are already wealthy purchasing
| all available stock of GPUs to mine and further enrich
| themselves is sort of like if 70% of land was owned by
| wealthy nobles, and they used the profits from their land
| ownership to purchase all new land-producing/discovering
| capital and therefore become the owners of all new land
| coming onto the market. It's like the worst nightmare of
| those worried about income inequality. And it just so
| happens to affect retail consumers who just want "land"
| for other purposes than becoming richer.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I use my GPU to render visualizations for my work and for
| educational YouTube videos. It's not just gaming, but
| even then, belittling gaming is kind of silly.
| Entertainment has value too, and that entertainment
| supports lots of actual people doing actual work.
|
| And crypto itself is the biggest hit to general purpose
| computing outside of the walled garden world of phones.
| What computing can be done if crypto speculation consumes
| all available computing power?
| Daishiman wrote:
| Content creators, specialty industrial systems, R&D
| researchers, and designers are core customers of nVidia's
| products too.
|
| They frankly contribute to society in a way that
| speculators never will.
| wpietri wrote:
| No principle exists in a vacuum. In practice, all are
| balanced against other principles.
|
| Let's run with your "software should be free" as an example.
| Licenses like the GPL family apparently work against that, in
| that they add restrictions. But so-called "viral" licenses
| aim to maximize a different kind of freedom for a larger
| number of less powerful players. Some call this hypocritical,
| but it's just balancing principles while taking into account
| outcomes.
|
| Another way to put it is that principles for most aren't
| religious commandments; they're mental tools to push the
| world toward a set of preferred results.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Without price discrimination, everyday users end up paying
| more for a given product while for-profit entities would pay
| less.
|
| When a company releases a product, they price it according to
| how much profit they want to make per unit sold. Market
| segmentation allows them to sell their product at a lower
| margin to lower income users and shift much of that profit
| burden to corporate customers who can easily afford it.
|
| Where I take issue with this practice is when manufacturers
| start suing users who modify their own hardware to enable
| features that they didn't pay the manufacturer for. Tesla
| selling heated seats as a software upgrade is a good example.
| It's fine if they want to build the hardware into every Tesla
| and only enable it for users that pay for it, but suing
| customers who modify their vehicle to turn on the heated
| seats on their own is way out of line.
|
| I don't think Nvidia is going too far here, unless they start
| suing customers who try to write custom drivers that bypass
| the limitation.
| neolog wrote:
| Why does Nvidia even want to sell to low-priced buyers, if
| they are saturating their manufacturing capacity with the
| high-priced buyers alone?
| babypuncher wrote:
| Because those price-sensitive buyers (PC gamers) are far
| more likely to be loyal customers down the road than
| crypto miners, who will immediately stop buying GPUs as
| soon as mining stops being profitable again.
|
| Nvidia wants to give PC gamers a reason to stay on "Team
| Green" by making it easier for them to get a card at a
| reasonable price during this perfect storm of limited
| silicon availability and insane crypto mining demand.
|
| I actually think that this particular move is more about
| rate limiting purchases intended for crypto mining than
| it is about putting miners in a different market segment.
| akersten wrote:
| It's been a shift I've noticed over the last ~15(?) years of
| browsing these and similar forums - as they become more well-
| known and frequented by the general public, the opinions
| start to lose nuance and aren't as tightly coupled to the
| principles from which the forum was borne.
|
| Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years
| ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was
| planning a massive law to regulate the way you can process
| data that internet browsers voluntarily send to your server,
| there would be principled outrage. But, speak ill of GDPR on
| today's HN, and you'll quickly find yourself inundated with
| anti-tech talking points.
|
| The filter bubble doesn't last forever :)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Or perhaps those of us who've been here since Fidonet are
| weary of nuance-free libertarianism. _Shrug_
| Daishiman wrote:
| Not really.
|
| Principles are borne of small communities because small
| communities can afford to be principles.
|
| Before software ate the world, the impact that damaging
| actors had was much more limited. A few computers would get
| a few viruses here and there but that was it.
|
| We live a world where computers have been integrated into
| the fabric of society, and where system risks do not have
| easy, principled answers.
|
| And if principles don't adapt and negotiate with reality,
| its defenders will just be isolated from the rest of
| society which can't afford to lose a lot of other things,
| which include other, possibly more important, principles.
|
| What changed with regards to GDPR was that 15 years ago
| there weren't Facebooks, Amazons, and other megacorps that
| had the personal data of 30% of the world's population
| available for their use. Tech monopolies encroached
| different product areas.
|
| What changed in 15 years is that we grew up, we acquired
| power, we became more integrated into society and as such
| the risk profiles change. You either do, or you become
| irrelevant like many of the Free Software activists who
| were a vanguard back then and whose opinion nowadays
| matters little.
| orangecat wrote:
| _It 's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many
| people on here are supporting this move._
|
| Unfortunately, I'm not surprised. Support for general purpose
| computing and user freedom has fallen substantially in the
| last several years. Look at iOS, where many geeks are happy
| to have a megacorporation tell you what you're allowed to run
| on "your" hardware.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think you're reading too much into people's reactions. I
| think this is a good move for Nvidia in the medium and long
| run. Gaming is the stated purpose of these cards; hashing is
| an unexpected and temporary phenomenon for them. Ethereum is
| moving away from PoW, and more regulation is undoubtedly
| coming to crypto, with its environmental cost likely a
| compelling bullet point. Why wouldn't they try to get back to
| their core business of selling GPUs to gamers?
| babypuncher wrote:
| You say that, but but you might change your tune if 4 months
| from now you can easily buy an Nvidia card because miners
| stopped buying them while AMD cards are still scarce.
| void_mint wrote:
| At some point, someone has to take action against harmful
| behavior, right? In the last few years, we've seen tons
| extremely problematic behavior arise out of well-principled
| technology (all of social media, cryptocurrency, etc). Groups
| of people say "When will we do something?!?!?!", and then, when
| something is done, other people say "But the principle of
| ___!".
|
| Sometime, someone has to do something about problematic
| behavior. The US government isn't going to do anything about it
| (as is evidenced by reality), but private companies are more
| than welcome to shape their products to match that company's
| intended vision for their product. Twitter didn't want fascist
| rants, Nvidia doesn't want all of their cards to be hoarded by
| crypto miners.
| cma wrote:
| Do you really believe Nvidia is being an enforcer here to
| "take action against harmful behavior"? It's just price
| discrimination. They saw they were leaving money on the
| table. Unless they thought it a huge PR win to do it, it's
| probably not much different in motivation than the previous
| thing with them segmenting out datacenter use.
| behringer wrote:
| As a gamer, I'd much rather they take miner's money for
| miner's uses and leave me able to play games in my spare
| time.
| imbnwa wrote:
| I can't believe this is so downvoted. So I, a gaming
| consumer, have to compete with bots every release because
| there's so much money in accommodating miner demand for
| the same cards? That's ridiculous
| kyboren wrote:
| No, that's arbitrage.
| katbyte wrote:
| It's how I feel about getting a ps5, scalpers grab your
| all the inventory and I refuse to buy one from them so
| here I am just given up on a next gen consolfor the near
| future
| void_mint wrote:
| > Do you really believe Nvidia is being an enforcer here to
| "take action against harmful behavior"?
|
| Nvidia has deemed crypto mining harmful to their brand and
| product and have taken action against it, so yes I do
| believe that.
|
| > It's just price discrimination
|
| And?
| undersuit wrote:
| I felt similar anger for similar decisions. GPUs are complex
| pieces of hardware present in so much of our world but we are
| reliant on the manufacture to provide a driver to control the
| hardware. An open(source) driver is nice but doesn't allow you
| to do anything not documented, and open hardware is an
| nonstarter for capitalism with our weak IP laws(but hey let's
| protect a drawn mouse indefinitely.)
|
| Nvidia has done things like this before and it can get worse.
| Imagine a future GPU where only authorized drivers have access
| to certain features, and I'm not talking about the difference
| between consumer and workstation GPUs unlocking a few obscure
| openGL functions in the drivers.
| jp_sc wrote:
| It does, but that the fact that the ponzy scheme that is
| cryptocurrency hasn't been made illegal by now should angers me
| even more.
| floil wrote:
| It's not a whole new level. An aspect of Quadro differentiation
| has, since ages ago, been based on selectively disabling
| features that the consumer gpus silicon was capable of. It's
| the same strategy here.
|
| This makes sense to Nvidia because it creates a segment
| differentiation and will allow them to charge more for the
| higher hash rate parts.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| What if they do it effectively and AMD GPU end up twice as
| expensive because gamers and miners have to compete for cards
| and the miners want 30 and you want 1.
| caconym_ wrote:
| My next GPU is going to be one that a) supports the features I
| want, and b) that I can actually go out and buy without putting
| hundreds or thousands of dollars into some economic parasite's
| pocket. It's not just "hard" to buy high-end GPUs right now--
| it's _impossible_ unless you make a lifestyle out of chasing
| them down.
|
| If this has any effect on anybody who isn't a crypto miner,
| it's going to be to open up possibilities and/or save them
| money. I have trouble finding fault with that, and we're
| surrounded by far more egregious erosions of our "right" to buy
| and use general-purpose computers.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Cryptomining angers me on a deep level far more than the
| nascent attempts of Nvidia to segment it. I think they're doing
| an incompetent job of diminishing the value of it, but at least
| they're making an effort to do so.
|
| Cryptominers are a far greater threat to general purpose
| computing than Nvidia. They ought to be compelled by law to
| purchase carbon credits for their mining, to offset the
| environmental destruction their petty "get rich quick" efforts
| have inflicted on the planet, enforced through Coinbase et al.
| and with noncompliant (offshore) exchange/wash platforms
| blocked and their users prosecuted through national laws and
| international agreements. Cryptominers and the malware they've
| created makes a very strong argument for walled gardens with
| enforcement and review of applications, simply because the vast
| majority of PC users are worse than useless at preventing
| misuse of general purpose Windows.
|
| I also think this proves Apple right on integrating the GPU on-
| die with the CPU, and not selling the CPU standalone at all,
| because Apple -- unlike Nvidia and AMD -- is having no such
| trouble with miners on _their_ general computing platform. This
| issue is for whatever reason restricted to DIY PCs, and
| cryptomining will be the end of DIY PCs if this keeps up.
|
| (Perhaps you meant "DIY computing" rather than "general purpose
| computing"? I definitely see Nvidia's steps as interfering in
| the build-your-own computing market, but if it keeps the DIY
| computing market from dying off in favor of Apple, isn't that a
| _desirable_ outcome?)
| LeftTriangle wrote:
| Yes. Everyone disagreeing with you is just making excuses for
| manufacturers to turn customers into serfs.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| GPUs by definition are not general purpose computers. Remember
| the G in GPU stands for Graphics, not General.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this
| behavior by Nvidia.
|
| I was thinking about buying NVIDIA for the next GPU based on
| performance numbers alone.
|
| However, against it there's:
|
| 1) Terrible Linux support(and history). This is specially
| important now that most of Steam's library runs on Linux
| without issues. It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running
| almost perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as
| Windows. In the case of AMD, with open source drivers.
|
| 2)Control freak shenanigans (see also: this thread). This is
| doing nothing to address the GPU shortage. It's just dishonest
| market segmentation.
|
| 3)Their completely unacceptable behavior regarding reviews.
| They were punishing reviewers that didn't place enough emphasis
| in ray tracing. They would be blacklisted just by saying it's
| not important (which I happen to agree with). They handled the
| situation horribly.
| endgame wrote:
| 4) Crippling the ability to GPU passthrough (subpoint of (2),
| I suppose)
| navaati wrote:
| To give them credit when it's due, they recently lifted
| this limitation.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| All I can say is that that company well deserved Linus
| Torvald's famous middle finger: "NVidia has been the single
| worst company we've ever dealt with, so NVidia F--- YOU!"
|
| And they certainly haven't disappointed since back then.
|
| Petty.
| godelski wrote:
| > It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running almost
| perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as Windows.
|
| I'm looking at Cyberpunk right now (because it is on sale)
| and Steam says it is windows only. Most of my Steam library
| doesn't work on linux, what are you running differently? I'm
| only just getting back into games after a long hiatus.
| krastanov wrote:
| Pretty much the only non-native games I can not run on my
| Linux computer are the ones that incorporate anticheat
| detection. I just use Proton, as it is built in to Steam.
| Origin games do cause some headaches, but usually because
| of the origin client, not because of the game. Examples of
| "heavier" games that run fine for me at highest settings
| (radeon 580): subnautica, tomb rader, mass effect
| (andromeda), alyx, population one.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Windows-only games can run on the Linux version of Steam
| using a feature built into the app called Steam Play, which
| allows games to be run on unsupported platforms using
| compatibility layers. Steam comes bundled with the Proton
| compatibility tool, a fork of Wine maintained by Valve. It
| has very high compatibility, as long as you aren't looking
| to play competitive multiplayer titles.
|
| Here's a community maintained compatibility list:
| https://www.protondb.com/
| godelski wrote:
| Thanks!!!! I found the option. I've heard great things
| about proton just didn't realize I had to flip a switch.
| coolspot wrote:
| 1) I have NVidia RTX 2060 in my Linux laptop (Lenovo Legion)
| and NVidia RTX 3070 in my Linux Ryzen desktop.
|
| Previously had 1060 in Intel Linux desktop.
|
| Zero issues.
| pizza234 wrote:
| I'm on the same boat, however, it's a bit unclear if parent
| is complaining [also] about their open source support.
| Their antagonistic position towards open source (AFAIK
| there's no comparison to AMD<>Nvidia open source drives) is
| a big issue for me.
| dr_zoidberg wrote:
| The driver you are using is a BLOB that comes from closed
| source. Many people who use Linux are against that, and
| would rather have open source drivers (which I think nvidia
| used to have but discontinued?).
| slownews45 wrote:
| I'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I
| think almost every industry.
|
| What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing
| long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by
| the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and
| increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy
| nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the
| long run nvidia ecosystem.
|
| Crypto folks come and go. Serve them on a short term basis with
| something at a higher price point or make them lock in long
| term orders
|
| Almost every business works this way. Long time regular
| customer - you get pricing option A. Rando runs in with lots of
| cash? You don't let them destroy your long term customer
| relationships, but sell them some extra / high margin stuff if
| they are willing to pay enough.
|
| Intel just went through this ecosystem pain with ARM. They said
| no to doing iphone chip. Now an ecosystem has built up around
| ARM with far more investment than would have been there without
| apple leading the way.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > Crypto folks come and go Do they more than gamers?
| Complaints about miners buying all the graphics cards have
| been going on for years now
| akersten wrote:
| If this works (spoiler: it won't, it will be cracked within a
| month), it will create more e-Waste as miners will toss their
| no-video-output-mining-only cards after they're no longer the
| latest tech, instead of being able to resell them to gamers,
| thinning the used graphics card market, forcing more gamers
| to buy new from nVidia instead of rebuying old cards online.
|
| That makes me angry, it should make you angry too.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I don't like Nvidia's approach for other reasons (mostly
| 'cause market segmentation raises prices in the end imo).
| But I'm pretty sure miners very price oriented. They'd sell
| rather than trash whatever cards they have. And it seems
| unlikely they'd be using any unsellable cards since those
| are energy inefficient.
|
| There's a shortage of Nvidia card/chips after all.
|
| Edit: Now I read the article, this is literally only being
| added to new cards and with a warning.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Right - old cards will still work. And they would DEF
| sell 1,000 cards at $500/card even if that's a fraction
| of retail.
| eropple wrote:
| This can be just as easier, and probably more truthfully,
| read as "miners can no longer make the used market a
| minefield by selling overtaxed consumer cards without
| disclosing their provenance." Because, yeah, having ex-
| miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used
| market. Great!
|
| Cryptocurrencies are not inherently good or valuable and
| cryptocurrency people aren't special and their world-
| burning habits and desires need not be privileged.
| dijit wrote:
| > Because, yeah, having ex-miner cards burn out is a
| pretty common thing on the used market.
|
| This is mostly a myth, miners cards are usually
| undervolted, and only a subset of the card is used.
|
| If your CPU only used it's floating point unit then it
| wouldn't be as intense as if you were using the whole
| thing.
|
| The only potential issue is thermal damage, but that's
| hard to place and has to be close to, or in excess of
| 90-110c.
| eropple wrote:
| It's not a myth. These things get racked in stacks of
| GPUs in what may or may not be actually-cooled data
| centers. Undervolted or not, when you couple that with
| constant load you're stressing devices manufactured to
| _consumer_ specs.
|
| The excusemaking is pernicious.
| krapht wrote:
| ? My CPU actually underclocks itself if I am running a
| heavy AVX-512 workload. Actually, back when I had it in a
| cheaper motherboard, my system would crash because the MB
| couldn't deliver enough power to the CPU.
|
| But I agree with the first sentence. Lots of miner cards
| are undervolted because what matters is performance per
| watt, just like many server cpus.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Being angry / outraged / upset is somewhat newer on HN.
|
| Not discounting it, but I tend to be more interested in the
| . well . interesting conversations and questions then to go
| down the angry / upset / outraged path.
|
| The no video out cards used in mining are already out of
| gamers hands. If they throw them away (they won't -
| existing product is working fine) they would no need to buy
| non-gaming product. Finally, I think you underestimate the
| value of the existing product, if they did want to resell
| into gaming market they would probably find success.
| luma wrote:
| They are clearly marking the new models with a new suffix
| on the model number. As someone who has been trying for
| months to buy a 3080 and has zero interest in crypto, this
| is fantastic news... IFF it means I can actually purchase a
| card.
|
| This doesn't make me angry, and I don't think it should
| make you angry either.
| akersten wrote:
| The e-Waste part is what should collectively anger us,
| but I'm glad you're able to buy your card.
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| I'm personally angry that this whole crypto ponzi scheme
| has gotten so big. That miners are producing e-Waste is
| the least of its environmental impact.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Has anybody written about the opportunity cost to society
| of technological resources going to crypto mining instead
| of to consumers, creators, and scientists? I'd be
| interested in reading such an analysis of cost/benefit of
| crypto vs. creation with the limited supply of hardware
| and electricity.
| christkv wrote:
| Not to mention the massive amount of electrical power
| consumed to perform the calculations.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| You aren't joking!
|
| From March 2018:
|
| _Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, "is nothing."
| The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are
| building sites with tens of thousands of servers and
| electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to
| power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms
| race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these
| operations will soon be considered small-scale._
|
| For people clamoring for renewable energy, this is an
| obscene amount of energy needed to do a single task -
| mine bitcoin. Which should make it even more obscene that
| all of that energy is being used for what? The benefit of
| a few people. Staggering to think how common this is and
| the article even states a 30 megawatt system is small
| compared to some of the other sites that are out there.
|
| https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoi
| n-m...
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Keep being angry. It will be much larger in future, and
| use magnitudes more energy. Either make peace (with the
| drumbeat of human progression), or spend your days being
| angry at something you don't understand. Your choice!
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| randomhodler84, have you heard the phrase "last man
| holding the bag?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagholder
| This crypt ponzi scheme turned the natural progression of
| itself into a meme that reinforces itself. But GME is at
| $180, so you could be right. Stupidity could yet win and
| our future could be doomed to feed an ever increasing
| amount of resources into accounting. I hope it's just
| mania and we can go back to regular low energy databases
| to keep track of funds.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| The amount of e-waste seems like worrying about the trash
| created from discarded plastic bottles of windshield
| washer fluid as the environmental impact of cars.
| lstamour wrote:
| What about the electricity cost for powering the card.
| Doesn't that outweigh the e-waste part by a significant
| margin?
|
| Just because a card can't be used by gamers doesn't mean
| the card must be tossed, there are plenty of non-gaming
| uses such as AI. You'll probably see an aftermarket for
| both types of cards.
|
| Also, like regular graphics cards, newer versions are
| highly prized so one might say that graphics cards as an
| industry is already all about e-waste. Unless you'd like
| to buy my Radeon 9800 or my GTX 1070? They're still
| perfectly good for gaming... except everybody wants the
| new RTX ray tracing etc.
| zaptrem wrote:
| I sold a very used GTX 1070 on eBay for $325 only three
| months ago.
| k12sosse wrote:
| I got mine after a 6 months wait on EVGA.com. Worth the
| wait. Best of luck
| skjoldr wrote:
| ...Why would you toss a perfectly working piece of
| equipment that brings you profit? If anything, there is a
| second hand market for mining cards for those who want to
| set up a mining farm for cheaper with a bit more risk.
| [deleted]
| earthtolazlo wrote:
| Proof of work makes me angry. I have a difficult time
| getting too upset over any attempt to curtail it.
| mrgordon wrote:
| I'm not sure it curtails it rather than just generating
| new card types that can only mine coins and then are
| garbage
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Don't be angry. Just try to understand it. It's all we
| can ask.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Nvidia isn't doing it for their customers, it's to reduce the
| aftermarket price drop next time crypto drops.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| To add on:
|
| none of it is malicious. its just the market stabalization
| problem
|
| a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price
|
| b) let's charge miners 3x, because they willing to pay 3x,
| and destroy the scalping market which is VERY anti
| everything. Scalpers hurt literally everyone.
|
| c) let's not de-stabalize nvidia's income again when eth
| drops in value. They don't want to be beholden to a coin's
| gamble either. Basically as it stands Nvidia is far invested
| into eth's value and if it drops their sales drop sharply
| because of a massive influx of cheap supply.
| knz_ wrote:
| > a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price
|
| Consumer GPUs had far from a 'stable price' before the
| mining boom.
|
| GPUs have more than tripled in MSRP once you factor in that
| NVIDIA has moved lower-tier chips that previously only
| featured in their lowest end x50 and x60 tier GPUs up the
| stack and started selling them for $400+ MSRP. Look at the
| GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, against the 3060
| which launched at an MSRP of $330.
|
| It's even worse at the high end. Flagship GPUs like the
| 980ti and 1080ti launched at MSRPs of $650 and $700
| respectively, now the high end GPUs are $1200 (2080ti) and
| $1500 (3090).
|
| > none of it is malicious.
|
| It absolutely is malicious. NVIDIA is trying to stop a
| strong second hand market from being formed so that they
| can continue to charge ridiculous prices for GPUs that
| should be 1/2 to 1/3 their current price if the market was
| healthy.
| munk-a wrote:
| I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then
| miners would be buying less of them. Miners are a black
| hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite
| amounts of processors since they know (or strongly
| believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty
| quickly.
|
| I think Nvidia has some problems and their chips should
| be cheaper - but if that were the case then this solution
| (splitting the markets into regular consumers and miners)
| would be even more necessary.
|
| I also disagree with it being malicious, I think it's a
| perfectly reasonable decision to attribute to some pretty
| sane decisions around market preservation. We here know
| about miners eating up the GPU supply, but for the
| average consumer Nvidia is just hording their chips or
| they're idiots that didn't produce enough - no matter
| what the imagined reason they're the people between the
| average consumer and shiny ray tracing in minecraft.
| knz_ wrote:
| > I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper
| then miners would be buying less of them.
|
| It would increase supply by forcing fabs to scale (would
| take years anyway, but should happen sooner rather than
| later).
|
| > Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can
| absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they
| know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for
| themselves pretty quickly.
|
| And that isn't going to change even with these limited
| GPUs. Mining with ethash is still profitable even with
| the halved hashrate, and other algorithms like kawpow and
| cn-gpu are not limited at all.
|
| The only thing that's going to get rid of PoW mining is
| the entire shitcoin market tanking. As long as the bubble
| continues there's going to be idiots spending money on
| scalped GPUs.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Look at the GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014,
| against the 3060 which launched at an MSRP of $330.
|
| Looks like I'll be hanging on to my 960 for the
| foreseeable future, then. I'm not interested in mining,
| but I've started thinking a bit about playing with CUDA,
| and I'm suddenly a lot less interested if Nvidia might
| decided to gimp my work because I inadvertently did $FOO
| that is commonly done by miners.
| acomjean wrote:
| I notice Microcenter has limited gpu sales to one per
| customer per month.
|
| Its weird when brick and mortar are like limiting sales,
| but on the other hand, they want to keep pc builders happy.
|
| https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/7334/graphic-
| ca...
| slownews45 wrote:
| nvidia could take advantage of eth craze in short run and
| auction cards or chips. They would make a ton more in short
| run. But crypto folks would be only customers (in short
| run) and rest of market would risk migrating away from
| them.
|
| Crypto is very very frothy, so preserving some supply to
| bread and butter / ecosystem supporting sales makes a lot
| of sense to me.
| savant_penguin wrote:
| Except that miners will simply workaround the downgrade
| software (as they did in the past) and regular consumers
| will be the only ones with crippled hardware
| smoldesu wrote:
| Nvidia is implementing a hardware fuse system (a-la the
| Nintendo Switch) to prevent firmware manipulation. I
| can't speak to how secure these new cards will be, but
| the Tegra was an absolute pain in the ass to work with.
| It took a year before people even figured out how the
| firmware was loaded, much less how to interoperate
| between custom and official ones without blowing a fuse.
| To this day, approaching half a decade since the Switch's
| launch, you cannot coldboot the Switch into custom
| firmware.
|
| Considering Nvidia's history with hardware DRM, I think
| there's reason to be scared. Plus, they've undoubtedly
| paid attention to the community as the Switch was
| exploited, and probably intend to further secure the
| firmware interface with what they've learned.
| longhairedhippy wrote:
| I think the big difference here is there is no money
| behind hacking the Switch, it's an interesting problem to
| a small(ish) subset of people. There's tons of folks that
| would make actual hard cash off those hacks which will
| make them much more invested in finding out how to work
| around the solution.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| Reading the Nvidia announcement it's not a software
| upgrade, but a change in hardware. It only affects cards
| made after late May.
| gsich wrote:
| They said that previously. Then they released an unlocked
| BIOS by "accident".
| mrb wrote:
| Nvidia did not say it will be a hardware limitation. In
| fact, they will almost certainly implement it in
| software. For example a "Lite Hash Rate" card will
| probably have a bit permanently set to 1 in the
| firmware/eeprom. The driver will read the bit, and
| arbitrarily enforce the restriction on such LHR card.
| This solves potential legal issues of retroactively
| crippling cards already out in the market, since only new
| cards sold from now on as "LHR models" will have the bit
| set to 1.
|
| But miners will find another software hack (just like
| they did for the RTX 3060 earlier) to bypass the
| restriction.
| munk-a wrote:
| I still think it's pretty likely we'll see a work around,
| but if that work around is a custom made firmware patch
| (like it was for the driver update they deployed IIRC)
| then that will probably mean the chips you purchased have
| a less rosy long term cost as future driver updates won't
| be applicable to your altered firmware. If it requires
| any physical tinkering with the chip then it definitely
| increases the effective cost by forcing a labour/card
| cost and opening up the possibility of expected chip
| defect as you break some proportion of the hardware you
| purchase in the process of fixing it.
|
| That all said - yea some people are totally going to hack
| that or my name isn't 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97
| E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 100% this in the short term, but in the long term
| workarounds will become harder to find. Have a look at
| iOS jailbreak history.
|
| I just hope they don't kill functionality which matters
| for other meaningful purposes, like deep learning.
| mrb wrote:
| c) is nonsense. There are no downsides to a temporary boost
| in Nvidia's profits, even if it means profits eventually
| falling back to normal levels when ETH drops in value.
| Also, LHR (gaming) GPUs and CMP (mining) GPUs share the
| exact same supply chain and components. When/if crypto
| demand suddenly drops, Nvidia will still have to deal with
| the oversupply of components. Having segmented the market
| between LHR and CMP GPUs does not in any way make it easier
| for Nvidia to forecast overall production capacity.
| lazide wrote:
| It is a real risk when gamers (the every day bread and
| butter) or ML model folks (emerging bread and butter)
| markets will stop using them because they can't get
| reliable supply. Both of those groups do quite a lot of
| driver validation, workload tuning, and other platform
| specific stuff. If another competitor gets those markets,
| that will hurt for a long time.
| jvol83 wrote:
| According to Tom's hardware analysis the CMP gpus are
| leftover Turing architecture that would otherwise have
| gone to the now less desirable GTX 1660 Ti, or 2080 Ti.
|
| And when they are finally using the new Ampere silicon,
| it's likely those chips that did not pass QA for being
| made into a RTX 3080.
|
| So they are getting rid of overstock/dead stock already.
| orangecat wrote:
| _Scalpers hurt literally everyone._
|
| They help people who are willing to pay the higher prices,
| and they provide a market signal encouraging producers to
| increase output.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Aren't scalpers only there because the product is clearly
| underpriced? Why not increase prices till the scalpers are
| gone or simply auction the GPUs off? That's clearly what
| the market is pointing at.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Absolutely - if they wanted they could make a killing
| (short term) and auction to Eth farms.
|
| That said, they are trying to preserve market / mind
| share in the longer term with existing customers (gamers,
| AI/ML) and partners (OEMs etc). And those folks aren't
| ready to pay the crypto price point.
|
| So they are giving up short term money (from auctions
| etc) for ideally long term market share.
| shados wrote:
| Normally I'd agree (eg: I think limited concert tickets
| should simply be auctioned off).
|
| This is a little trickier. You have a consumer grade
| product aimed at a mass market segment (gamers) being
| used as a glorified financial market device (crypto).
|
| You could just sell it at whatever price people are
| willing to pay for (crypto) and make a big buck. You'd
| likely wreck the gaming industry in the process. If you
| feel the crypto market is there to stay forever and that
| it's your best bet as a manufacturer going forward, it
| could possibly be a good move.
|
| If you think its a temporary fad though, that the gaming
| market has a larger long term return (if it's allowed to
| thrive), and that this setback, even if temporary, is
| harmful to your long term plan, then it's an issue. If
| you think that the gaming industry beyond the GPU market
| (eg: streaming grids) have value, and you want to foster
| those because it will make more money in the long run,
| then the current situation isn't looking so good.
|
| What it looks like is a large public company thinking
| more than quarter to quarter for once. It's actually kind
| of confusing, but that's what it looks like to my
| untrained eyes.
| jhauris wrote:
| Short term they could make a lot of money that way, but
| then they may lose gamers who will likely still want gpus
| after miners no longer need them. It's not a one off
| transaction.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Because the scalpers _won't_ go away. There will always
| be some poor sap willing to pay double market value for a
| scalped product.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I guess the issue is, let's say you're doing something in
| CUDA, and the program uses $FOO, something commonly used by
| miners. Never mind that you're not mining any kind of
| cryptocurrency, the card or driver will decide that because
| you did $FOO, you're mining and gimp your work, or, let's say
| that they doubled down further, shut it down completely.
| amelius wrote:
| Meanwhile, Nvidia doesn't allow you to use your graphics card
| in a datacenter/machine learning setup. You need a special
| license for that.
|
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-
| ge...
|
| So let's not pretend that Nvidia is acting in the interest of
| their clients at all times.
| creato wrote:
| One could argue this is the exact same thing: protecting
| their long-time customers from a small number of big
| customers (datacenters) that can afford to dramatically
| out-price their gamer customers temporarily, but might
| disappear (if they develop their own hardware?) not too
| long from now.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I think it's more that Nvidia knows datacenter customers
| have the money to pay a premium for "datacenter grade"
| products.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| Isn't that kind of the point? If consumers and
| enterprises were competing for the same product, we would
| probably see a similar situation as we are with consumers
| and miners.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I suppose the "long term customers" for these GPUs are
| gamers, right? Don't they also come and go? I don't
| particularly follow this as I'm not really into games, but it
| seems to me that AMD has had quite an impressive growth
| recently. Does that mainly come from people new to the
| market? I'm actually a "new to the market" buyer, and I
| bought an AMD mostly because I'm mainly a Linux user and
| didn't want to take any chances with nvidia given the horror
| stories I've seen floating around these parts.
|
| The issue with the GPU market is that since it's a duopoly,
| customers don't really have anywhere else to go. My
| impression is that people mostly bounce between the two. I'm
| not sure how many people have that much of a "brand loyalty",
| especially since this is the "enthusiast sector", so I guess
| people don't just buy whatever they find at the corner store.
|
| To me, this looks more like market segmentation, the same way
| that you can't run virtualization on their consumer products,
| and you can't have ECC RAM on consumer intel chips. I really
| don't think they're doing this from the goodness of their
| hearts towards those poor gamers who are priced out of the
| market, but because they figured that miners would be ready
| to pay more. Which is pretty obvious, since scalpers are
| managing to sell those at outrageous prices, someone has to
| be buying them, right?
| lacker wrote:
| It isn't the "goodness of their hearts", Nvidia just wants
| to maintain their position as the market leader in the
| markets that will be there for a long time. Gamers is one
| such market. Some gamers are loyal to a particular brand of
| graphics card, but there are also just network effects to
| being the most popular. Game designers spend extra effort
| making sure their games work well on the most popular video
| cards. Influential people like YouTubers, streamers, or
| game reviewers are more likely to buy elite hardware and
| talk about what they got.
|
| Market segmentation would only really make sense if Nvidia
| were capable of saturating all the demand from miners, and
| wanted to squeeze out some extra margin from them. But
| right now it doesn't seem like Nvidia is actually able to
| manufacture enough to meet the market demand at $800 like
| they initially intended.
| chrisan wrote:
| > Don't they also come and go?
|
| Myself and most of my gaming friends have been buying
| nvidia cards for (soon to be) decades now.
|
| Basically since 3dfx went belly up
| babypuncher wrote:
| Gaming demand is fairly constant, while mining demand ebbs
| and flows with the value of cryptos. Last time this peaked
| was in early 2018.
|
| Nvidia knows their loyal, regular customers are PC gamers,
| so it's in their best interest to make sure these customers
| get the best buying experience to ensure they stay repeat
| customers.
| josefx wrote:
| Gamers need games to play and if gamers buy more AMD cards
| because high end NVIDIA is not an option then game
| developers will focus their efforts more towards AMD. Going
| by steam NVIDIA currently has three quarters of the PC
| Gaming market cornered, that is a lot of motivation to
| focus development on their hardware and an edge they do not
| want to loose.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
| slownews45 wrote:
| The ecosystem nvidia has built and maintains is a KEY
| differentiator.
|
| Basically, for machine learning, AMD is nowhere - the
| ecosystem is on nvidia (provided you can buy their stuff).
| If they can't deliver, then whatever crazy thing AMD is
| trying in this space (been a few tries) may take hold more.
| Getting developers access to nvidia becomes key then -
| games / machine learning tooling etc all then gravitates
| that way.
|
| For gaming you do end up with some options. Nvidia / AMD /
| Intel. Wide range here, but been pretty steady need for
| graphics including top end and lower end options. The OEM's
| are also customers in this space, everyone going to remote
| work with virtualized workloads as well if they need a
| graphics option there and more.
|
| Yes, they are segmenting, but in short run they are giving
| up $ they would get by selling all stuff with full Eth
| enabled and perhaps auctioning cards. They'd make a ton in
| short run, but a few user bases would abandon them. It
| really is not going to be good for their business if they
| have another 6 months of supply issues.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I don't think this is "recognizing customers", I think this
| is just sectioning markets. I'd dreading Nvidia crippling
| deep learning for all those not paying X more dollars (as the
| situation already is for server farms).
|
| Long term, the aim has to be selling cards by usage rather
| than by cost of production (obvious with the aim of prices
| higher than the cost of production by different amounts). How
| many people like Adobe's creative suite? Student software
| versus professional software, etc.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Def doing it for themselves, I see it in this case as
| customer base preservation. Most of their other approaches
| have tried to move users off their lower end products. This
| time they are trying to preserve lower end product
| availability (smart).
| knz_ wrote:
| > I'd dreading Nvidia crippling deep learning for all those
| not paying X more dollars (as the situation already is for
| server farms).
|
| This already changed years ago when NVIDIA removed the last
| non-crippled double and half precision GPUs from their
| product lineup. The cheapest GPU you can buy for ML now is
| the titan v, which was $3000 at launch.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'm only planning at this point - so I don't know but am
| very interested. I see the RTX 3080 reviewed as the most
| cost effective chip you can get for deep learning. I have
| the impression a lot of research is moving to lower
| precision also.
|
| https://timdettmers.com/2020/09/07/which-gpu-for-deep-
| learni...
| m463 wrote:
| I thought the miner cards were cheaper. They are set up for
| mining and don't have video out.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Yep, this is designed products for specific markets that are
| currently being untapped.
|
| It's allows for a premium charge on crypto-enabled cards
| while still capturing the consumer market. It's a great
| solution.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| They have separate product lines for mining. I don't understand
| the complaint. NVIDIA probably gets a ton of complaints about
| miners "stealing" all of the GPU cards.
|
| I think it's perfectly reasonable for them segregate the
| capabilities for their varying consumers.
| godelski wrote:
| > Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level?
|
| Yes. A lot of what has angered me about the situation is that
| there's these claims that these companies are going to help us
| as consumers but aren't actually doing anything that helps us.
| It is just show. They know it, we know it. So stop saying
| you're on our side and stabbing us in the back. As an example,
| look at NewEgg's product shuffle. It is a clear scam and
| actively helps miners. Microcenter, BestBuy, Amazon, and
| everyone else does the same thing but NE is the worst because
| the bundling with useless stuff.
|
| You want to help consumers? I have 2 models for you:
|
| 1) Create a signup list (like EVGA, but just select the number,
| not this list for every variant). Send out cards as they come
| in.
|
| 2) Only sell cards once or twice a month and in large pools
| (many cards in stock). This way you have a reasonable quantity
| of cards to hand out for the high demand instead of the small
| quantity that bots are always going to get to first. It should
| take only basic statistics to understand this. If a bot has an
| 80% chance of getting a product first and a consumer 20% then
| we need a bigger pool to draw from, not more pools (with small
| number of cards). More (small) pools helps the bots and harms
| the consumers. Larger and less frequent pools results in a
| larger set of consumers getting the products.
|
| With these two models you can better fight bots and stock
| doesn't need to be on the shelves for long periods of time.
| behringer wrote:
| Good luck getting a next gen AMD GPU for any reasonable price
| if NVidia successfully segments away the miners and AMD
| doesn't.
| swiley wrote:
| Meh. It's pretty consistent with Nvidia's behavior. If you
| don't like being Nvidia's bitch then buy AMD and use open
| source drivers.
|
| Sorry for the strong wording but if people didn't tolerate this
| crap from GPU vendors that would solve a _lot_ of problems
| everyone has. You mention attacks on personal computing, the
| main reason everyone is stuck with vendor provided Android
| system software on their phones is because the closed GPU
| drivers are heavily coupled with it. Otherwise lots of people
| would have dumped it when they crippled the file API and
| started creating problems for termux. Because of this there 's
| no real competition for iOS so Apple and Google can pretty much
| get away with whatever they want.
| Bancakes wrote:
| Nvidia can't make nvidia laptops run well on Linux but they
| sure can cripple all their drivers, huh. That's what they're
| good at.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > Hardware manufactures already segment features between
| consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is
| capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what
| algorithms one can run is a whole new level.
|
| The silicon might also be capable of running the latest nvidia
| self driving ML models, yet you don't get that just because
| it's capable- you have to pay them $x so that they have the
| money to pay their engineers to develop those features (and pay
| the company directors, and shareholders, etc). It's the same
| for things like the professional quadro view software -
| https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/design-visualization/software/q...
| - there's only a compelling business case to make this software
| as a result of the higher margins they make on quadro cards.
| vikingerik wrote:
| The situation fascinates me. It's one heck of an expression of
| capitalist market forces. Gamers can't get computational
| capacity for their graphics, because the market-clearing price
| for computing is the value of the cryptocurrency that that GPU
| could be mining instead. Every pixel you calculate has an
| opportunity cost of that calculation's worth in cryptocurrency.
|
| Nvidia wants to serve gamers over miners, presumably to
| establish and maintain brand loyalty for future purchases. If
| they can't increase supply, the only other way is to reduce
| miner demand. That's their goal; this limitation is just a
| technical detail of implementing that. Hardware segmenting to
| serve different markets has been a thing forever and I don't
| see any reason to call this out as any worse.
|
| That said, I like that Nvidia and AMD are taking different
| approaches here. That's free market capitalism, let the
| invisible hand guide the outcome.
| standardUser wrote:
| I find the energy used in crypto mining to be a crime against
| humanity and support reasonable efforts to curtail it. Until we
| price in the externalities of using fossil fuel energy, no one
| should be wasting energy on this scale for such a spectacularly
| nonessential purpose.
| Keyframe wrote:
| I'd be worried a lot if it were for existing products, but this
| is a right move in my opinion. Drastic times, drastic measures.
| eugeniub wrote:
| No I don't care.
| optymizer wrote:
| I woke up early back on launch day in October 2020 to buy a
| 3080 when they said it would be available. Couldn't get one.
| Periodically I'd check newegg and other sites to see if the
| shortage is gone. Nope, on 05/18 it's still out of stock
| everywhere. Throwing $750 on a piece of hardware to play games
| shouldn't be this horrendous of an experience. I for one am
| glad nVidia is doing something about it.
| Siira wrote:
| They should just raise the prices. Supply and demand, you
| know?
| babypuncher wrote:
| That is essentially what they are doing, but in a way that
| doesn't burn their long-term customers (PC gamers). There
| will be crypto ready SKUs of these cards sold at a
| considerably higher margin.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't think PC gaming should require you to be part of
| the top 10% in order to fairly price computer hardware
| between mostly foreign miners buying scores of chips whose
| primary contribution to society is using 129 TW hours
| annually and individual users buying a single GPU.
|
| As a selfish American I would rather we arrange for GPUs to
| be useless to a small number of users buying a large number
| of GPUS for mining in order for the much larger group of
| users to be able to afford one GPU.
|
| If this strategy is successful and AMD doesn't follow suit
| nvidia GPUs will basically be the only ones most people can
| afford and if mining collapses years later AMD wont have
| any marketshare left to lose in the consumer space.
|
| The only other way to still get their hardware in front of
| people who they want to keep a relationship going with will
| be via privileging OEMs over selling individual GPUs but in
| fact people are actually buying machines for the GPU and
| turning over the remaining GPU less machine in the consumer
| market.
|
| As it stands the whole situation is broken for the only
| buyers that are sure to be here in 10 years and I would
| rather it move towards sanity sooner rather than later.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Prices have been raised.
|
| You can buy an RTX 3080 right now if you want. It's just
| going to cost you $2500 or so because vendors and scalpers
| are capturing that markup.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Sounds like Nvidia hasn't actually raised the price. They
| could just auction this off from their website directly
| and cut out the middle man.
| [deleted]
| akersten wrote:
| Yep, this enrages me. Deliberately introducing faults into a
| product to make it less appealing to one market segment in a
| desperate attempt to cover for their supply chain failure.
| Stinks to high heaven.
|
| In addition the detection is not magic (it can't be) so there
| are going to be false positives. Can't wait until my games
| start dropping frames 30 minutes in because the driver decided
| my competitive FPS was actually mining crypto.
|
| Imagine a headline like "Charmin introduces toilet paper that
| cannot be hoarded, to prevent shortages," and it's because the
| TP biodegrades after 6 months.
| 542458 wrote:
| GPUs have been doing this forever. This is exactly the same
| as some features being enabled on quadros that don't exist on
| RTX/GTX/GT cards. That's (mostly) not silicon, that's just
| firmware.
|
| This isn't covering any supply chain failures (despite what
| nvidia says, the number of available GPUs remains
| approximately fixed), it's just more market segmentation to
| minimize the secondhand mining GPU market and capture more
| dollars.
|
| I was also concerned about detection false positives, but as
| far as I can tell they're detecting a very specific algorithm
| that only gets used for ETH mining - there have been no false
| positives that I can see. Some miners are even working around
| the limiter by introducing obfuscation operations, but that
| comes with a hashrate cost of course.
| akersten wrote:
| > GPUs have been doing this forever though. This is exactly
| the same as some features being enabled on quadros that
| don't exist on RTX/GTX/GT cards.
|
| No, I think this is the first time a GPU has been
| heuristically trying to detect what you're doing and self-
| limiting in response. How is that equivalent to features
| just being literally off?
|
| There's no special "mine-crypto" instruction in the CUDA
| ISA.
|
| > there have been no false positives that I can see.
|
| How can you see that? These aren't released yet and the
| GTX-3060 isn't really a popular card among serious gamers
| that would notice.
| 542458 wrote:
| The 3060 has been out for a few months now, and it has
| the limiter. Re: your edit about noticing, I strongly
| disagree. Tech reviewers would LOVE to run the "limiter
| cripples Blender/Tensorflow/whatever" story, but that
| hasn't happened. And in this market users are generally
| taking what they can get, so I've seen lots of people who
| would normally run 70/80/90s running 60s instead.
| nybble41 wrote:
| The existing limiter doesn't _work_ , though. It was
| narrowly focused and consequently easy for miners to work
| around. That's why they're making this new version. There
| is no precise test for whether a given workload is
| "mining", though, so we can expect more false positives
| to show up as Nvidia tries to close off the myriad ways
| to avoid detection and miners respond by making their
| computation look more like traditional gaming workloads.
| mrgordon wrote:
| The number of GPUs being produced may be constant but it's
| lower than desired. The issue is Nvidia worked with Samsung
| to fab their chips this time around and Samsung had poor
| yields. Nvidia should have used TSMC like AMD and Apple but
| they tried to use Samsung and got burned on supply. They
| said they will use TSMC going forward but in the meantime
| there are shortages.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| I see no problem with it. I could see the argument that crypto
| is an existential threat to Nvidias business. If they lose a
| generation of PC gamers they risk that loss compounding years
| down the road as they and their children lean toward console.
| If they _want_ to serve those PC gamers first over crypto then
| they need to find ways to keep them as their customers.
| wavefunction wrote:
| I don't care. I have a 3080 I paid a pretty penny for so that I
| could play some games in high resolution and do personal
| machine learning projects. Between the cryto miners and
| scalpers I don't care what happens to those folks.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Given that they are struggling to ramp up production to meet
| demand this seems like a perfectly acceptable move when they
| are essentially unable to serve their most loyal customers.
|
| The problem really is that cryptominers will happily scale
| their purchases arbitrarily high
| m3kw9 wrote:
| With Ethereum 2.0 there is no need for these cards. I think in a
| few months if it goes well.
| SXX wrote:
| It's will be funny to see how HN crowd that support Nvidia here
| will react when Nvidia going to cripple ML features for the sake
| of market segmentation.
| 0x_rs wrote:
| There's precedent with crippled FP16 performance, so it would
| not be surprising to see such things in the future to attain
| market segmentation from consumer cards.
| ollien wrote:
| This is exactly why I'm worried. I took an ML class last
| semester and having access to CUDA on my 1080Ti (explicitly
| purchased for gaming) was a boon for my project group, since we
| could actually tune models efficiently.
|
| This might be good for the short-term, but it sets a precedent
| I'm really not happy with. I know they already do some of this
| with Quadro, but my understanding there is that the value add
| is in its reliability and certification, not ability to operate
| on workloads that have been artificially crippled on the gaming
| cards.
| jti107 wrote:
| interesting philosophical question that intersects with "right to
| repair" and "ownership of digital purchases". when you buy a
| product does the company get to dictate what you can do with it.
| Kranar wrote:
| When you buy a product? No.
|
| When you purchase a license agreement for software that the
| product depends on? Yes.
| gruez wrote:
| So apple restricting iphone repairs (by breaking
| camera/fingerprint reader, or nagging you about the
| battery/display) is totally fine because it's done in
| software?
| orky56 wrote:
| It's not quite so clear cut. Less and less hardware solutions
| can meaningfully exist without some software for it to
| provide the functions it was meant for when purchased. This
| is a slippery slope that brings together the right to repair
| & net neutrality law type arguments.
| skytreader wrote:
| Total hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a
| particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games
| can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions
| that's signature to ETH?
| smiley1437 wrote:
| From what I've read, the card detects if it has been
| continuously mining for 30 minutes then throttles itself.
| levesque wrote:
| Going to be fun to see cases of false positives. "Help! My
| FPS drops 75% after running game for 30 minutes!"
| TwoBit wrote:
| Those games are using a lot more of the gpu than just the
| compute functionality.
| livre wrote:
| GP's question was about _how_ it detects it has been mining.
| Does it have a list of processes or executable names of
| popular mining software? Does it perform some kind of
| heuristic and detect if the code it is about to execute
| corresponds to a hashing algorithm? I don't know the answer,
| I hope someone can explain it to me and GP.
| [deleted]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Going to be a fun future game of cat-and-mouse as miners figure
| out how to disable/bypass nvidia's electronic countermeasures.
| dheera wrote:
| Couldn't one just not upgrade their drivers? NVIDIA has no
| way of crippling an offline system.
| gotbeans wrote:
| I understand this might come at hw level. Driver could have
| little or nothing to do with it.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| This is for future manufactures, and it'll come out of the
| box disabled.
| sschueller wrote:
| Cards that have already been sold don't matter. New cards
| however become worthless to miners so the demand should go
| down as well as the prices.
|
| We will probably see cards with old firmware show up on
| eBay for a lot more money than new cards.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It doesn't need to last forever, just long enough to prevent
| shortages from pissing off non-mining customers.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if nVidia releases updates to unlock
| hardware after a set time period.
| canada_dry wrote:
| Hacks that re-enable mining likely won't be showing up on tpb
| anytime soon! A bypass will be worth quite a bit of money for
| large miners that can get hold of the cards.
| snuxoll wrote:
| Scalpers benefit from it, and they have an extreme
| incentive to drive up demand.
| edave64 wrote:
| Probably not much of a cat-and-mouse game. Once they can
| bypass it once, all they have to do is not update. Unless
| Nvidia is prepared to release new hardware revisions every
| time.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| No new hardware revision needed. Just a new on-card BIOS
| requiring a newer driver with a more fine-tuned mining
| detection. Should be trivial for manufacturers.
| ssully wrote:
| They previously did this with the 3060 cards, but accidently
| released beta drivers that unlocked the countermeasures [1].
| I am sure people just start with using those drivers on the
| 3070/80 cards.
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331537/nvidia-
| rtx-3060-...
| Vespasian wrote:
| I think I read the new cards will require a higher driver
| version
| Alekhine wrote:
| It'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks,
| sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal
| with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or
| use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it
| a hassle.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their
| efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely
| patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which
| it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).
| balls187 wrote:
| Are serious miners buying supply constrained GPUs?
| valuearb wrote:
| Serious miners are buying Antminers, not video cards.
| Franciscouzo wrote:
| Antminers are for mining Bitcoin, GPUs are mostly used
| for Ethereum.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| We'll see a cottage industry of modders. Turning a $300
| thing into a $600 thing should be a viable business.
|
| Though I've seen some really sketchy mods before... can't
| find it at the moment, but one involved taking a dremel to
| the chip to break an internal pad/link.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Miners are already doing hacks like this, i.e ETHlargement
| pill (which alters memory timings on 1080/1080Ti cards to
| improve ETH mining).
| alert0 wrote:
| Speculation having thought about this for a few minutes a few
| weeks ago. Given that a driver update disabled the feature, my
| guess is that they have certain kernels blacklisted. Really
| just the anti-virus equivalent of if (e.g.) Nicehash Miner, set
| throttle. A good way to test this would be to write a new miner
| and see what perf you can get.
|
| I have the driver with it disabled and would patch diff it
| against a new one if I had the time, but I'm very busy with
| work. It would be an interesting problem of binary diffing at
| scale (dozens of libraries). Very interested if anyone has any
| insight.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I never planned to mine cryptocurrency but such a move sends a
| very bad message to me as an end user.
|
| Fine, NVIDIA. I planned to have a dedicated Win10 gaming PC with
| an RTX 3090 and a separate Linux workstation but I guess it's
| better if I just get the Threadripper Pro workstation and equip
| it with an AMD 6900XT and do both my work and gaming under Linux.
| Will spend 40-50% less money, too.
|
| And Steam is getting better and better at gaming under Linux with
| each passing week so the Linux users automatically get in a
| better position with time.
|
| If that's how you want to play, good luck to you, NVIDIA. You
| just lost a future customer.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Why would them diminishing a certain aspect that you admittedly
| never planned on using in the first place affect your decision?
| Does your work involve computing millions of hashes, but isn't
| cryptocurrency?
| pdimitar wrote:
| No, my work doesn't involve that at all. It just sends the
| signal to me as a customer that they can limit what I do with
| something that I bought and is supposedly now mine. It's a
| slippery slope kind of situation where you don't know what
| else they might figure they'll want to limit in the future.
|
| I am not okay with that so I'll vote with my wallet.
| SXX wrote:
| Nvidia never applied those mining limitations
| rectoactivelyl they only announced for newer cards. Still
| they crippled VFIO capabilities with driver updates in past
| so they had bad track of record years ago.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yep, that's what worries me. They are cautious for now
| but if they don't meet pushback (or a financial hit) they
| might get bolder and start applying more and more
| restrictions.
|
| This is likely too paranoid for many but the technical
| possibility is there and believing in the good heart of a
| huge business is to me not a sound strategy.
| Const-me wrote:
| I have mixed feelings about that.
|
| I'd like to replace 1080Ti with 3080, but miners priced me out.
|
| I wonder how exactly nVidia is doing that? I do little integer
| ops on my GPUs, but I do a lot of FP64 ones. Just like these
| integer Ethereum hashes, FP64 is not used by videogames much.
|
| If nVidia does that performance throttling by detecting some
| patterns in the code, looking for Ethereum miners, AV-style --
| pretty sure Ethereum miners will find a workaround soon. These
| AV-style code detectors are unreliable by design.
|
| If nVidia does that by crippling specific low-level instructions,
| this gonna slow down innovation rate for everyone. Not just for
| me with my niche FP64 CAD/CAE workloads, for games too.
| CivBase wrote:
| > "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers, we announced
| in February that all GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards shipped with
| a reduced Ethereum hash rate," Wuebbling added.
|
| Is there any evidence that crypto mining plays a significant role
| in the ongoing hardware shortage? Any evidence at all? I see so
| many people complain about it, but I haven't seen any reason to
| believe crypto is one of the primary factors driving the
| shortage.
|
| I don't mine or trade crypto. I acknowledge the many problems
| with current crypto offerings and have no interest in dealing
| with the tech until those problems get sorted out (if that ever
| even happens). But I inherently don't like the idea of a hardware
| company intentionally crippling general computing tech like this.
| And it's especially frustrating to see them try to spin it as a
| positive move for their customers.
|
| The RX 6000 series was another huge step forward for AMD graphics
| hardware. Hopefully their 7000 series will be even more
| competitive. NVIDIA needs the pressure.
| Corazoor wrote:
| I find the argument for this move unconvincing: Nvidias failure
| to meet demand is somehow the fault of... the customers? But
| since there are morally aprehensible workloads, it is totally
| fine to... throttle them? Not prevent or contractually prohibit,
| as one might expect... And of course it is Nvidia who decicdes on
| the morals of your workload.
|
| I mean, seriously, how can anyone be ok with that?
| skjoldr wrote:
| They can't improve the supply any longer, so they are cutting
| demand instead.
|
| Why would you prevent mining if some gamers do want to utilize
| their idle GPU power? Mining is supposed to be for everyone.
| jcheng wrote:
| I didn't see Nvidia weigh in on the morality of any workload,
| just like nerfing FP64 performance in their GeForce cards
| wasn't a statement on the morality of double-precision
| workloads. They're trying to steer cards towards a particular
| segment of the market, there can be a lot of reasons for that.
|
| For example, they might believe that while selling to gamers is
| less lucrative than selling to miners in the short term, the
| gaming market will always exist while the mining market dries
| up the moment GPU mining is no longer profitable; so
| maintaining a good relationship with the gaming community is
| important for their long term health. Or maybe they're just
| tired of gamers yelling at them.
| lacker wrote:
| _how can anyone be ok with that?_
|
| I don't want to mine cryptocurrency on my graphics card. So
| given the choice of buying an unrestricted one off ebay for
| $2500, or a restricted one for the originally suggested price
| of $800, I would rather buy the restricted one. Nvidia isn't
| being dishonest, they aren't throttling the cards they already
| sold, they aren't claiming anything is moral or immoral, they
| are just offering a new product that does exactly what I want
| for cheaper. So I'm certainly okay with it.
| lamontcg wrote:
| This is how community standards works.
|
| The government should never mandate that video card
| manufacturers do this, or don't do this.
|
| If you don't like it, set up your own video card business that
| caters to crypto mining.
|
| The vast majority of NVidia customers are applauding this move
| though.
|
| This is the free market working, but if you're into crypto you
| may not like it because you're not winning the marketplace of
| ideas.
|
| (And IMO if you support cryptocurrency you should appreciate
| this as well, because astronomically high GPU costs for gamers
| erodes the standing of cryptocurrencies in that demographic, it
| is very bad PR to just let GPU costs inflate -- people start to
| vehemently hate cryptocurrencies because of that effect).
| wpietri wrote:
| You realize you're making a moral argument against moral
| arguments, right?
|
| If you'd like to know how people are ok with this, it's been
| explained plenty already, right here in this discussion.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I think it's just an argument against a unilateral decision
| by NVIDIA under the facade of morals. Businesses aren't
| people and don't have morals, everything they do is strategic
| and profit motivated, even if the people that compose them
| have morals.
|
| My guess is that NVIDIA doesn't want one basket of demand
| dominating the majority of their demand while disenfranching
| all of their other demands in parallel computing (graphics,
| industrial/scientific, etc.). If they allow crypto to take
| the lionshare of their cards, consumers for the other demands
| will eventually seek out alternatives if they haven't
| already. That's all well and fine as long as crypto demand
| sustains whatever NVIDIA can supply indefinitely.
|
| It's not so great if crypto demand for GPUs drops
| drastically, then NVIDIA is sitting there looking to drum
| demand back up from all their previous customers and markets.
| Essentially, they're likely just trying to distribute risk
| for a future demand portfolio.
|
| I can't honestly believe any large investors or top level
| executives at NVIDIA are losing a second of sleep by having
| so much demand they have to turn people away. If they're
| losing any sleep it's all the lost profit they can't make
| because they can't meet full demand or because they're in a
| potentially risky situation.
| wpietri wrote:
| Did they do it under a facade of morals? Perhaps you can
| point me to where Nvidia makes a moral argument.
|
| As an aside, businesses don't act on their own. People do
| have morals, and they're the ones running things. Whether
| or not they use their morals is a different question, but
| we needn't preemptively excuse them from doing so just
| because money is involved.
| ahD5zae7 wrote:
| Actually, is there a need to block anything? They're coming up
| with a mining-focused product line now. Just make them slightly
| cheaper per hash and voila - all miners will be buying the
| mining-focused products. They lack the video outputs so it makes
| sense, you can skip some of the BOM on the card, save a few
| bucks. As it has already been mentioned in the thread miners are
| super sensitive to squeezing every cent out of their setup. If
| they can save some bucks on cards, they will surely go for it.
|
| So either the mining cards will be cheaper than regular, which
| makes this block a moot point in near future, or they will be
| more expensive per hash than normal graphic cards. In which case
| the block makes sense but in my opinion is a bad move by Nvidia.
| Making the mining cards more expensive than regular cards is
| throwing a gauntlet to the whole world to break the drivers or
| workaround the hardware. It will be fascinating to watch the cat-
| and-mouse game of hackers and Nvidia developers, but it will not
| fix the horrible GPU market situation we're in now and that is a
| shame.
|
| Disclaimer: I want to buy a new GPU soon but for the MSRP and not
| the price equivalent of a small car. So I may be biased...
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| My understanding is there is a concern that cryptocurrency
| miners are buying GPUs, using them for a few weeks to determine
| which ones they can overclock, and selling the ones they can't
| (and have probably limited the life of in the process) since
| you can probably sell a 30 series GPU for more than you got it
| for, even if you're upfront about it being used.
|
| All of that isn't possible with the mining-focused line, so
| Nvidia feels they need other tools to help convince the
| cryptocurrency miners to move over, hence the block.
| xur17 wrote:
| I hadn't heard of this before - do you have a link or
| something with more details?
| mrgordon wrote:
| The issue is the resale value for actual working GPUs is higher
| so the miners will often buy the normal cards anyway
| burnethtards wrote:
| You can customize mining algorithms to work on any hardware....
|
| Either way gpu mining was always a terrible idea since they have
| resale value and thus cost of attack was small vs ASICs that are
| rendered worthless when they attack their own chain effectively
| unable to break even on sunk costs.
| inetsee wrote:
| Didn't Nvidia try this on some different cards recently? And
| wasn't it only about a week before there was a patch that undid
| what Nvidia had done?
| ihuman wrote:
| They only tried it on a version of the 3060, and they
| accidentally released a driver without LHR.
| plttn wrote:
| My unfounded speculation is that the 3060Ti limiter (which was
| mostly bypassed due to an accidental leak of dev drivers) acted
| as a bit of a test balloon to see how it would be attacked
| before implementing it on the 3070/3080 silicon.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wonder if the << accidental >> release was to avoid the
| motivation for a massive lawsuit.
|
| If apple can get sued for << excessive >> throttling when
| batteries lose peak cranking amps, nvidia would fare much
| worse.
| simion314 wrote:
| >If apple can get sued for << excessive >> throttling when
| batteries lose peak cranking amps
|
| You are missing the main part, "Apple downgraded your CPU
| behind your back" which is very different then "The iPhone
| box clearly mentions that when the battery is low the CPU
| will throttle and a notification is shown".
|
| It seems the fanboys managed to trick you in believing that
| Apple is the victim here.
| moogly wrote:
| Why only reduce them to half the performance? How about 0%.
|
| I predict this will do absolutely nothing for general
| availability of these cards.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Denting the performance that way makes them no longer cost
| effective for eth, but doesn't make them completely useless for
| any workloads (in games, or adobe premiere, etc) that happen to
| look like crypto mining - so they can avoid selling a
| completely broken card.
| kevincox wrote:
| Because halving the performance makes them unprofitable to run.
| If you buy one you can still try mining, and if it falsely
| detects mining your desktop won't crash, but professional
| miners won't be interested.
| moogly wrote:
| Considering they sell the cards afterwards, I remain
| unconvinced that they will (to miners appear to) be
| unprofitable at half the hashing performance.
|
| I fear these guys will just want the double amount of cards
| now :/
|
| So sorry, but I'll believe it when I see it.
| mrkramer wrote:
| "GeForce Is Made for Gaming" Yea just like Microsoft Windows is
| made only for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. Piss off.
| rhema wrote:
| Why not the 3090? What's the logic?
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Cost is roughly 2x (at MSRP/inflated MSRP) over a 3080, so if
| you can buy a 3080 there's no reason to buy a 3090 for hashing.
| Hashrate is something like 20-30% more than a 3080.
| zokier wrote:
| 3090 availability is relatively good at the moment.
| gradys wrote:
| This has very much not been my experience in the US.
| irq wrote:
| Is it? I haven't seen one in stock in a long time. People are
| setting up sniping programs to auto-buy them.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Relative is a broad statement depending on where you live. In
| the US, Newegg has been going in-and-out of stock but mostly
| out.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| I'd love to see a few links. I haven't been able to purchase
| them, checked Amazon, Best Buy, and newegg.
| belltaco wrote:
| The extra cost over the 3080 is probably not worth the minor
| increase in the hash rate for mining.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Drive miners to the high priced cards while leaving the
| price/performance market for gamers.
| [deleted]
| Zenst wrote:
| I find the prospect of being able to add more overhead and
| potential bugs into a product to remove a niche functionality in
| a move that reeks of PR marketing driven solution, too be of bad
| taste. Whilst the overhead will be so small I doubt it will be
| measurable, it still is not zero and only adds the possibility
| that some workloads of non crypto currency origins fall foul of
| this in ways that may not be easy to discern.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| "Niche functionality" that is ballooning the price of their
| graphics cards for end users?
|
| > adds the possibility that some workloads of non crypto
| currency origins fall foul of this in ways that may not be easy
| to discern.
|
| So what? The proof is in the pudding. You buy things as they
| are sold, not with some kind of expectation that you can
| achieve 100% of the theoretical performance of some ideal
| version of the product. If I buy a car with a limiter that
| doesn't let me go over 100mph, I shouldn't be surprised or
| upset that I can't hit 105 mph.
| Quick2822 wrote:
| I'm not sure its niche.
|
| ETH is the 2nd most popular crypto with a $394,657,267,540
| market cap at $3,403.15 per as of the timestamp.
| Vespasian wrote:
| It's a niche for GPU usage when compared to gaming,
| rendering, video editing, machine learning.
|
| And it's most likely a really short lived niche
| saiya-jin wrote:
| > a niche functionality
|
| That's kind of a bullcrap, since this 'niche' functionality
| completely crippled graphic card sales, and negative effects
| will ripple through PC gaming markets for quite some time.
| Every gamer that didn't manage to snatch one before is pissed
| beyond funny.
|
| Imagine a gaming studio that is deciding to develop a next-gen
| game - why would they try hard to go for / optimize for PC
| version if there are very few actual owners of good cards?
| Produce either generic all-platform-compatible stuff or abandon
| PC market altogether.
| tristanj wrote:
| Context: Back in February, Nvidia also restricted cryptocurrency
| mining on their RTX 3060 cards. The restrictions were bypassed a
| month later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26475596
|
| Related HN Discussions:
|
| _Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in
| half_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260 (461 points,
| 746 comments)
|
| _Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192201 (280 points, 509
| comments)
|
| _AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be
| blocking any workload_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26524387 (68 points, 53
| comments)
| DrNuke wrote:
| Folks, the GTX 1070s 8GB coming with 2017 laptops are still good
| enough for literally any semi-professional, non-mining
| application out there, from machine learning to gaming. With a
| few hacks and the right hardware setup, they can still do not-so-
| clever professionals happy. Therefore, this is a full supply-
| demand problem, with Nvidia facing its first, real catch-22
| maturity problem: how do they sell new GPUs to happy-with-1070
| regulars like me?
| fooey wrote:
| Nvidia is betting DLSS and Ray Tracing will be the killer
| features to get you to upgrade
| Dah00n wrote:
| This falls apart when you move to a 4k display. A 1070, a 4k
| display, hdr, and a new-ish game and you are lightyears from
| the 60fps that is a minimum for many gamers.
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