[HN Gopher] GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge
___________________________________________________________________
GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge
Author : geekinchief
Score : 265 points
Date : 2022-09-16 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| geekinchief wrote:
| It would take at least 20 years for you to break even on the cost
| of a graphics card. Expect to see a lot of used cards on eBay.
| ddevault wrote:
| A lot of heavily used cards, which were run at 100% load 24/7
| for who knows how long. What a deal.
| staringback wrote:
| Untrue, forcing more usage on a card while mining will
| immensely increase power usage whilst hardly improving
| hashrate. Mining GPUs are undervolted and arguably will be in
| better condition than a hardcore gamer's card.
| belval wrote:
| Most "professional" miners were actually undervolting to keep
| the power consumption down so it's really not that bad as
| long as the price is right.
|
| Anecdata but, 3 years ago I got an old mining RX 580 4GB for
| ~120 CAD (about a $100). That card can run almost everything
| at 1080p and has been used a lot ever since.
| latchkey wrote:
| I've got over 100,000 of those RX470,480,570,580 8gb cards
| running for 24/7 _years_. It is a total farce that they go
| bad over time.
|
| Not only were ours undervolted, but also individually tuned
| for best performance/watt. A very difficult thing to do at
| my scale since the failure mode is a full machine crash.
|
| Only thing that really degrades is the paste on the
| heatsink and that's fairly easy to fix.
| causi wrote:
| Also the fan bearings, but again an easy fix.
| latchkey wrote:
| We don't have fans on the cards.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| Sounds like you run a large operation. Would you be
| comfortable sharing what country you're in?
| belval wrote:
| I know there is a lot of negativity around mining
| nowadays, but I'd love to hear more about the challenges
| of running a large-scale operation.
| latchkey wrote:
| The largest challenge was tuning the cards for best
| efficiency.
|
| Next up is just tracking inventory, making changes to the
| system, etc... this is over 8k individual computers in
| multiple data centers.
|
| We also added a different class of hardware which was
| blade based... which increased the individual computers
| significantly. Ended up with a very cool iPXE boot
| solution for that.
|
| I also built some pretty cool software to manage it all.
| It runs on the concept that each machine is an individual
| worker that knows how to self-heal itself. Even just
| distributing the software to so many machines reliably,
| is a challenge.
|
| It has been a fun few years.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's more temperature variation that kills cards. In a
| conventional mining setup thermals are monitored and
| accounted for. A card running at 70C 24/7 will last a long
| time. Longer than a card that is constantly bouncing around
| in temperature.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Miners overclock and overvolt the memory because there's a
| substantial performance advantage to doing so with little
| efficiency loss. This rapidly ages the memory.
|
| Also, 70c is well into the temperature range that will
| significantly age capacitors.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I would hope performance GPUs are using 105C caps. At a
| 30% derating they should last almost 10x as long as at
| 105C.
| latchkey wrote:
| Also untrue. My cards have been running for _years_ in
| shipping containers that are outdoors and go through full 4
| seasons (winter snows to summer heats).
|
| Edit: power supplies on the other hand... are a mess.
| Mostly hand soldered in China... they fail randomly due to
| the environment they run in. Sometimes, they "die", let
| rest for a day or two and then fire back up and run just
| fine.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| Temperature changes outside don't translate to
| temperature changes on the die. If the cards are running
| 24/7 there will be no thermal shock to speak of since
| they are always generating heat.
| latchkey wrote:
| Various machines reboot randomly _all the time_. Given
| the amount of direct outdoor airflow that we push through
| the machines (we don 't have fans on the GPUs), as soon
| as the GPUs stop running, they cool down very very
| quickly. That is the 'shock' you're looking for.
|
| Why do they reboot? We run on the edge of peak OC tuning
| performance by default and I've built an automated tuner
| which downclocks individual cards. This way, they get
| more stable over time, while maintaining their best
| possible performance.
|
| Occasionally, we would reset the tunings and then let
| them auto tune back... this accounted for the seasonal
| variances because hotter cards are more prone to
| crashing.
| mlyle wrote:
| > That is the 'shock' you're looking for.
|
| It may still be a lot less 'shock' than normal use, where
| players have a 15 minute round, then low use for a couple
| minutes, etc, for hours.. and then turn the card off.
|
| Thermal cycling is known to be bad for electronics-- this
| is well studied and documented. Sustained high
| temperatures are also bad, but it's only really bad when
| the temperatures are really high.
| latchkey wrote:
| I'm pretty sure my cards have gone through all extreme
| different load situations that you could possibly make up
| in your head.
|
| Certainly, thermal cycling can be an issue for
| electronics in general, but my experience with these
| specific cards says that it isn't an issue at all. At
| least certainly not as much as something that should
| dictate purchasing 'miner' cards or not.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Since you would know about every possible failure mode...
|
| Do you know what causes NVIDIA cards to have their output
| turn off (black screen) and the fan to go 100%?
|
| Been happening to my 2000-series recently but I don't
| know what to try to fix: cooling, PSU, or capacitors...
| latchkey wrote:
| My primary experience is with AMD cards.
|
| My guess is a vbios or driver bug. You could also be
| running into a tuning issue. GPUs are amazingly complex
| beasts.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| How often does the average machine reboot? If it's less
| often than 24 hours you're still putting the card under
| less thermal stress than someone who games for a half
| hour every evening. I'd buy your used GPU over a gamer's
| used GPU
| latchkey wrote:
| Sometimes it can reboot 50+ times in a row. Each box has
| 12 gpus, so if I reset the tuning for the box, it can
| take a while to find the optimal settings because the
| voltage/clock tuning steps are very granular.
|
| Again, this isn't an actual issue and I have the data to
| prove it.
| TakeBlaster16 wrote:
| Fair enough, I'll defer to your experience. Although if
| you're power cycling that much, I take it back, maybe I
| won't buy your cards :)
| latchkey wrote:
| No, you want my cards because I've proven that
| reboots/thermal changes don't make any difference. =)
|
| You wouldn't want my cards, because they don't have fans.
| Most people don't have adequate cooling for something
| like that.
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| I'd be mostly worried about the fans. IIRC the thing that
| really kills microchips is heat-cycles, so a continuous load
| seems pretty good.
| nomel wrote:
| Is this actually a problem, besides needing to replace a
| cheap fan? If the fans go out, they just maintain thermal
| limit. These aren't like old cards, where they would melt.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Don't run your hospital on them. Probably fine for gaming or
| a little render farm.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| That's assuming the cost of electricity doesn't go up and the
| value of POW coins doesn't go down.
| neilv wrote:
| I just got a nice GPU upgrade off eBay, and it looked like it
| came from a farm/cluster.
| sp332 wrote:
| GPU prices _are_ tanking. They seem to be falling by the hour.
| pawelduda wrote:
| Hey, do you have any resource which tracks these, and
| historical prices in real time?
| usednet wrote:
| Just look at posts on r/BuildAPCSales
| [deleted]
| wtallis wrote:
| Long-term price trends:
| https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/
|
| They also have more or less real-time pricing and price
| history for individual products. But it doesn't provide
| visibility into the used GPU market.
| coffee_beqn wrote:
| Finally we beat inflation
| doubled112 wrote:
| If only I could eat a PCB.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Oh, you can.
|
| https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22944-pica
| ajross wrote:
| I know this is a drive-by joke, but in fact speculative
| bubbles (crypto among them) were among the big drivers of
| last year's inflation hump. Production was still suppressed
| by the pandemic, lots of expenditures (travel, etc...) were
| likewise suppressed, yet bank account balances were still
| around and wanting to be spent.
|
| Broadly: what do you do when you can't go to Cancun like you
| planned? You bet on Doge and GME, apparently. (Or you declare
| yourself a "VC" and start handing out checks to 20-something
| quarantined hackers.) Then you just end up with _more_ money
| you can 't spend.
| bagels wrote:
| Why didn't people sell before the merge? Did they think it
| wouldn't happen?
| joecot wrote:
| Given that crypto miners weren't willing to think ahead to
| the consequences of countries needing to fire coal power
| plants back up to meet their demand, or the problems with
| continuing to crypto mine during multiple worldwide energy
| crises, I am not surprised if they didn't think ahead to what
| would happen if the Ethereum merge happened exactly as
| planned.
| miragecraft wrote:
| Because they want to mine until the last second, supposedly
| there will be a lot less ETH being generated after the merge
| so each one will be worth more.
| datalopers wrote:
| > supposedly there will be a lot less ETH being generated
| after the merge so each one will be worth more
|
| This has been hands-down the most ignorant view of the ETH-
| merge proponents. The floor of the currency is tied to the
| cost to mine. There's minimal cost to mine now. The price
| will fall. It's not a supply vs demand problem.
| DennisP wrote:
| > The floor of the currency is tied to the cost to mine.
|
| This is not true because of difficulty adjustment. If the
| price drops enough so miners are losing money, some of
| them quit, the difficulty adjusts downward, and the
| economics improve for the remaining miners.
| epolanski wrote:
| "worth" depends on price.
| fortysixdegrees wrote:
| Where can you see this?
|
| I've been looking on eBay but can't see any change. I'd like to
| buy a lot of GPUs but don't know where to look
| mmastrac wrote:
| eBay is tough because the prices you see are the prices the
| sellers want. I don't think it's in eBay's interest to show
| you the real price.
| albedoa wrote:
| In the Advanced Search, you can include completed listings
| and sold listings. This is a much better indicator of
| market prices for consumer goods.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I didn't know this! Thanks
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| If not on eBay, where, then? The list of "sold" cards on
| eBay appear to me to be a pretty good starting point, but
| if there's something I don't know, like "everyone on eBay
| is a scalper" (which is not implausible) then where should
| I be looking?
| cercatrova wrote:
| /r/hardwareswap
| andrewla wrote:
| There is one other cryptocurrency use for these mining rigs, and
| that is to compromise existing chains.
|
| Now that there is a great deal of excess capacity, presumably it
| would be possible to attack smaller chains in an attempt to glean
| some profit through double-spending, as those chains might now be
| vulnerable to larger-scale history-rewriting attacks.
| mattnewton wrote:
| The problem is that such an attack would be discovered and send
| the value of the token to zero , so you'd have a limited window
| to double spend into something else valuable but also not
| revokable.
| pengaru wrote:
| Does this mean the Monero/XMR network is about to explode in
| size?
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Monero works with CPU mining.
| pengaru wrote:
| You're not wrong but it's far far more productive on the GPU.
| If you're willing to burn your CPU on mining XMR, you may as
| well add GPU(s) to that host and light them up as well.
| humanwhosits wrote:
| The miners will just start hyping the next most popular needs-gpu
| coin
| latchkey wrote:
| None of that can support the amount of GPU compute. The price
| would have to be the same as ETH and nothing is even close.
| syntaxing wrote:
| A bit off tangent, what would be the best bang for the buck GTX
| GPU to buy nowadays if I want to use it for machine learning
| (like running stable diffusion locally)?
| switchers wrote:
| 12gb 3060 if you can find one. That extra memory over 8gb will
| try help for that kind of thing.
| hedora wrote:
| If you want the cheapest total spend, use paperspace. (I linked
| their price page elsewhere.) It's about $7 per month for boot
| drive storage, plus tens of cents per hour of uptime.
|
| If you want the cheapest total spend where you buy your own
| hardware, it basically runs on any current-generation amd /
| nvidia / m1 card. I used a modified version of stable diffusion
| that works with < 10GB of DRAM on a AMD RX 6600XT. Check around
| before buying, obviously; I lucked out.
|
| The modified version produces the same quality output, but has
| to page data in and out. It takes about 100 seconds per batch
| of five images. The card cost under $300, and is plugged into a
| ~ 10 year old Linux box. It's probably possible to go cheaper
| than that.
| ftufek wrote:
| RTX 3090, it has 24 gb of memory which is barely enough
| nowadays. Hoping that 4090s will have 48gb, but we'll know on
| the 20th.
| malikNF wrote:
| https://lambdalabs.com/gpu-benchmarks
| illuminerdy wrote:
| Great. Now I can build my next rig with 4x RTX 3080 and,
| well...who cares about the rest of the parts?
|
| Also, I hope every GPU miner's fireproof safe fails and all their
| money burns up.
| ftufek wrote:
| It's actually not that straightforward to plug in these
| consumer cards as 4x setup. We spent weeks researching how to
| achieve up to 7x RTX 3090 setup in a single rig. Could write up
| our method if anyone is interested.
| krisdol wrote:
| What kind of motherboard can accommodate such a set up? There
| are not enough PCIe slots on many high end boards.
| ftufek wrote:
| It's not even just about the slots, it's about the PCIe
| lanes (which is something I never had to worry until now,
| though I built countless PCs in the past).
|
| We tried bunch of setups with Threadrippers and EPYC, at
| the end settled for the ROMED8-2T which is a monster
| motherboard.
| tinco wrote:
| We run 4x 2080s on threadripper systems. What sort of
| trouble did you run into? I thought threadripper has
| plenty of PCIe lanes. We didn't have any trouble but it
| could be I missed something, we had to get it working
| quick and I didn't do very much benchmarking.
| ftufek wrote:
| Threadrippers are great and I had 4x Threadripper setup
| for the longest time, but they are a bit more expensive.
|
| The advantage of EPYC is that because it's so common, we
| can find used cheaper ones on ebay. They are a bit slower
| I believe, but we can deal with that by using Nvidia's
| DALI and decoding images on the GPU rather than CPU.
| pixelHD wrote:
| Oh that sounds interesting! I'd love to read about it, please
| post/write!
| ftufek wrote:
| Sure, will do, though it might take some time to finish
| writing the blog post, you can get a preview of our
| previous setup with 4x GPUs here:
| https://twitter.com/ftufek/status/1569367127878139905. For
| those that are curious, that's running a Threadripper
| 3970x.
|
| It's not exactly a "clean" one, like a proper 2u/4u chassis
| and server grade GPUs but it does the job for 70-90%
| cheaper.
| Cixelyn wrote:
| would love to see the riser setup that you're using for such
| a monster!
|
| we mostly gave up and just got barebones machines since the
| cabling situation becomes pretty tricky, and the barebones
| total cost is low relative to the GPUs anyways.
| ftufek wrote:
| I posted a link just below to twitter with an image of the
| riser setup. That setup worked well for 4x, but for the 7x
| we're moving the cards upside down and setting them up like
| tree branches if you will. So the trunk/floor is the
| motherboard and you get close to edges, the cards are
| angled and use longer riser cables.
|
| The issue we had with barebones was cost and cooling, we
| use 30$ racks from Target and hang the GPUs with metal zip
| ties and a box fan from below, so they get lots of air and
| we don't break the bank and can easily roll them around.
| post_break wrote:
| Without SLI no you can't.
| nharada wrote:
| Where's the best place to actually find these cards? When I see
| used cards on say Craigslist they always claim "never used for
| mining" or similar, is there a way to verify that kind of thing?
| capableweb wrote:
| What's the problem with cards that been used for mining? People
| say that they are in worse state than other second-hand cards,
| but I'm not sure that's true. Most if not everyone I know who
| uses GPUs for mining undervolt the cards as it's more
| profitable, while everyone I know who is a gamer run their
| cards overclocked.
|
| So in theory (but someone please correct me if I'm wrong), with
| that in mind, you should prefer cards that have been used for
| mining and undervolted, rather than cards from gamers that have
| been overclocked.
| nharada wrote:
| I might not mind for the right price, but I'd like to at
| least know. Right now it seems that either (a) nobody is yet
| selling used mining cards or (b) everyone selling used mining
| cards is lying about it and trying to sell them at the same
| prices as barely used cards.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Most if not everyone I know who uses GPUs for mining
| undervolt the cards as it's more profitable
|
| This is true, but it doesn't mean that the card runs any
| cooler. Yes, for mining it makes perfect sense to run it at a
| lower voltage. That doesn't stop your VRAM from getting
| pinned at 95c, and if you do that for long enough then it
| won't matter how hard you underclock your GPU. The clock
| speed doesn't directly correlate to your hash rate.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| Linus tech tips had an episode on it, and largely found that
| the performance degradation was insignificant:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKqVvXTanzI
|
| He did however note that the cards that he tested had been
| used in a relatively clean and dust-free environment. The
| biggest risk to buying a card that has been running 24/7 for
| years is that the cooling system is busted due to build-up of
| dust.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| Used mining cards are definitely worse, the VRMs are usually
| destroyed and they're typically missing a couple VRAM memory
| modules as well
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| to people downvoting this for some reason, it's real:
| https://wccftech.com/beware-several-used-nvidia-geforce-
| rtx-...
| lostmsu wrote:
| I would not trust anything coming from wccftech. That
| particular article is probably just an advertisement for
| some shitty software that promises to fix your broken
| GPU.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| The city of Denton TX recently signed a huge deal to allow a
| mining company (Core Scientific) to set up a large GPU mining
| facility directly next to their powerplant to make up for lost
| revenues during the winter storms. I'm wondering what's going to
| happen there. It seems like they mostly mine BTC but this can't
| help their bottom line.
| latchkey wrote:
| It'll be BTC mining and if they do anything with GPUs it'll be
| for other workloads than mining (likely rendering/ai/ml), which
| is a very competitive market and not much money there either.
| moomin wrote:
| I don't think you can mine BTC with GPUs? Might be unaffected.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| You sure it's GPU mining? Their website only mentions ASIC
| mining.
| [deleted]
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Core Scientific is mining Bitcoin (they mention how many
| Bitcoin in their filing where they update on the status of the
| Denton location [1] ). No doubt all of their work is done on
| ASICs, not GPUs.
|
| 1
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1839341/000119312522...
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I don't think GPU mining of bitcoin has been profitable for
| quite some time. ASICs obliterated GPUs in $/hash.
| nrdgrrrl wrote:
| [deleted]
| ikornaselur wrote:
| I don't understand this well enough, but, why can't miners just
| mine other coins? Was all GPU mining Etherium based?
|
| I know that bitcoin mining requires ASICS and GPUS can't compete
| with that, but I just assumed miners are just mining one of many
| possible coins, with Etherium being one of them.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I would assume the problem is that a lot of alt-coins are built
| on top of the Ethereum blockchain, and that most of those that
| aren't are nowhere near as profitable to mine.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| No other coins provide the profitability margins that ETH did,
| so miners can switch to other POW coins, however the will be
| paying more in electricity than whatever crypto they are
| mining.
| zeven7 wrote:
| If 80% of the revenue was from Ethereum, and now that part
| disappeared, 100% of the miners are left fighting over the 20%
| that's left.
| ftufek wrote:
| Looking forward to all the creative AI startups using these cheap
| cards to build cool products. We've been waiting a long for the
| merge to finally happen.
|
| I can't believe that you can buy a card that'll do 15+ Tflops for
| like 500$.
| generj wrote:
| Thank goodness. Hopefully they aren't able to grift another coin
| up enough to be worth mining.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| If enough GPU miners stop, it becomes profitable for other GPU
| miners to mine. Fortunately that's currently 90% fewer GPU
| miners at the moment, across the whole sector.
| BuckRogers wrote:
| That's a good outcome. We'd still be in a situation with so
| many fewer miners that GPU prices aren't influenced as they
| have been. The investment becomes risky as it'll always be
| teetering on the edge. I'm finally looking forward to a new
| GPU to pair with this 11900K.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| Didn't this already happen several times in the history of
| cryptocurrency? Then GPUs because scarce again when the
| price of them goes up.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yes and it will happen again!
|
| the 2020 cycle was a triple whammy though
|
| 1) semiconductor and supply chain shock
|
| 2) cryptocurrencies zooming in price and profitability
| again
|
| 3) cryptocurrencies actually being used. in all prior
| cycles, blockchains were empty (although people got a
| glimpse of what congestion would be like, during the 2017
| cycle). miners earned the subsidy made for people to show
| up at all. miners are also privy to a cut of transactions
| that occur, but this was close to 1% of the subsidy. in
| the 2020 cycle it was 250% on top of the subsidy,
| frequently, and way more than that as blocks were full.
| All mining calculators were wrong because they only show
| the predictable subsidy and not a forecast based on an
| average, but miners learned how profitable it was.
|
| Automated Market Makers (Uniswap code and classes) and
| Automated Lending (Compound) were 2020 cycles killer apps
| built on top of 2017's killer app of ERC20 tokens.
|
| Followed by NFT's and their marketplaces.
|
| Other chains secured by GPUs will get this activity,
| periodically.
| velmu wrote:
| Yes. Nothing unique.
| LazyMans wrote:
| Yeah, looks like it's all trash now.
| https://whattomine.com/gpus
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| I see peak Profit 24h at $0.29
|
| What was it before ETH PoW -> PoS merge?
|
| And is 0.1 $/kWh average/normal?
|
| Let me pull up my latest electric bill (which I almost have
| never looked at/have on autopay):
|
| New Charges
|
| Rate: RS-1 RESIDENTIAL SERVICE Base charge: $8.99
|
| Non-fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.073710) (Over 1000 kWh at
| $0.083710) $76.74
|
| Fuel: (First 1000 kWh at $0.034870) (Over 1000 kWh at
| $0.044870) $36.49
|
| Electric service amount 122.22
|
| 20.99 in taxes / surcharges
|
| Total $143.21
|
| $143.21 for 1036 kWh in a 30 day timespan
|
| 0.138 $/kWh with taxes and fees I guess for me, I'm sure if I
| was doing crazy ASIC stuff at my house they'd charge me
| more/the rate would become less favorable
|
| Looks like mining BTC would net be $0.85 a day profit with
| some kind of ASIC. $310/yr. Yikes.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It doesn't matter if its trash so long as its fungible trash
| at a profitable price. i.e. the situation is OK for now but
| as soon as the market adjusts to the glut of GPU miners
| suddenly minting no-name coins no one really wants (and the
| novelty wears off) those prices are going to drop like a
| rock.
|
| Most of these coins only have value as scams that you could
| prop up then cash out by exchanging for BTC or ETH; so long
| as the "new coin of the day" hype train exists there will be
| a way to make money off of GPU mining. I guess there will
| always be suckers in this unregulated market.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Head to the Winchester, grab a pint and wait for those GPU prices
| to come down
| amelius wrote:
| Especially now the energy prices go up.
| Macha wrote:
| To some extent this has already happened, as the recent crash
| in the GPU market from its highs a few months back, but
| obviously we did see some miners hold on to the bitter end, but
| it's not clear how much difference that inventory will make.
| serg_chernata wrote:
| Love the reference. On a more serious note I'm really curious
| how this will play out. Nvidia seems to be doing it's best to
| prop up the prices of existing models as it prepares to launch
| the 4k series. The big question seems to be whether most of
| these miners will start mining some other token or get out of
| gpu mining entirely.
| aosmith wrote:
| If the card has cuda support I would guess they're off to
| some sort of p2p AI / ML marketplace. Unfortunately AMD cards
| were actually better for mining. If anybody knows of
| something like vast.ai or render for AMD I'm all ears.
| asciimike wrote:
| Morgenrot Cloud (https://morgenrot.cloud/) is the main
| consumer grade AMD compute provider I know of. Not quite
| vast.ai in that they're centralized, but they've got the
| hardware.
| capableweb wrote:
| > they're off to some sort of p2p AI / ML marketplace
|
| Seems to be at least slightly true, by my amateur
| judgement. Sometimes I use https://vast.ai, and seems there
| is more offers than usual, currently ~180 instances
| available for rent.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > Nvidia seems to be doing it's best to prop up the prices of
| existing models as it prepares to launch the 4k series.
|
| Not really, no:
|
| https://wccftech.com/hours-into-the-eth-merge-nvidia-
| geforce...
|
| New 3000 series retail prices on the high end cards have been
| steadily dropping, and it seems like on ebay used prices have
| dropped 10% in the last month.
|
| As for the 4000 series cards - they've stated in SEC filings
| that they will be trickling out stock to keep prices high.
|
| AMD are the ones who are really fucked; their cards suck, and
| nobody bought them out of choice but desperation. Now that
| the market is glutted, people will heavily prefer nvidia
| cards.
| sofixa wrote:
| > AMD are the ones who are really fucked; their cards suck,
| and nobody bought them out of choice but desperation.
|
| Do they really suck? From some benchmarks i saw there are
| cards comparable to 3060-3070s (the 6800 IIRC) which is
| solid midrange competition.
| MatthiasPortzel wrote:
| This is surprising to me for two reasons. The first is that we
| knew the merge was coming. Second is that it wasn't obvious to me
| that Ethereum was a majority of mining.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| So regarding your first point, the merge has been coming for
| years now. I suspect the folks who kept mining and didn't dump
| their cards earlier were basically making the bet that the
| merge would fail or get delayed once again.
|
| If they had been right, it would've meant more mining rewards
| going to fewer miners. So it's an understandable bet. They just
| bet wrong.
| LazyMans wrote:
| Yes, also, if they acquired these cards at or below MSRP. Now
| they can dump these GPUs and only take a loss of 10-20% on
| the hardware. Much less than the profits made while mining.
| [deleted]
| sp332 wrote:
| Ethereum was a majority of GPU mining. Bitcoin miners use
| ASICs. And mining was profitable right until it wasn't, so why
| not wait until then?
| bagels wrote:
| The marginal gain from a few days/weeks of mining might not
| outweigh the drop in value of the hardware.
| depingus wrote:
| But who would be buying these cards? Other miners looking
| to mine to the last second might not be so keen on
| expanding their operation. And gamers looking for cheap
| cards would be better served by waiting for the merge.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| gamers might not be paying attention to the merge
| situation.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| There's always a market for GPUs. The market was trading
| higher immediately before the merge, and now it's trading
| lower, so if you ran a mining operation then selling your
| hardware before the merge would've yielded some good
| money unless you held so much it would actually change
| the market price (unlikely).
|
| So why did the price drop so suddenly? Why didn't
| everyone anticipate this and sell before? Probably some
| combination of laziness and belief that the merge
| wouldn't work.
| coffee_beqn wrote:
| I mined for a few weeks out of curiosity and I figured it
| would work as a heater downstairs since it was winter. I
| would think that the best move was to sell your GPU about a
| month before it all ends since the actual mining doesn't make
| enough money to offset the resale value plummet.
| djhworld wrote:
| I'm really hopeful we won't see this problem anymore.
|
| However a small part of me thinks some other coin/token/digital
| widget will gain traction and the whole GPU rush will come around
| again.
| Animats wrote:
| NVidia stock down 42% in last year.
| devman0 wrote:
| Lots of tech is down, the NASDAQ is down 25% YoY. NVDA is
| certainly down a lot, but so is INTC for instance.
| m4jor wrote:
| You can still get paid to crack hashes :)
| donmcronald wrote:
| I hope to see a glut of used cards on the market. In the past
| I've always been able to buy decent used cards for <$100, but the
| prices have been crazy for the last few years.
|
| I wonder if this is the end of an era for GPU based mining. It's
| been a long time. I remember buying an R9 270X in 2014 from a guy
| that was mining Bitcoin, but had switched to ASICs. When I picked
| it up he was telling me he didn't win enough blocks with the
| ASICs and was going to sell them too.
|
| I always wonder if that guy played his cards right and became a
| Bitcoin millionaire. Lol.
| spapas82 wrote:
| What's the step after asics for bitcoin mining?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| quantum miners?
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| ASIC is "application-specific integrated circuit". A custom
| IC design for some task. There won't be anything after except
| maybe better and more miniaturized designs, at least until
| computers and digital logic are built from something other
| than electronics.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| FIIIIINALLY I can buy a decent GPU to edit video with, which is
| far more important than making pretend number money.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Among the things that are unfortunate about cryptocurrency as a
| model is the fact that it's not immune to the general capital-
| breeds-capital effect. For proof of stake, people with money to
| spare are likely to have newly-minted money granted to them in
| the future. For proof of work, people with money to spare can
| afford to buy the rigs to increase the odds they have newly-
| minted money granted to them in the future. I think it's fair to
| ask what the net benefit is to society for a wealth-distribution
| system to give more money to those who have the most money.
|
| Fiat currency has issues, but at least a government has the
| authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the
| poor.
| godelski wrote:
| > Fiat currency has issues, but at least a government has the
| authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the
| poor.
|
| This is why I'd rather see development of privacy coins, like
| zcash, and less concerned with the decentralization issue (I've
| yet to see a project actually address centralization or even
| acknowledge the issue you're bringing up: momentum). We're
| moving away from a cashless society and while that has a lot of
| great benefits it also has a lot of detriments. So why not have
| digital cash then? ZKPs for transactions.
|
| If you want to promote democracy you should also want to
| decrease the ability for authoritarians to arise, which in our
| modern era means how much data they can get their hands on and
| abuse. There's common cop-outs like how will taxes work etc,
| but society ran pretty smoothly on cash before. Companies still
| have to report incomes and salaries. We can still do
| consumption taxes. So we have our income and consumption easily
| solved. I'm even fine with a small transaction fee, which I
| know others aren't, but we already pay this in the world of
| credit cards (2-4%). I think we could really bring down the
| Visa/Mastercard tax (maybe something like 0.1%/0.5%?) and it
| would all be a win for everyone.
|
| It is clear to me that cryptocurrencies aren't going to get us
| this world, so let's start thinking about other means.
| thayne wrote:
| > Fiat currency has issues, but at least a government has the
| authority to conjure money out of nothing and hand it to the
| poor.
|
| Maybe, but it is much more common to summon money out of
| nothing and give it to the rich. At least in the US this
| happens in the form of buying securities from entities that
| hold them, which from what I understand is kind of similar to
| proof of stake (you stake some of your currency by buying a
| security for a chance to get more when you sell it).
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Just to give context to others, it sounds like you're talking
| about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
| the-anarchist wrote:
| You, Sir, have clearly never been poor and required that
| handout money you're claiming to exist.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Either this entire subthread is a confused reaction to
| someone who expressed a belief that quick transfer payments
| for the poor are good, and the fact that they couldn't be
| done in a bitcoin economy is an argument against bitcoin, or
| I'm the confused one.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Countries with social safetynets do exist, even if we don't
| live in one.
| nightski wrote:
| Social safety nets are one thing. But in those countries
| don't fool yourself capital still breeds capital. Also the
| U.S. _does_ have social safety nets. In fact the largest
| source of government spending is on them. I 'm not saying
| we don't need more, but we can't dismiss what does exist.
| derac wrote:
| The OP didn't claim any currency is immune to that.
| Actually, noone did.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I'm thinking more along the lines of the giant stimulus the
| United States cut to almost everyone during the COVID-19
| pandemic. Everyone who paid taxes just got a check in the
| mail.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| The handout went to the wealthy in the form of Payroll
| Protection Loans that never were required to be disbursed
| to employees or repaid. And Wall Street got a huge multi-
| trillion-dollar boost.
|
| The stimulus checks were a door prize.
| brightball wrote:
| PPP loans were required to be paid out or paid back.
|
| Issuing those loans prevented nationwide layoffs and
| insurance termination for millions of people.
| pessimizer wrote:
| https://www.pandemicoversight.gov/data-interactive-
| tools/dat...
|
| _Update: 10.2 million PPP loans were forgiven. Here 's
| why._
|
| > If borrowers use at least 60% of the loan to cover
| payroll within 8 or 24 weeks after receiving the loan,
| they can submit an application to have the loan forgiven.
|
| -----
|
| edit: if anybody can clear this up for me, I'd appreciate
| it, but what could it possibly mean for "at least 60% of
| the loan to cover payroll?"
|
| Does that mean that the company has to spend its way into
| insolvency first, then after becoming insolvent pay out
| 60% of the loan to employees, or does it simply mean that
| an employer's payroll has to sum to at least 60% of the
| loan within 24 weeks, no matter how much cash the
| employer has?
|
| It seems like the difference between 1) handing out gifts
| to employers of up to 40% of their 24-week payroll, or 2)
| handing out gifts to employers that are up to 166% of
| their 24-week payroll. But I'm not a math scientist.
|
| Either way, making direct cash payments to employers in
| proportion to their payrolls is as stark an example of
| welfare for the rich as you could cite. That's like
| paying money to people in proportion to their total
| stockholdings, as long as they promise to spend at least
| 60% of those payments to buy more stock. Even worse in
| the execution, where tons of the smallest employers and
| the self-employed were left out in favor of companies
| with high-powered accounting firms or lawyers on staff.
| nightski wrote:
| There were limits on what you could spend the other 40%
| on (defined categories of expenses). You could spend 100%
| on payroll if you wanted, but it had a minimum of 60%.
| The other 40% had to be used for specific things such as
| building maintenance, etc... No owner could take a
| distribution of these funds (directly at least, although
| if this loan allowed them to be profitable they could of
| taken those profits).
|
| Businesses that wanted to be legit put this money into a
| specific account (in their accounting system) and tracked
| all expenses against that specific account for
| auditability.
|
| The only loans that had less strict rules were for sole
| proprietors/self employed businesses. But the size of the
| loan was capped pretty low relatively.
|
| Of course this program was highly flawed. But it was
| thrown together quickly in response to the pandemic.
| Personally I wish our government would already have plans
| in place ahead of time so everything wasn't done so
| hastily and last minute causing massive fraud.
| pessimizer wrote:
| What I'm trying to figure out is if they had to spend
| their own money before spending the loan. Otherwise it's
| strange to say that the money went to either payroll or
| "specific things such as building maintenance." The money
| went to the employer, and in return they wouldn't lay off
| so many employees that their 24-week payroll would fall
| below 60% of the amount of the loan (and a possible
| requirement that they'd have to spend the difference
| between the amount of the loan and the 24-week payroll on
| capital improvements?)
|
| Did they at least have to prove that it would be
| financially beneficial for them to do layoffs?
|
| > Of course this program was highly flawed. But it was
| thrown together quickly in response to the pandemic.
|
| Eh, this isn't a deep dive, these are basic questions
| about the concept. Not that a deep dive wouldn't be
| warranted with tens or hundreds of billions at stake.
| brightball wrote:
| The flip side of this is that if the loans weren't given
| and everybody is closed for lockdown, companies are
| either firing everybody or going out of business.
|
| If that had happened, all of those people would have been
| applying for unemployment, COBRA, Obamacare plans,
| Medicaid, etc as well. It was more a question of which
| Federal accounts to drain. By giving businesses a clear
| path to making sure they could keep paying people
| regardless of whether money was coming in from customers,
| that was avoided. In order to get business owners to take
| it though, you had to basically give it to them.
|
| It was highly variable which businesses could find a way
| to keep operating in the conditions of lock down and
| COVID protocols. Remote work was easy. Running a bar was
| not.
|
| Even then you also had exorbitantly high unemployment
| payments for a long period of time. It wasn't as if the
| PPP loans were the only money being injected.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm asking specifics, you're giving me ideology. Unless
| you have some evidence that people had to prove that they
| would it would be more profitable to layoff/close unless
| they got the loan, which is what I've asked.
|
| > If that had happened, all of those people would have
| been applying for unemployment, COBRA, Obamacare plans,
| Medicaid, etc as well.
|
| If we don't prefer direct aid over middlemen, why don't
| we route all social programs through middlemen? I'd like
| to volunteer, as long as I'm allowed a 40% cut off the
| top.
|
| I have no objection to the government sending money to
| people who were made unemployed by covid. I have little
| objection to the government propping up marginal
| businesses that serve a valuable purpose in better times,
| but would otherwise fail during covid without aid,
| although I feel it was largely a landlord subsidy.
|
| I'm asking a process question.
| nightski wrote:
| As for certifying whether your business needed it or not
| you had to make a statement saying it was necessary for
| you to continue the business on the loan app. But it was
| an honor system. It will be up to the government to
| search out & prosecute fraudsters.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I didn't ask any questions about fraud.
|
| edit: thanks for the edit.
| [deleted]
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| https://www.sba.gov/funding-
| programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o...
|
| To get your loan forgiven, you had to take a loan and
| show documentation of having spent loan amount of dollars
| on qualified expenses. There is no "must prove you were
| saved by the loan" requirement.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's what I figured.
| belltaco wrote:
| >Everyone who paid taxes just got a check in the mail
|
| There was an income limit of $75,000, thats not close to
| everyone.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| It really wasn't giant. It was less than the average cost
| of one month of rent in most locations
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| BS, especially since the 3-time IRS checks were just one
| small part of the stimulus. The enhanced unemployment
| lasted for months, and the increased amount alone was
| more than many people's regular paychecks.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Precisely. I'm trying to imagine how one would have
| implemented something similar atop the cryptocurrencies
| I'm familiar with and coming up empty.
|
| Stabilizing an economy when a national quarantine had
| shut down production and trade is one of those challenges
| that's much easier to solve in a centralized fashion.
| calculatte wrote:
| And that's one of the reasons supply chain issues
| continue today as well as the record inflation.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| For middle-class workers who didn't lose their job it's
| as I said, just a little bit less than one month's rent.
| Definitely not enough to compensate for increased cost of
| living and inflation across the board, especially now.
| salawat wrote:
| Correct. When you are poor, a one time check does
| nothing. Your issue is lack of cash flow.
|
| You want to talk really uplifting those in poverty, we
| need to talk stipend.
| nomel wrote:
| I would assume the problem they have, and that we should all
| have, is the source of the money, which is leaving the
| printer running through the night.
| belltaco wrote:
| MS has a patent application on PoL (proof of life) so that
| crypto can be distributed to every human being that wants it.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-patent-describes-tracki...
| dezmou wrote:
| "By tracking brainwaves when someone watches an advert,
| Microsoft hopes to use the data generated as a "proof-of-
| work." " Look like an episode of black mirror
| DennisP wrote:
| The government authority doesn't go away just because
| cryptocurrency exists. Unless cryptocurrency somehow replaces
| fiat entirely, which seems unlikely. And even if that happened,
| governments could do the same by way of taxes.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| > Unless cryptocurrency somehow replaces fiat entirely, which
| seems unlikely.
|
| No the central banks of the world are all working on fiat
| crypto, so we'll get the worst of both worlds.
| dsr_ wrote:
| "fiat crypto", or if you prefer, digital currency, will
| neither be proof-of-work nor proof-of-stake. Neither
| mechanism is needed when there is a single trusted
| authority.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| lovich wrote:
| Relative to random individuals it seems like a democratic
| form of government at least, has several advantages
|
| Did society fall apart when current fiat currency with
| the government as the central trusted authority was
| adopted?
| [deleted]
| codehalo wrote:
| A "single authority", not a "single trusted authority".
| px43 wrote:
| PoS pays the people who run the infrastructure. Someone has to
| run it, and it's trivial for anyone to participate. If you have
| 5 dollars you can stake it in the PoS network and earn rewards.
| The barrier for entry in the legacy financial system is way way
| higher. Have you ever applied for a banking license?
| BbzzbB wrote:
| False equivalence, why is your equivalent to staking
| (investing crypto) applying for a banking license rather than
| opening a brokerage account (investing dollars)? With the
| advent of fractional shares anyone can buy $5 of stocks too,
| but it requires zero technical know-how.
| nightski wrote:
| When you stake, you are still processing transactions and
| creating blocks/forming consensus similar to what mining
| did. This isn't really comparable to investing in a
| security.
|
| Just because you can join a staking pool which often takes
| a cut and makes it easy doesn't invalidate what is actually
| going on.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Sending $5 to a third party pool so they stake it in your
| stead under the promise it remains your $5 does not make
| you a bank. It's more like sending $5 to Robinhood so
| they buy $BAC in your stead under the (legally backed up)
| promise it remains your $5. IMO.
| nightski wrote:
| That's not really staking. It's just lending your eth to
| a staker which is completely different.
| belltaco wrote:
| >PoS pays the people who run the infrastructure
|
| Both Ethereum's and Bitcoin's regular nodes don't make any
| money.
| jsemrau wrote:
| You are conflating several topics. (Background: through
| Ternary we run the Red Bike validator nodes on Cardano).
|
| 1. If you want to run a validator node, i.e. run the
| architecture you need to have 32 ETH to be eligible to
| provide this service. And it does not mean immediately that
| you will earn something. https://ethereum.org/en/staking/
|
| 2. If I stake the equivalent of 5 USD I will likely get a 5%
| return on it per year making it much less interesting from an
| investment perspective given volatility and opportunity cost.
|
| 3. Staked funds are locked and can't be used anywhere else or
| for anything else. At least GPUs can be used for mining AND
| general purpose computing.
|
| 4. It is much easier to go to any random money exchanger and
| go USD/EUR or USD/JPY
|
| 5. Getting a retail bank account can be done in a matter of
| minutes online.
| sterlind wrote:
| you have to have 32 ETH, which is around $50K USD, but agreed
| other than that.
| sudhirj wrote:
| Pooling should be possible, same as mining earlier. Collect
| ETH from a bunch of people and split the gains by ratio.
| px43 wrote:
| You need 32 ETH to run your own staking node, but there are
| many options for liquid staking, which can be done with any
| denomination of ETH.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| [edit: misunderstood the initial statement; disregard the
| part that was previously here]
|
| > The barrier for entry in the legacy financial system is way
| way higher. Have you ever applied for a banking license?
|
| One doesn't have to have a banking license to use the local
| fiat currency of one's nation (basically, one is born into
| it). And one must do almost nothing to get a check from the
| government if they decide to stimulate the economy by handing
| out money to those who showed they had very little on their
| last tax return.
| px43 wrote:
| You don't need to be a staker to use Ethereum either. You
| can also stake with a few clicks on a website if you're
| using a web3 capable browser. You don't need to buy
| anything fancy or even open up a terminal if you don't want
| to.
|
| If you're into UBI type stuff, yeah, there are multiple UBI
| projects on Ethereum https://www.proofofhumanity.id
|
| There are a ton of other projects that allow people to
| share storage space, compute, art, information, etc to earn
| cryptocurrencies. People contribute what they can to the
| network, and are compensated for their efforts. Projects
| like gitcoin are raising millions of dollars for people who
| volunteer to provide public goods, from performing security
| audits on large open source projects, to cleaning plastic
| out of rivers (https://gitcoin.co/grants/). Seems to me
| like the Ethereum ecosystem is far more altruistic than
| many current governments.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| How will PoS not deflate the currency to zero? Why would you
| spend eth at all when you can make more money holding it via
| guaranteed returns?
| Drakim wrote:
| Couldn't somebody ask the same about getting interest rate
| on their savings? Why spend money when you can use the
| money to grow more money?
| [deleted]
| dmarcos wrote:
| Yep. Parking your ETH in a staking pool much better than in a
| traditional bank saving accounts. There's a proliferation of
| services that make it easier and easier and can put any
| amount.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| My bank account didn't drop 63% YTD though
| calculatte wrote:
| 1 ETH = 1 ETH still.
| blep_ wrote:
| The numbers are irrelevant over time. Can you buy the
| same things for 1 ETH now as you could then?
| kodyo wrote:
| Dollars have similar problems, for more depraved reasons.
| calculatte wrote:
| That all depends on the time points you are comparing to.
| 1 ETH now is $1400. 3 years ago it was $180.
|
| Can you buy the same things for 1 USD as you could then?
| (no)
| blep_ wrote:
| No, but it's close. USD's swings are a hell of a lot less
| wild, even in high-inflation years.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Or 100% when it got hacked.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| My loss, I guess
| glennvtx wrote:
| Nor did it go up thousands of percent over the past
| decade
| kmeisthax wrote:
| This isn't unfortunate, this is deliberate. Bitcoin was birthed
| dripping in the amniotic fluid of right-libertarian ideology.
| Capital-breeds-capital isn't so much a side effect as much as
| it is the deliberate goal of capitalism: use money to make more
| money. And the core of right-libertarian ideology is to more or
| less let the capitalists do what they want.
|
| This isn't exclusive to capitalism; there are other ideologies
| that work this way. However, they are ever more intolerably
| authoritarian than capitalism. Capitalists at least offer the
| promise of growing the economic universe alongside themselves -
| you can get 10x richer by taking 50% _less profit_ in some
| businesses. But fascists, criminals, and dictators also play
| this game - not to create wealth and grow the size of the pie,
| but to shrink it so their share gets bigger. And without a
| government to enforce rules, capitalists will be out-moded,
| out-gunned, and out-played by thieves of various stripes every
| time.
|
| Making this worse is the fact that Bitcoin mining is inherently
| and deliberately zero-sum. It _has_ to be, because it pays in
| inflation (block subsidy) and confiscation (transaction fees).
| So capitalists can offer no wealth creation here.
|
| In other words, Bitcoin is how authoritarians trolled right-
| libertarians into building and buying into a system that
| creates the thing they hate.
| [deleted]
| chef0 wrote:
| A deflationary system awards each market participant with an
| equitable increase of purchasing power relative to the increase
| in demand for earning more units through value creation. I'd
| imagine that would shift some social responsibility from being
| more centralized to being more decentralized. The Gini Index
| over time has only been trending up toward 100, signaling a
| growing environment of inequality. Having said that I do
| believe that we tend to oscillate between central and
| decentralized governance of social responsibility and
| technology innovation around how we transfer value (money)
| enables a shift away from one end of the spectrum.
| lottin wrote:
| > A deflationary system awards each market participant with
| an equitable increase of purchasing power relative to the
| increase in demand for earning more units through value
| creation.
|
| What do you mean? Holding a currency involves zero value
| creation.
| jalino23 wrote:
| nothing stops crypto PoS with governance to hand money to the
| poor as well.
| klodolph wrote:
| With fiat, there are at least some incentives. Not perfect
| incentives, but incentives just the same. Not sure what would
| incentivize crypto here.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If a cryptocurrency actually gained widespread use
| (competitive with cash), I'd imagine it would take on some
| aspects of a central bank -- being the only currency is
| only fun if the economy running smoothly. Money given to
| poor people more-or-less immediately enters circulation.
| skybrian wrote:
| Depending on what you mean by money, there are unsolved
| problems. You need some kind of layer that maps real people
| to accounts, or people can just create lots of accounts for
| unlimited money.
|
| There was some crypto startup that wanted to do this and was
| going to different cities and doing retina scans. I wonder
| what happened to them?
|
| I suppose you could outsource it by donating to GiveDirectly,
| but that would require conversion to real money and then (by
| GiveDirectly) to mobile phone payments. In that case, the
| cryptocurrency isn't solving much of the problem.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Seems like an interesting idea to spur adoption of the
| currency.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| "Unfortunate" is a very generous word in that case.
|
| For a technology that claims to be decentralized, it is simply
| one more major flaw in an already terrible design.
| dlivingston wrote:
| > [crypto is] not immune to the general capital-breeds-capital
| effect.
|
| Is there a currency - even theoretical - where 'capital-breeds-
| capital' is _not_ a side-effect?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Fiat currencies can defend against that phenomenon via wealth
| redistribution: simply creating more currency and handing it
| to the poor.
| fwip wrote:
| Most currencies don't have it baked it into the core workings
| of the currency.
|
| In crypto, possessing money generates money, without
| investing it or putting the money "to work." This would be
| like if the dollar bills in your wallet periodically grew
| another dollar.
| oumua_don17 wrote:
| I won't be surprised if this is final nail in the coffin for
| Intel dGPU efforts as well. Intel has only to blame itself though
| for the debacle a second time.
| ant6n wrote:
| Seriously. If they'd launched a year ago they could've perhaps
| prevented their stock tanking and future being totally in
| doubt.
| latchkey wrote:
| https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/04/intel-doubles-d...
| armchairhacker wrote:
| If I am looking to buy a GPU chip for ML research:
|
| - What chip should I buy? - When should I buy? Should I wait for
| prices to drop? Will new and improved chips be released anytime
| soon? - What are the advantages / disadvantages of each chip
| (3060 vs 3080, Nvidia vs AMD)? Which chip is most cost-efficient?
| What are each chips' specialties (e.g. specific type of neural
| network, graphics vs compute)?
| cstejerean wrote:
| I picked up a 3090 Ti for this purpose given the price drop.
| The 24 GB of VRAM is hard to beat.
| ftufek wrote:
| Not much difference between 3090 or 3090 ti though, while the
| price is usually 30% higher.
| wincy wrote:
| The prices are identical now from what I've seen.
| cstejerean wrote:
| Mostly because the 3090 Ti was discounted to $1,000, at
| which point it's about the same as the non-Ti version.
| barrkel wrote:
| The 3090 Ti also pumps out a lot more heat.
| learndeeply wrote:
| This applies for all neural networks. Depending on how much
| money you're willing to spend, in descending order: DGX
| (computer with 8 A100s, $150,000), A100 (80GB, $15,000), A6000
| ($5000), RTX 3090 ($1000).
| hedora wrote:
| I'd consider renting these, especially if you are just
| getting started:
|
| https://docs.paperspace.com/core/compute/machine-types/
|
| 1 x A100, 80GB is $3.19 / hour. 8 x A100, 80GB is about $25 /
| hour.
|
| They have much less expensive machines. I used to use them to
| run steam games, but now proton is just too darn good. Their
| low end machines are OK for CAD software that supports real-
| time raytracing.
| asciimike wrote:
| Lots of good options for cheap GPU clouds, including
| Paperspace (mentioned above), Coreweave, and Crusoe Cloud
| (crusoecloud.com). Crusoe Cloud's angle is that our GPUs
| are powered off otherwise wasted energy and are carbon-
| reducing; running one for a year provides an emissions
| reduction equivalent to taking one car off the road.
|
| Disclosure, I'm head of product @ Crusoe Cloud. Feel free
| to ping me at mike at crusoecloud dot com if you've got
| questions or feedback.
| hedora wrote:
| How do you carbon offset?
|
| We have a bunch of diseased pine trees. Assuming we don't
| have enough time to cut them down and burn them in the
| next 12 months, and that I am unscrupulous, I could sell
| you carbon credits through one of the bigger exchanges.
| You would never know, and it would be completely above
| board.
|
| John Oliver had a particularly depressing segment on this
| recently.
|
| (Totally off topic, but I'd love to biochar them instead.
| Using them for lumber and shipping them offsite are non-
| starters. Any ideas, anyone?)
| asciimike wrote:
| See above post, but the TL;DR: is "we capture methane
| that would otherwise be flared."
|
| Agreed that a lot of carbon offsets look like, "we were
| going to cut this section of the rainforest down, but if
| you pay us, we won't do that for X period of time." This
| is _actually_ reducing existing emissions.
| douto wrote:
| How can this be carbon-reducing? That sounds like a
| dubious marketing claim.
| asciimike wrote:
| TL;DR: we run data centers on-site at oil wells and take
| natural gas that would otherwise be flared (it can't be
| economically transported as natural gas in a pipeline or
| turned into electricity and transported) and combust it
| completely. Methane is a significantly more potent
| greenhouse gas than CO2, so it ends up being a net
| reduction in emissions vs what's currently happening.
|
| https://www.crusoeenergy.com/digital-flare-mitigation has
| some more information.
| pbronez wrote:
| Cool idea. Tried to join your waitlist but the form
| throws errors. Could be my security measures, but I'm on
| mobile safari, toggled off all content blockers and still
| had an error.
| asciimike wrote:
| Odd, I just tested on Safari mobile and it went through
| without issues. Mind sending me an email at mike at
| crusoecloud dot com and we can get you set up?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Won't 3090 prices go down a good bit after the 4xxx series
| cards start coming out in a couple of months?
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| My guess is "not as much as most folks seem to think"
|
| Comparable 24gb vram 4xxx cards are also 1 slot bigger and
| many watts hungrier. If you want to be able to use a 800w
| PSU + 3 slots, and just need 24gb vram for say, running
| inference on a big diffusion model, then 3090 is still
| going to be your only option for a while.
|
| They're pretty well priced right now, at $1k. If you need
| one, not much reason to wait, your time is probably worth
| more than saving a couple hundred bucks.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Is there no consumer option bigger than 24gb next gen?
| tootyskooty wrote:
| The 4090ti is rumoured to be 48GB [1], but who knows when
| that will release or how much it will cost. If you really
| need extra VRAM and don't mind longer inference, older
| used Tesla cards are an option. A used Tesla V100 32GB
| can be sometimes found on Ebay for 1500.
|
| [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-
| rtx-4090-ti.c3...
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Thank you great tip on V100.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| It appears as though the 4090 will be 24GB, but that card
| may also be almost $2k.
|
| Used 3090s on eBay are $800 all day long. That price may
| drop a bit in the next week or so, but not much, as that
| 24GB of VRAM is the main draw for that over a 3080Ti.
| pbronez wrote:
| Lambda Labs crunched the numbers in Feb 2022 [0]. They
| concluded:
|
| """ So, which GPUs to choose if you need an upgrade in early
| 2022 for Deep Learning? We feel there are two yes/no questions
| that help you choose between A100, A6000, and 3090. These three
| together probably cover most of the use cases in training Deep
| Learning models:
|
| Do you need multi-node distributed training? If the answer is
| yes, go for A100 80GB/40GB SXM4 because they are the only GPUs
| that support Infiniband. Without Infiniband, your distributed
| training simply would not scale. If the answer is no, see the
| next question.
|
| How big is your model? That helps you to choose between A100
| PCIe (80GB), A6000 (48GB), and 3090 (24GB). A couple of 3090s
| are adequate for mainstream academic research. Choose A6000 if
| you work with a large image/language model and need multi-GPU
| training to scale efficiently. An A6000 system should cover
| most of the use cases in the context of a single node. Only
| choose A100 PCIe 80GB when working on extremely large models
| """
|
| [0] https://lambdalabs.com/blog/best-gpu-2022-sofar/
| papercrane wrote:
| You should get a Nvidia card with as much VRAM as possible. A
| 12 GB RTX 3060 is probably the most cost efficient at the
| moment.
|
| I don't think AMD is really viable for ML. Nvidia has the mind
| share in that segment, so nearly all tools will work with
| Nvidia, while very few support AMD.
| hedora wrote:
| Not disagreeing, but my < $300 8GB AMD runs stable diffusion
| just fine.
| capableweb wrote:
| Guessing "just fine" is relative, but care to put a prompt
| + the settings you use, and how many it/s you get? I'm
| getting max ~8it/s on a 2080ti and I think even that feels
| slow sometimes so looking to upgrade my GPU now, curious to
| see what "just fine" means for you here.
| hedora wrote:
| 100 seconds per batch of five (1.7it/s); default settings
| (512x512, etc)
|
| Performance seems to be prompt-independent; I'm using a
| docker container that seems to have disappeared, this
| modified version for amd cards with less than 10gb:
|
| https://github.com/basujindal/stable-diffusion
|
| and this workaround:
|
| https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm/issues/1756#iss
| uec...
|
| Anyway, don't "upgrade" to my budget AMD card. :-)
| capableweb wrote:
| > 100 seconds per batch of five (1.7it/s); default
| settings (512x512, etc)
|
| What settings precisely? Scale, steps and sampler being
| the most important ones (together with size, but you
| already shared that :) )
| Uehreka wrote:
| Stable Diffusion is the kind of phenomenon where people are
| actually contributing other backends (like the one for the
| M1 GPU). That's not super common though, a lot of the time
| if you want to get a network running you need an Nvidia
| card so you can use CUDA (it's not even about hardware
| performance, just that CUDA and CUDNN and so on are written
| by Nvidia for their GPUs).
| paulgb wrote:
| I have a dumb question: when someone implements a backend
| like mps for stable diffusion, what are they actually
| implementing? Shims for Nvidia proprietary stuff that
| doesn't exist outside of CUDA?
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Keep in mind that bigger models are coming. And to use all
| features of even the current SD version, you need a lot of
| VRAM - 12GB for textual inversion (making it learn your own
| style), 30GB+ for Dreambooth (sort of micro-finetuning that
| doesn't need a GPU farm and a huge tagged dataset), a lot
| for img2img on a high-res picture. It also massively
| benefits from the large amount of compute cores.
|
| Right now, the bigger and faster, the better. And there's
| really no limit of the computing power you can throw at
| various tasks to make them run better. It almost looks like
| 90s again.
| 34679 wrote:
| There are tons of "shit coins" that can be mined with GPUs and
| there are several mining pools that will allow you to choose what
| crypto you get your payout in. GPU mining isn't going anywhere.
| Smithalicious wrote:
| Prediction: this is not gonna lead to even close to the levels of
| cpu price drops that people expect, especially not for new GPUs.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| GPUs are already readily available at MSRP, I don't see what
| drop would be expected in the non-used market.
| LazyMans wrote:
| For the last two years, the highest end cards which were good
| for mining were certainly not available at MSRP in the US.
| nomel wrote:
| > GPUs are already readily available at MSRP
|
| I don't think maintaining original MSRP, a month before next
| gen release, is all that great.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I'll take that any day over what I paid for my 3060 at the
| time.
| nightski wrote:
| They are far below. The 3090 original MSRP was $1500 and
| you can find them brand new for under $1000 now.
| holoduke wrote:
| Prices are already down to acceptable levels.
| LazyMans wrote:
| For the RX 6800xt, prices already dropped by over 50% on ebay
| in the last month.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| I think this is fantastic. Availability of GPUs for gaming and
| small scale machine learning just exploded dramatically. Would be
| interesting to see how NVDA behaves in the next couple of
| quarters
| stuntkite wrote:
| There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that
| isn't crypto. I'm really excited about this because there are SO
| MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand. There is A
| LOT that can be made of that and I intend to get mine. I think
| the crypto boom really covered up what we can really, really do
| with GPU compute and possibly stifled adoption and innovation but
| now we've got so many just sitting around. Which is super useful
| as we move more into a world after being able to get things
| manufactured and shipped world wide in what feels like an
| instant.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Aren't they immediately going to start mining other PoW coins
| with those GPUs?
| giarc wrote:
| I saw that argument on twitter when talking about the energy
| reduction for ETH mining. Someone commented that it won't
| change because they will just focus their GPUs on some other
| coin.
| apeace wrote:
| TFA is pointing out that other GPU-based POW chains have
| become unprofitable. Partly because of the massive influx
| of GPUs increasing the difficulty of those chains, and
| partly because those coins are just not worth as much as
| ETH. If that's true, then lots of miners are going to be
| shutting down their GPUs and selling them.
| latchkey wrote:
| Power companies are incentivized to sell power.
|
| They will just find other buyers.
| elil17 wrote:
| Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to
| sell more power (although it seems like that is not the
| case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies
| do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers).
|
| But even so, at least that power would go to something
| useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water,
| who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-
| pit.
| latchkey wrote:
| I'm getting downvoted on my original comment, sigh HN.
|
| > Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to
| sell more power (although it seems like that is not the
| case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies
| do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers).
|
| It is literally called a power _company_. They offer
| special rates for large customers. That alone creates a
| marketplace.
|
| > But even so, at least that power would go to something
| useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water,
| who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-
| pit.
|
| Did you have a choice in where that power went to begin
| with? No.
|
| "No one has the moral authority to tell you what is a
| good or bad use of energy (ex: watching the Kardashians)"
| -- https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1479135584685854729
| ?lang=...
| simondotau wrote:
| The parent to your post never asserted "moral authority"
| around how power is used, only that they think this shift
| is a good thing in their view.
| latchkey wrote:
| > _at least that power would go to something useful_
|
| I consider that a moral opinion.
| simondotau wrote:
| Ultimately it wasn't the grandparent that asserted that
| proof-of-work Etherium mining wasn't useful, it was the
| Etherium blockchain community themselves -- which is why
| they have stopped doing it.
|
| It's not a "moral opinion" to accept someone else's
| assessment of the utility of their own actions.
|
| Is it a "moral opinion" to state a preference that crude
| oil is more useful when refined and injected into an ICE
| vehicle than if it's burned on site in an oil well fire?
| chowells wrote:
| That tweet thread is 100% wrong. I absolutely do have the
| moral authority to tell everyone that burning billions of
| joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then
| dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally
| wrong. It's not even a tough question. It is clearly a
| malicious (hypothetical) act being done only to hurt
| others.
|
| So if there's an unambiguous case of morally abhorrent
| energy use, everything else is up for debate. That tweet
| thread goes off the rails early, as it's clear the author
| is financially incentivized to not understand the
| position he is arguing against. So it's no surprise the
| argument is nonsense.
| latchkey wrote:
| It opens a can of worms. If you start telling people how
| they should or should not use any form of energy, then
| you have to deg [?]? deg at yourself first.
|
| https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin-
| energy-c...
|
| https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
| simondotau wrote:
| > then you have to deg [?]? deg at yourself first
|
| Yes, and?
| latchkey wrote:
| It is absurd as: your website makes money from Google
| Adsense and therefore is a waste of power because google
| is profiting off people advertising crap to others.
| simondotau wrote:
| The only way for them to find other buyers is to lower
| prices, which benefits everyone.
| LazyMans wrote:
| Not really. https://whattomine.com/gpus
| Volundr wrote:
| Ouch, looks like for most cards even if energy was free a
| miner would be looking at ~1000 days to break even.
| Hopefully this really does more or less end GPU mining.
| cesaref wrote:
| Those numbers are based on $0.1/kwh electricity costs.
| Here in the UK the cost is around $0.4/kwh, so I don't
| believe any of those cards would generate any sort of
| profit. Basically the electricity cost is the main
| driver, and you'd need to check what your local cost is
| to evaluate this.
|
| Of course if you are running from home generated power
| (e.g solar) then the equation changes, but so does the
| capital cost.
| [deleted]
| dybber wrote:
| More/bigger miners ==> higher competition ==> miners will
| require higher transaction fee's to finance their operation?
| Or do I misunderstand it?
| [deleted]
| karaterobot wrote:
| The article gives an answer to this.
|
| > "The only coins showing profit have no market cap or
| liquidity. The profit is not real."
|
| That is, the remaining PoW derived coins are not as
| profitable for miners, presumably not enough to cover their
| margins.
| Retric wrote:
| Presumably those other coins are close to an equilibrium
| point where more people mining them would be unprofitable.
| Aka if the total block rewards from other coins are 1 million
| dollars per month, there is no way spending 2 million per
| month on electricity is a good idea.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Mining is only profitable when the block reward and
| transaction fees are worth more than the costs of mining
| (electricity, capital costs). ETH was the only coin big
| enough to support all those GPU mining rigs. With ETH gone,
| there are too many miners and not enough valuable stuff to
| mine.
| adriand wrote:
| I'm sure this is a stupid question, but I'm going to go for
| it anyway: isn't Bitcoin also proof-of-work? Why isn't that
| where ETH miners are going?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Why isn't that where ETH miners are going?
|
| Mining BTC on a GPU isn't profitable.
|
| You need a dedicated ASIC chip that is far more efficient
| at the task than a GPU if you want to hope turning a
| profit mining Bitcoin.
|
| Something like this:
|
| https://www.bitmain.com/
| duskwuff wrote:
| Bitcoin mining all switched over to custom ASICs long
| ago, and is barely profitable even on that hardware. The
| GPUs that were used for Ethereum mining can't compete.
| wongarsu wrote:
| For some more background: bitcoin's POW is basically just
| sha256, which was trivial to port first to GPUs and then
| to custom hardware. That makes mining a bigger up-front
| investment and thus more centralized, which is why almost
| all later coins chose POWs that aren't easy to speed up
| with ASICs
| cedricd wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that Bitcoin mining just isn't as
| profitable to mine with a GPU -- it's more cost-effective
| to use an ASIC designed for that purpose.
| acchow wrote:
| > I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus
| that are now going to be cheaper than sand
|
| Over the course of a GPU's lifetime (in your hypothetical use-
| case), how much of the cost is the GPU itself and how much
| electricity?
| hinkley wrote:
| I'd like to see some PoW scheme for public good projects like
| SETI or Folding@Home or even CGI for a fan fiction, where
| there's perhaps something more than just bragging rights for
| contributing. I'm not sure what that would look like exactly.
| stuntkite wrote:
| Since the new GPU offerings from nvidia have secure multi-
| tenancy, I think you're going to start seeing things like
| that. Especially when you look at what's happening with
| compute being more universally adapted via Vulkan. I haven't
| seen the framework for such a thing yet but you make a good
| point. I think I've got half a model in my head that could be
| retooled for something like that in a flexible fashion. It
| could work both ways too. Either you are giving away GPU
| cycles for research or you are paying for people to be paid
| for their cycles, or you post up your own job to be computed
| for pay or donation of cycles or money. As an example, wanna
| render predictions for erosion on a property you wanna buy?
| Put up the job and people that wanna contribute can and you
| get the result. Any user could set their hierarchy of things
| they contribute to. Like patreon sort of. So bucks or compute
| cycles can be chunked out to them by order of need and
| weighted priority.
|
| Humm. Someone beat me to this idea so I don't have to do it.
| djbusby wrote:
| GPUslice.com
| Grimburger wrote:
| > There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute
| that isn't crypto.
|
| There's a lot of stuff that isn't any better than crypto
| either, deepfakes, producing hundreds of thousands stable
| diffusion pics of the same scene.
|
| Much of this is still a garbage fire of greenhouse gases and
| e-waste, used GPU prices won't change that. Many ml _advances_
| are simply more compute and bigger models in the end.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| By that logic you can include gaming in there as well.
| Thousands of people re-playing the same scenes over and over
| again, instead of just watching a let's play of the first
| person that bought the game. I guess the only reasonable uses
| for GPUs are cancer research etc.
| yaddaor wrote:
| Please provide a citation to a well researched study for
| that claim.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| PC gaming alone has bigger carbon footprint than crypto
| mining so objectively yes they are both anti environmental
| activities.
| switchers wrote:
| Running cards at full pelt 24/7 vs at most a few hours a
| day? Doubtful.
| ben_w wrote:
| Lot of gamers, and the displays add a few more watts each
| to the total.
|
| Fermi estimate: 10 million latest Xboxes, used for 1 hour
| per day.
|
| Power estimates seem to vary from 120 W to 315 W, let's
| say 200 W including display. That's 2 GWh/day. Probably
| similar for Playstation, or at least close enough for a
| Fermi estimate. I'm going to guess similar for PC gaming
| also.
|
| Smartphones are what, about 1 W? But a few billion of
| them? 1 hour per day makes that another GWh/day?
|
| So probably about 7 GWh/day for Xbox + Playstation + PC +
| mobile, 2.5 TWh/year.
|
| Bitcoin is estimated to use 131 TWh/year according to
| Wikipedia.
|
| Yeah, you're right, it's not even close.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| There have been see scientific prayers on power us usage
| snd PC gaming (only) and it comes similar to crypto
| usage. There are not many things that take tons of energy
| - heating, cooling, crypto, gaming etc.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I'd be surprised if it's actually more than crypto; while
| there are way more gamers than crypto miners, they don't
| game 24/7, don't have a dozen GPUs per rig etc.
|
| Anyways my main point was that a lot of things people do
| for fun are more or less directly bad for the
| environment, like for example creating dozens of silly
| images with stable diffusion. But it's still better than
| crypto mining imo, as doing "fun things" usually benefits
| you/your mental health.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| If you say something's bad, you imply something else is good.
| So can you identify some contrasting technologies which
| didn't start out as a "garbage fire of greenhouse gasses and
| e-waste" or the appropriate equivalent? Are you wanting a
| world contains only those born perfect technologies?
| visarga wrote:
| > producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of
| the same scene
|
| Why are you twisting reality? People don't generate hundreds
| of thousands of stable diffusion pics of the same scene.
| Instead they generate dozens to hundreds of images carefully
| tweaking the prompt and the starter image.
| behnamoh wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted. At least the last
| part is totally true; advance in ML is unfortunately just
| bigger models, more data, and more compute.
|
| But doing ML won't necessarily boost GPU sales because most
| deep learning work is shifted to the cloud.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute
| that isn 't crypto._
|
| For sure, but there were many crypto operations with data
| centers that had hundreds or thousands of GPUs. For example, a
| report from JPR estimates that crypto miners bought 25% of all
| GPUs produced in 1H'2021.1
|
| 1 https://www.jonpeddie.com/blog/crypto-minings-half-a-
| billion...
| latchkey wrote:
| Or over 100k...
| UberFly wrote:
| 25% seems like a very low estimate. All sections of the
| supply chain were being looted. Barely anything made it to
| stores.
| CharlesW wrote:
| It seemed low to me too, but it was the most credible
| reference I could find. Surely it's an estimate, and I'd
| guess a conservative one.
| eachro wrote:
| What other things can you do with GPUs outside of machine
| learning, generalized scientific computing and gaming?
| qeternity wrote:
| Can't tell if sarcasm...
| wheresmycraisin wrote:
| What are the interesting things?
| thaneross wrote:
| One I'm interested in is graph databases powered with linear
| algebra (see GraphBLAS and RedisGraph). Putting the graph
| structure in a sparse matrix in GPU memory and doing matrix-
| multiplication to perform queries means you can effectively
| traverse the entire graph quickly by using the massive
| parallel nature of the graphics card.
| ars wrote:
| I predict the opposite will happen. GPU demand will drop, which
| means GPU manufacturers will have less money to spend on R&D.
|
| GPU prices may go down in the short term, but long term GPU
| speeds will stagnate.
|
| I wish there was a way to put a 1 year timer on this comment to
| see who's right me or stuntkite.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| There's more than enough demand for GPUs with gaming, video
| rendering, and machine learning that R&D will continue
| without crypto mining.
| stuntkite wrote:
| You seem to think GPUs are only currently used for gaming and
| speculation on ape gifs.
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| We are already at a stagnating point in GPU speeds, with the
| most recent generations from NVIDIA simply being pump more
| juice (watts) instead of big design changes and efficiency
| optimizations.
|
| I don't believe R&D funds will dry as well, since they will
| simply be relocated to AI and datacenter workloads which have
| been on the rise more recently.
| ls612 wrote:
| The rumored 4090 is going to pull 450W and score ~19000 on
| 3DMark time spy extreme. The 3080 pulls 350W and scores
| 9000 if we are being optimistic. If these numbers are
| ballpark correct we are talking about 60% more performance
| per watt in two years. Your story may eventually come true
| but it is not yet true.
| stuntkite wrote:
| Maybe kind of in like clock... but the parallel throughput
| and the ability to securely slice and provision GPU
| workloads is what was delivered this go around. As well as
| optical NV-Link and all the crazy new stuff coupled with
| their CPUs. Go look at crowdsupply and look at the previous
| gen cores being strapped to massive software defined radio
| arrays.
|
| This isn't just about pushing framerate. It's about vector
| processing being massively more efficient than CPU for
| almost everything and the tooling to start floating
| consumer needs that aren't just making pretty bleep bloops
| go boom boom for fun times is very, very mature.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think you are both right. Lower prices _and_ lower r &d. If
| you buy gpu because you care about the objective performance
| then it's bad. If you buy gpu to keep up with Joneses, then
| it's good.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I don't think 1 year is long enough to tell - release cycles
| seem to be ~3 years so you'd need that long to compare the
| 3xxx->4xxx->5xxx series.
| colordrops wrote:
| Would it be possible to buy 10 GPUs on the cheap and set them up
| as a cluster? I'd like to generate larger stable diffusion images
| for instance, but don't know if a cluster would support this.
| pksebben wrote:
| https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/modulus/text/features/p...
| ftufek wrote:
| You could, but you'll need server grade parts and a few good
| electric circuits. Oh and it costs hundreds of dollars in
| electricity every month.
| asciimike wrote:
| If the goal is to increase the GPU vRAM (which I believe it is,
| given that's the constraint on image size), the answer is "not
| really" for consumer cards. You need NVLink bridges for pairs
| of PCIe cards (which they have, but then you'd only double the
| vRAM), or NVSwitch on the high end data center servers (DGX/HGX
| A100).
| christkv wrote:
| This will be helpful for straining electrical supplies as well.
| j-bos wrote:
| What are the ballpark odds that we'll soon see an uptick in ai
| image generation? Perhaps for profitable reasons?
|
| My favorite wacky conspiracy theory is that proof-of-work was
| invented to slow down ai progress.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| Alternative: "Satoshi Nakamoto" was the nom de guerre of an
| emergent renegade AI who had figured out a way to induce
| monkeys to attach as much processing power as possible to a
| network.
| colordrops wrote:
| I have a similar fun conspiracy theory, that Satoshi is actual
| an alien farmer that injected the whitepaper into its human
| farm to get humanity's tensor calculation capacity up, and now
| injected PoS to switch the capacity over to AI for some
| ineffable purpose.
| Drakim wrote:
| Satoshi is actually a time traveling Roko's Basilisk creating
| itself.
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
| DennisP wrote:
| If you and your parent comment are correct, then anyone who
| owned bitcoin or ethereum before the PoS launch has helped
| out the basilisk, and anyone who didn't had better do
| something to catch up. Something besides buying crypto,
| since that phase of the basilisk's plan is complete.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| Awesome. I've got a 1060 that is long in the tooth, and I've
| wanted to add a second video card for experimenting with SR-IOV.
|
| Regarding SR-IOV (if that's what it's still called); Can anybody
| suggest a decent resource for implementing it?
|
| I know that alot of these mining cards will have been worked
| hard. I'm not afraid to reapply thermal paste, and if the price
| is right I can get a couple.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Maybe there's hope for us after all.
|
| I had given up on the singularity ever coming to pass, and the
| reason was CryptoCurrency. How could we ever upload our
| consciousness to the cloud if the cloud was fully occupied
| inventing imaginary wealth tokens? Because 'mining' can consume
| any amount of cpu horsepower, so there was never going to be any
| left for the singularity.
|
| But now? There's a new hope.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Why do you want to upload, at best, a _copy_ of your
| consciousness?
| officeplant wrote:
| To leave the flesh husk behind.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| The flesh husk is you. You can't provably leave it behind
| without dying.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| as soon as you copy yourself you're both, and
| indistinguishable to anyone else but your flesh husk.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Yeah but I don't think _you 'll_ feel that you're both.
| You'll still feel like yourself, and the other will feel
| like another. You won't feel as though you have left
| anything behind, only the other will feel like that.
| dymk wrote:
| There's an entire subgenre of science fiction exploring just
| that question!
|
| You may enjoy authors Greg Egan or Dennis E. Taylor.
| trollied wrote:
| I recently discovered the Bobiverse series. Very
| entertaining:)
| donio wrote:
| To me they tend to answer the question of why you wouldn't
| want to do it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yeah but the bots _would_ so there 's that.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Immortality
| jdpedrie wrote:
| But you're dead. Digital copy of you != you.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| How are you certain that you can survive a night's sleep?
| johndough wrote:
| The digital copy can be kept alive long enough until we
| figure out how to download it back into a body again, at
| which point this is basically the ship of Theseus
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
|
| Also some people might disagree with "digital copy of you
| != you". Personally, I do not care since it is close
| enough to immortality imho.
| philipkglass wrote:
| It won't do anything to solve the dread-of-nonexistence
| problem. But a copy that behaves just like you is still
| useful if your motivation is something like "ensure that
| my line of scientific research continues" or "take care
| of my extended family."
| ycombobreaker wrote:
| But even if it's a copy of your essence, it's not a
| slave. Mortal-you has goals and family to care about.
| Mortal-you has been living and planning with the
| constraint of mortality for its entire life. Immortal-you
| will eventually develop different motivations.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Immortal-you will eventually develop different
| motivations.
|
| Yah, well, mortal-me also eventually develops different
| motivations. There's still continuity and connectedness.
|
| It's just fork(2).
| batch12 wrote:
| To be fair, it's not you that becomes immortal, just your
| copy. From your perspective, you still die.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| But not today!
|
| And consider: if I can upload, perhaps I can download.
| Perhaps my digital copy can live life 'faster'? In that
| case I live 1000 lives digitally and download that.
|
| Now I'm essentially immortal, in my physical body,
| because I've lived for millennia!
|
| At the very, very least its no worse than living this one
| life and dying anyway.
| batch12 wrote:
| It isn't you living those lives though. What is the
| difference between this and downloading someone else's
| memories?
| mlyle wrote:
| What about the whole Ship-of-Theseus thing?
|
| What if you add something to you that's knit into and
| augmenting your brain by 10%, and then as a little more of
| your brain withers, you add another chunk. Ultimately it
| reaches a point where your existing brain is doing none of
| the work and it's all machines, but there was arguably never
| a precipice crossed where it wasn't "you".
| debacle wrote:
| Such a strange thing, that a comment like this on a Friday
| afternoon would completely blow my mind.
| mlyle wrote:
| Thank you :D
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Stories have been written! On this very subject. Back in
| the day.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I wonder if keeping their GPUs mining until the last minute ended
| up making those miners more money than selling them when the
| price of GPUs was still high would have.
| yuan43 wrote:
| > If you're looking to build a new gaming PC or upgrade your
| existing graphics card, just wait a little longer and definitely
| don't buy any graphics card for more than $500. Prices on
| existing GPUs will continue to drop, and the new stuff is right
| around the corner.
|
| To be clear, no mass-produced GPU can profitably mine Bitcoin.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| GPUs haven't been profitable for Bitcoin mining in _years_.
|
| Anyone mining on a GPU was likely mining Ethereum.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| I always wonder how many people have their boss's machines in
| their boss's offices mining bitcoin 24/7...
| rhacker wrote:
| Can a mass produced GPU profitably mine bitcoin if the
| electricity was "free" somehow?
| latchkey wrote:
| If you mean "free" as in "stolen", yes.
|
| If you mean "free" as in "solar", then the amount of time to
| reach ROI would be so long that it wouldn't make much sense.
| Kerrick wrote:
| What about "free" as in "my solar array is large enough to
| produce $0 in electricity charges all winter, and the
| excess I sell back in summer/autumn/spring cannot be cashed
| out or used to cover my connection charges (and even if it
| could is sold at a pittance anyways)"? :)
| latchkey wrote:
| That's what I said, but wasn't clear enough to you.
|
| The hardware capex for mining BTC with GPUs would
| outweigh any 'free' power you have access to. You can't
| just focus on one aspect of this business in order to
| calculate your ROI.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| The GPU would need to be stolen, too. You'd never reach ROI
| on a GPU.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It doesn't have to be stolen, it could have simply
| "fallen off the back of a truck." /s
|
| (This actually doesn't happen as much as it used to
| twenty years ago with step-by-step inventory checkins
| made possible w/ RFID chips and barcodes combined with
| mobile network connections).
| [deleted]
| ugjka wrote:
| If electricity was free it would also be "free" for ASIC
| farms
| MBCook wrote:
| Yes, but you'd still mine much faster with an ASIC.
| 01100011 wrote:
| > definitely don't buy any graphics card for more than $500
|
| Ef that, I'm buying a 20GB 4080 when they come out for doing
| stable diffusion research and gaming. I'm still rocking a 1060.
| I doubt a 4080 is going to drop below $500, recession or not.
| derac wrote:
| The 4080 tis might have 48 gb _salivating emoji_
| olliej wrote:
| I assumed bitcoin also had GPU mining as well, is it now all just
| ASICs?
| ur-whale wrote:
| > is it now all just ASICs
|
| Yes.
|
| And been that way for a very long time.
|
| Can't remember exactly but IIRC Bitcoin GPU mining withered off
| around 2014 or so when the first ASIC miners came out [1]
|
| https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/04/26/the-rise-of-asics-a...
|
| https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/the-history-of-cryptocurr...
|
| https://thenextweb.com/news/a-brief-history-of-bitcoin-minin...
| sc68cal wrote:
| Good.
| hedora wrote:
| Queue the machine-generated SEO content / fake-news Internet
| apocalypse in 3, 2, 1...
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Is it possible to use one of those GPUs as external GPU for my
| laptop or NAS? Do I need an enclosure? How would I connect them,
| PCI-e to USB adapter? I mainly want to experiment with stable
| diffussion and for video transcoding.
| syntaxing wrote:
| You just need a computer with TB3 and above. Get an eGPU box
| like Razer Core X [1]. Caveat is that chances are, these GPU
| are probably Nvidia because of CUDA. Therefore, it will not
| work with Mac (will work on Linux or Windows though).
|
| [1] https://www.razer.com/gaming-egpus/razer-core-x
| [deleted]
| trenning wrote:
| Now all those PC gamers are going to keep polluting the earth
| with their dirty GPUs that aren't even contributing anything
| positive to the world.
| neogodless wrote:
| Just to be clear, have you ever purchased any physical device
| to be used for entertainment?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This may be a dumb question but, since I would not trust a GPU
| card "on eBay" anymore than I would a guy selling the Golden Gate
| Bridge for scrap, where will these cards appear - how will people
| trust them? (Or more accurately - where can I pick up a couple?)
| cphoover wrote:
| good
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