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Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

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121–130 of 762 posts

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#121

While I hate the GPU shortage, I dont think this is the right way to go. Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.

> Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.

Unfortunately it happens all the time. For instance Nvidia had Quadro lineup, with nicer multi-display settings that to my knowledge was always just driver thing. They never ported those to GeForce line up, and people suffered with displays that wake up too late and all windows were messed up when you waked up your computer.

It hasn't happened to me lately so they might have fixed it, problem was that if one of the displays took longer to wake up then Windows didn't recognize it until it was too late. With Quadro you could force the EDI settings so that it faked for operating system that the display was there.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#122
It seems like manufacturers are now resorting to artificial means to curb demand, rather than increasing supply.

What are the practical reasons supply hasn’t kept up? Obviously, a fab is expensive but they have to be just printing money with these things in the current market. This really goes across the board with semiconductors as CPU supply issues are outrageous right now as well. Why aren’t more fabs being built? Is this just plain and simple greed?

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#123

Aren't ASIC miners at least an order (or in the case of Bitcoin, several orders) of magnitude more efficient than these chips? Is this just more attractive in terms of more easily accessible supply?

those who bought 3090/3080 five months ago can probably sell their GPU cards at the original purchase price. you will never be able to do that for those ASIC based devices.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this is relevant. Company should look how to increase the supply instead of artificially crippling the product to squeeze more money.

By crippling the product for miners, they're increasing the supply for gamers.

What if you are a gamer and you want to mine when you don't play?

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#125
Clearly the solution for everyone is to either make a popular computer game that matches the signature of cryptocurrency mining, or develop a cryptocurrency that is mined by beating computer games that require high quality and frame rates to maximize the mining rate.

The graphic card manufacturers would, of course, have to optimize their hardware and software for these situations, to make the gamers happy.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#126
post #15

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…

The CBECI tool estimates that bitcoin consumes about 15.24 gigawatts.

There are approximately 2 million employees working at FDIC insured banks in the United States.[2] There are approximately 330 million people in the United States.[3] United States food production uses about 10 quadrillion BTUs per year (about 332 gigawatts = [10 quadrillion BTU / (365246060) sec to gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW. That's approximately 1 kilowatt per person in the United States. There are probably some good arguments about exports etc but we will hold that aside for now. In 2019, total U.S. primary energy consumption per person (or per capita consumption) was about 305 million British thermal units (Btu).[5] = 305 million btu / (365246060) sec = 10kW. So, we get around 11kW per person for the total food and primary energy consumption rate.

11kW / person * 2 million people = 22 gigawatts

So, we come to the conclusion that if you look at the people employed by FDIC insured banks in the United States alone, they have a larger impact on the environment than bitcoin. If my calculations are correct, maybe we don't need this complaint to be the same first post in every thread on crypto.

Maybe I'm missing something or have done an incorrect calculation, if so, please point it out.

[1] https://www.cbeci.org

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/193286/number-of-employe...

[3] https://www.census.gov/popclock/

[4] https://www.chooseenergy.com/blog/energy-101/energy-food-pro...

[5] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=85&t=1

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#127

It seems like manufacturers are now resorting to artificial means to curb demand, rather than increasing supply. What are the practical reasons supply hasn’t kept up? Obviously, a fab is expensive but they have to be just printing money with these things in the current market. This really goes across the board with semiconductors as CPU supply issues are outrageous right now as well. Why aren’t more fabs being built?…

The lead times for the machines used in fabs are in the years.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#128
post #48
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. They (nvidia or someone else) should be building tons and tons of cards for the existing demand. I just cant understand why isnt someone salivating at such market inefficiency.

They did exactly that just 3 years ago when bitcoin was hot, and (when bitcoin crashed) ended up with an oversupply of GTX cards that delayed Turing sales and tanked the stock for a while. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-cryptocurrency-earn...

Doesn't really make sense to blame Turing's sales on this when it was also a pretty bad generation in general (price hikes, poor performance, RTX gimmick turned out to be a flop).

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#129

Aren't ASIC miners at least an order (or in the case of Bitcoin, several orders) of magnitude more efficient than these chips? Is this just more attractive in terms of more easily accessible supply?

those who bought 3090/3080 five months ago can probably sell their GPU cards at the original purchase price. you will never be able to do that for those ASIC based devices.

Not original more like 2x more.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how this is relevant. Company should look how to increase the supply instead of artificially crippling the product to squeeze more money.

If it is not physically possible, this decision makes a lot of sense. Due to the global semiconductor shortage it simply is not possible to build more on the scale customers would like to.

The instrument to regulate that is called the price. You increase the price until there is a steady supply. That would help funding new fabs and in the long run increase the supply so that it could be available for a broader range of consumers. The way they do it is not sustainable. They will not generate enough money to pay for new manufacturing plants this way.
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