Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 762 posts

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

#151

Post by ralmidani »

option wrote: post #138
ralmidani wrote: post #50

I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…

how Syrian refugees (or any other people from war torn place) convert their assets to crypto before leaving?

Good question. I don't know the details, but early on in Assad's war against Syrians, the situation was easier than it is now. In 2012/2013, a lot of cash was taken to neighboring countries.

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

#152

Post by glennpratt »

dannyw wrote: post #144
trynumber9 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is annoying they limit their drivers this way but ultimately this is in response to their core customers' frustrations. Nvidia is trying to segment their products so that the video game market can get their cards without dealing with the boom and bust cycle of cryptomining. I somehow doubt these drivers will be enough to stop it, however.

Gimp the memory bandwidth, that'll do it.

That will also hurt games. It's a huge differentiator between integrated GPUs and dedicated.

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

#153

Post by jimmaswell »

dis-sys wrote: post #123
vlovich123 wrote: post #108

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.

I never got around to selling my old r9 380 that I used to do some mining on. Unfortunately too old now I guess, doesn't go for more than $80.

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

#154

Post by namdnay »

patrickaljord wrote: post #86
namdnay wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres. About 40000 times less I think? That's the figure I saw for a SEPA transfer or Mastercard transaction vs the bitcoin equivalent

The dollar is backed by the petro-dollar, the fact that Saudi Arabia and friends only accept dollars when selling oil is one of the reason the dollar is strong. When you factor in that the US military protects the petro-dollar while at the same time being the biggest consumer on earth of oil, it starts adding up. Europe and therefore the Euro is also protected by the US army. All of a sudden, your fiat's energy consu…

The dollar being strong or not doesn't change the fact that a transaction in any currency is several orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than with bitcoin.

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

#155

Post by wtallis »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #133
IceWreck wrote: post #115

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. Everything does it - from Intel chips being binned by performance, Windows versions and # of CPUs, and pretty much any big software products. Another way to see it is: it costs X to develop a line, and a vendor can charge everyone the same, no matter how they use it, or they can design and partition the line so users with different…

Binning chips for yield is different from artificially crippling chips. There's nothing wrong with taking an 8-core CPU with a defect in one core and selling it as a 6-core part, or underclocking it until all 8 cores are stable and selling it as a slower part. The odious part happens when fab defect rates drop and yield improves, so basically all the dies can function as 8-core chips. When that happens, Intel et al. start disabling perfectly functional cores to artificially constrain the supply of high-end parts. That's a pretty clear cut market failure that's only possible because the barriers to entry are so high.

The most extreme instance of this that I'm aware of was when Intel sold a ~$50 piece of software that would unlock the rest of the L2 cache on a specific low-end processor model. They didn't say it might work on your chip; every instance of that model had apparently passed QA with the full cache enabled but shipped with a fourth of it (IIRC) disabled. So Intel wasn't saving any money or harvesting any otherwise-unusable parts with that model. They were just price fixing.

Product segmentation for software is also a different issue, because all the scarcity is artificial to begin with, with no natural underlying supply curves because there's no marginal cost to making another copy.

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

#156

Post by mindcandy »

vlovich123 wrote: post #108

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?

ASICs are great for Bitcoin because B’s algo strains the math features of a chip. An ASIC can bake a whole iteration of the algo into a single, huge instruction.

Many people in the community don’t like ASICs in crypto because they believe their high cost and rarity creates a hurdle for mass adoption. Every kid playing games on their computer has a GPU, but it’s much harder for that same kid to get their hands in an ASIC. Mass adoption by all kinds of people, not just already rich corporations, is important to the security and the mission of crypto.

In response, Ethereum was designed to have an algo that stresses your RAM rather than your processor. This reduces the advantage of ASICs tremendously. You can’t drive RAM much harder than GPUs already do. And so, Eth and many other memory-hard cryptos are still mined on GPUs.

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

#158

Post by _alex_ »

vlovich123 wrote: post #108

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?

There are ASICs for Bitcoin and other coins that use SHA. Ethereum and other "later" cryptocurrencies using hashing algorithms that are memory-hard and there aren't efficient ASICs for those. If you're mining Ethereum or ZCash or something, you're using GPUs

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

#159

Post by Uke »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #137
NKosmatos wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, when you buy the hardware you should be able to do what you please with it. This applies for something you already own and use. Imagine a new driver, for hardware you already own where you couldn't watch cat videos (extreme example) in 4K but only in 360p :-) On the other hand if you're well informed before buying such a card, that it will have reduced performance for crypto (or whatever) I guess it's ok and…

> I think this is a marketing trick so that both gamers and miners are happy, RTX line for gamers and CMP line for miners, win-win for NVIDIA :-) But they won't magically have twice the amount of chips on hand, will they? So either they make a lot of CMP cards and too little RTX cards, and gamers will still struggle to get one, or they'll make sufficient RTX cards and too few CMP ones and miners have a big incentive…

This could be the win-win-win for all parties, if only the cuda cores on the die have to be known good, it could mean, that the yield of nvidia goes up, gamers get their gpus with graphics, and miners get a card that can mine for a limited amount of time but then can't go into secondary market.

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

#160

Post by paulpan »

cybrexalpha wrote: post #9

Have nvidia lost their minds? It's going to take days for mining operations to reverse-engineer the driver and undo this. So commercial operations won't be affected at all. Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then? Suggest I buy a Quadro for AE support? This will only penalise…

So true. Nvidia can't not know how resourceful cryptominers are - and to what lengths a miner will go to modify the firmware for even a few percentage point improvements. It'll just lead to a never-ending back and forth (will daily drivers become a thing?) until Nvidia decides it's not worth the effort.

This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers. What's interesting is that these "mining-crippling" changes will only apply to the 3060 GPU, not the rest of the RTX 3000 series. If it was a legitimate gesture, then Nvidia would've made it universally applicable.

Post reply on HN