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

blogs.nvidia.com

181–190 of 762 posts

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

#181

Nvidia should partner with Steam. Steam has enough meta-data on user accounts to be able to offer a level of certainty about how accurate and authentic a given account and it's user information is. You could then use a trusted enough Steam account as a one-per-customer method to sell a card to. You wouldn't have to monkey around with hardware freedom and even if a person decides to re-sell it at least it had the chan…

I'm in the market for a card for computer vision stuff, but don't have steam.

Understood but Nvidia is justifying the changes by saying "we’re taking an important step to help ensure GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of gamers."

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency dom…

The long term road map for Ethereum 2 is 100k transactions per second. This is a theoretical maximum and it will likely take years to get there. This defies your assertion that scaling cannot ever be achieved with current crypto approaches.

Okay, so for the foreseeable future: "The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over"

Not really a change in semantics here. It's still the point that crypto promised a LOT of really cool things for fintech that realistically won't materialize for a long time.

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

#183
post #157

I'm a miner (7x3070, 2x3080, 1x3090) and I support this nerf. The reason is because I am also a gamer, and it's always regrettable that cryptocurrency mining has made gaming cards out of reach.

Are you making a profit mining? Or is it more of a “supporting the network” kind of thing?

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

#184
post #5

It's a real shame that companies think that they should be the ones dictating how you use a piece of hardware you bought from them. It's a further shame that they would artificially hinder their hardware for such purposes. I will avoid nvidia in the future as a result of this sort of attitude, and I don't even mine cryptocurrency. I have no dog in this race other than a philosophical one.

It's easy to speak philosophically when you have no dog in the race. It's harder when you need a GPU for other tasks and have to pay the crypto tax.

There is no "crypto tax", just supply and demand. I recently bought a NIB 3090 (secondhand, because nvidia are in denial of reality apparently) for gaming and video production.

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

#185
post #52
post #5

It's a real shame that companies think that they should be the ones dictating how you use a piece of hardware you bought from them. It's a further shame that they would artificially hinder their hardware for such purposes. I will avoid nvidia in the future as a result of this sort of attitude, and I don't even mine cryptocurrency. I have no dog in this race other than a philosophical one.

The real shame is allowing scalpers to run their stock dry and generating this problem.

Scalpers do not alter supply or demand.

What, to you, is the difference between a scalper and a dealer?

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

#186
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" chan…

Maybe there is some hardware enforcement involved? Also, retroactively capping functionality of a sold product seems like a PR and legal nightmare.

The Sony PS3 precedent of removing OtherOS springs to mind regards retroactive restrictions.

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

#188
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. We can only hope that AMD implements a similar slowdown.

Why shouldn't people be allowed to use their GPUs how they want?

Why shouldn't companies be allowed to do product segmentation?

Limiting mining performance on a consumer GPU is no different than limiting certain professional or machine learning specific performance features.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency dom…

The long term road map for Ethereum 2 is 100k transactions per second. This is a theoretical maximum and it will likely take years to get there. This defies your assertion that scaling cannot ever be achieved with current crypto approaches.

100k transactions per section w/ serializability and all of the other things required to satisfy real-world concerns like fraud and regulatory constraints?

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.…

> there's no marginal cost to making another copy

Marginal cost is not the only cost. It's disingenuous to treat it as such. It's also incorrect - making a copy for someone to access is most certainly not free.

And the economics is sound - partitioning markets allows sales at lower prices to many purchasers. There's simply no way around this, no matter how you feel about it.

>That's a pretty clear cut market failure

No, the same economics above apply - partitioning the market lets those less needs obtain product at a lower cost than those with more needs, no matter how the device/software is created.

Market segmentation replaces a single, ham handed consumer and producer surplus with a multi level one, allowing each side to capture more of the surplus for their benefit, leaving less of the summed surplus on the table.

Not every purchaser has the same surplus to trade. By splitting the market some purchasers that would not otherwise buy are now willing and able to do so, and the tighter or possible non-existent margins there are offset by selling to those accepting higher price points, almost always offset by extra capability.

And no matter how you slice it, commodity chips and software are so incredibly cheap compared to the value they provide it's hard to claim these prices are somehow not reasonable. For less than a week's pay I can purchase an incredible set of tools that I can then turn into orders of magnitude more value for me. Pretty much any professional making a living based on computers is in the same position.

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