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

blogs.nvidia.com

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

#301

Post by IshKebab »

sabalaba wrote: post #126
Thaxll wrote: 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 / (365 24 60 60) sec to gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW…

So Bitcoin - which almost nobody uses - consumes a similar amount of power to feeding, heating and powering every person in the US?

Ok.

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

#302

Post by bean5 »

cloudhead wrote: post #288
bob1029 wrote: post #114

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…

I'm not sure why you would compare Visa with Bitcoin, unless you had no idea what you were talking about.. Visa does not enable one to transact without the rest of the banking system. It's useless on its own. Really pointless point of reference.

apples = oranges

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

#303

Post by elinear »

ljm wrote: post #269
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…

The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…

Modern day California, and by extension Silicon Valley, would not look the way it is today without the California Gold Rush [1], as horrible as its externalities were.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush#Longer-te...

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

#304

Post by dmitrygr » 

  > RTX 3060 software drivers are
  > designed to detect specific
  > attributes of the Ethereum
  > cryptocurrency mining algorithm,
  > and limit the hash rate, or
  > cryptocurrency mining
  > efficiency, by around 50
  > percent.
I have no interest in crypto, but hacking around this restriction sounds fun. I think announcing this publicly was a mistake. There are a lot of people who'l take this as a challenge, especially if these cards are easier to purchase. I expect hacked drivers in weeks, if not days.

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

#305

Post by disiplus »

golover721 wrote: post #251

I wonder how much of this is Nvidia getting pressure from the Gaming industry to do something about it. As far as Nvidia is concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so it is a gold rush for them. The gaming industry I am sure is getting concerned that for their new AAA titles already under development which require these high end GPUs, their customers won’t be able to get ahold of them. Or at lea…

well, people will buy a console (i have a ps5) nvidia does not want that.

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

#307

Post by Tenoke »

TomVDB wrote: post #270
Klwohu wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building more fabs is the only sustainable solution. Demand is higher than supply, and miners will just use older drivers or figure out a workaround pretty quickly, unless the new mining cards are substantially cheaper yet just as fast as the "gaming" GPUs.

Building more fabs is the general solution to the demand in silicon. And that's happening. But in the context of "I'd rather they have scaled up the demand", where "they' is Nvidia (or almost any other fabless semiconductor company), it's not a solution because it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19.

>it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19.

This has been happening for half a decade, it is not remotely a COVID issue. And no, they can't build their own fabs but they can certainly invest (either directly or indirectly by securing larger orders at a higher price even more years in advance) all the premium so there's at more fabs at an earlier time.

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

#308

Post by Tenoke »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #245
Tenoke wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line. I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations t…

You do realize there is a global chip shortage right now? It’s not as easy as clicking a button in ec2 to suddenly make more gpus.

This has been going on for half a decade. Yes, it's not as easy as ec2 but it's not a problem that money can't help with solving faster.

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

#309

Post by paulmd »

golover721 wrote: post #251

I wonder how much of this is Nvidia getting pressure from the Gaming industry to do something about it. As far as Nvidia is concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so it is a gold rush for them. The gaming industry I am sure is getting concerned that for their new AAA titles already under development which require these high end GPUs, their customers won’t be able to get ahold of them. Or at lea…

> As far as Nvidia is concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so it is a gold rush for them.

It actually is not, because those cards sold to miners don't just magically vanish, when crypto prices finally fall the miners will flood the market and the prices for new cards will have to be depressed as a result.

Mining sales should largely be thought of as a "pull-forward", they represent revenue that you're not going to make in some future quarter when everyone is buying used miner cards for 40% under MSRP. And NVIDIA themselves don't crank the chip price for OEMs (all of that was locked in a year ago) so they aren't making more money in the short term to make up for it.

That is specifically what NVIDIA is trying to address here by banning mining on gaming cards and creating mining-specific cards that can't be gamed on. Now cards that are sold for mining can't flood back and hit their future revenue in the gaming market.

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

#310

Post by Tenoke »

PixelOfDeath wrote: post #235
Tenoke wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason. My argument is they should and could have scaled up the production rather than just shuffling around which group they hurt or help at the expense of which other (be it miners, ML folks or gamers). This isn't the 'right thing', it just helps the group you prefer on this round.

Ask AMD why scaling up to mining demand is a bad idea. A sudden implosion of demand combined with a flooding of the used GPU marked. Better not plan on bringing out any new GPU architectures when your warehouses are still full of the previous generation.

Except with NVIDIA there's already extra demand if they need it - they can allow GeForce into data centers which are currently artificially disallowed.
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