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

551–560 of 762 posts

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

#551

Post by qqii »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #458
jsheard wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was artificially reduced. It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some heuristic decides that mining is happening. https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu... There's speculation that the limiter might actual…

I'm really curious about how they got the card working without the specific drivers for it. I'm also curious if this "mining detection" is going to kick in "accidentally" on other compute loads. It would be really crappy if the CUDA performance of these cards is bad because they don't want miners using them.

If you watch the Russian source video he seems to somehow install Nividia's drivers selecting 3070.

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

#552

Post by benrbray »

iexplainbtc wrote: post #56
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 environmental impact of "Proof of Work" could have been a problem but the inventors did think about that and realized that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources that would otherwise be untapped. As usual the ethical burden should be on the user of the tool, not the tool itself. In the long run miners who do not use untapped (cheaper) renewables are going to be priced out, it just take…

> As usual the ethical burden should be on the user of the tool, not the tool itself.

I dunno. Suppose Acme, Inc. starts selling a giant red button. When pressed, it means my boss will decide to give me the rest of the day off, no strings attached. There's a little disclaimer in the fine print that warns that whenever the button is pressed, Acme, Inc. will roll a 6-sided die. Whenever a 1 is rolled, a small child in Kenya will be executed.

Individual users of the product can claim that they aren't directly responsible for the externalities, because "I'm not the one performing the executions!" or "my dice roll was a four!".

Or, perhaps there are business users of the product, who are motivated by cost and nothing else. Good luck convincing a company that ethics are more important than its bottom line.

Sometimes users of a product are so detached from its consequences that they're willing to accept them, even if the true result is horrible. We should certainly hold companies accountable for exploiting human nature in this way.

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

#553

Post by fuzxi »

mlyle wrote: post #498
lordlimecat wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you said addresses the core and critical issue that Bitcoin and most blockchain currencies have terrible limitations on transaction-per-second, and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide. And thinking that bitcoin is a terrible idea is not the same as thinking you can predict its market value. When something is as volatile as bitcoin, shorting it is almost as bad as go…

> and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide. As I've said elsewhere: doing one transaction on bitcoin uses approximately the amount of electrical power that an average US household uses in 2 weeks.

I'm not buying that for a second, unless that calculation includes the power it took to mine the coin in the first place (which is not consumed by the transaction any more than cash changing hands consumes cloth and ink).

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

#554

Post by reducesuffering »

jakeinspace wrote: post #433

I've been helping keep my bedroom warm each night this week by mining ethereum on my RTX 2070 - made about $6 net so far. The fact that I'm benefiting from the waste heat literally helps me sleep at night.

You're probably spending much more on the electricity used than the $ from ETH. You're probably better off buying a real heater...

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

#555

Post by qqii »

hn8788 wrote: post #71
notum wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or. Uhm. Use older drivers? I bet these are bios changes though.

The RTX 3060 hasn't released yet, so if the cards ship with this limitation, there aren't any old drivers to use.

I don't speak Russian but this video suggests otherwise: https://youtu.be/282Ozbp-Uv8?t=262

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

#557

Post by qqii »

vlovich123 wrote: post #196
mindcandy wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

Looking up (admittedly expensive) ASICs on Amazon shows ASICs that outperform MH/s/watt on Etherium by 2x vs the best nVidia card announced.

I suspect they're listing maximum power draw and not mining power draw like their other cards, otherwise they'll also be outer performed by their normal cards if properly optimised.

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

#558

Post by ineedasername »

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…

Besides, a Syrian refugees who can manage to get their liquid assets into a digital store like bitcoin could probably alsoamage to get them into a commodities account and buy gold. Bitcoin isn't the only way, or even most convenient way, of moving assets across borders.

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

#559

Post by charcircuit »

beervirus wrote: post #390

I didn’t realize people still mined on gpu anymore, thought everything was asic.

Some cryptocurrencies use ASIC resistant algorithms for PoW. This helps decentralize the miners. Since a lot of people and gamers already have GPUs they can get right into mining without having to order any custom hardware.

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

#560

Post by ineedasername »

tikwidd wrote: post #414
MereInterest wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's putting it in the best possible light. Mining gold leaves the world with physical blocks of gold, which has no continuous upkeep cost. "Mining" cryptocurrency leaves the world with an asset that requires continual upkeep (further "mining") in order to maintain that asset. Any significant drop in the network's hashrate opens it up to attacks. The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, proportiona…

But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining. If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities). In other words, if you just mine a physical gold block, you don't really have an asset without the state's (or your own) continual upkeep that keeps it protected from attacks.

Upkeep of gold doesn't scale at the same rate as Bitcoin. If we suddenly had 1000 tons more gold, we could put it in existing vaults and very little increased cost.
Post reply on HN