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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

#571

Post by xtian »

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…

Do you apply the same level of concern to the US military? It produces a lot more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin. I don’t think it produces more benefits for normal people either.

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

#572

Post by jakeinspace »

reducesuffering wrote: post #554
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...

You'd think so, but that's not the case. Electricity is only running me around 7 cents / kWh, so when I say "net" I mean it. Ethereum is up 7x over the last year, and is largely driving the surge in GPU prices - if it weren't currently profitable, nobody would be buying modern GPUs for mining it.

Regardless, even if I were losing money, 100% of the waste heat from my computer is doing actual useful work in heating my room. No electric space heater would be more energy efficient at that, although it would be quieter and put out more heat per unit area.

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

#573

Post by herendin2 »

arsome wrote: post #243

Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on…

Nvidia is effectively incentivizing the cracking of their driver and firmware security signing with millions of dollars. Because a person who cracks it can build a more profitable mining farm

It's a sort of accidental bug bounty and I wonder if Nvidia have really thought this through?

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

#574

Post by reader_mode »

reducesuffering wrote: post #548
Tenoke wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TSM is slammed with chip demand from Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and others. Like, 100% booked for the next year or two. They have been heavily investing in state of the art manufacturing facilities for decades and it's still not enough.

Nvidia is using Samsung for 3xxx series cards

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

#575

Post by remexre »

happynacho wrote: post #543
Const-me wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC My Gigabyte motherboard is doing that. Ain’t too old, has AMD’s X570 chipset.

Well, that's the motherboard, not the videocard. Every motherboard does it.

Yep, that's through the BGRT, which is part of ACPI. I'm not actually sure if a GPU could export one to the BIOS, but I assume not.

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

#576

Post by Der_Einzige »

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…

Yeah the shortages of RTX 3000 series cards are likely actively reducing AI/ML innovations in the short term. I have no idea what to do about these shortages - but it seems to be something that needs more regulation so that crypto miners don't continue to hoard the cards.

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

#577

Post by patmcc »

xtian wrote: post #571
ljm wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you apply the same level of concern to the US military? It produces a lot more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin. I don’t think it produces more benefits for normal people either.

Both the US military and bitcoin can be hugely wasteful, it's not xor.

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

#578

Post by minitoar »

danShumway wrote: post #541
minitoar wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, gold was created by a supernova so you should take that energy into account as well.

This comment is probably sarcasm, but just in case it was meant seriously, I just want to make it clear that expending the energy of another supernova to create a currency would be, overall, a Bad Thing at this point in time. Unless you've got some dyson spheres lying around that you're not telling me about, I'm going to politely request that bitcoin advocates not expend more energy than we have in the entire world j…

Type V civilizations do it for the memes.

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

#579

Post by Der_Einzige »

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.

Sounds like a good opportunity for the US to significantly expand its domestic chap manufacturing industry. I don't care if the lag time is 5 years or more before the first chip rolls off the production lines - because I don't anticipate demand for chips will significantly reduce in the future.

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

#580

Post by TechnoTimeStop »

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…

Someone clearly hasn't figured out what Ethereum is, or Ethereum 2.0 in how proof of stake actually makes most of your weak premise completely evaporate.
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