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

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

#701

Post by TomVDB »

the-enterprise wrote: post #683
TomVDB wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When GPUs are know to use signed firmware, when open source coders need to ask for signed firmware to make even a minimal feature open source GPU driver work, and when there’s no evidence at all that high performance custom made mining-only drivers exist, then that seems very far fetched to me.

Not so much a new driver, but here is an example of drivers being patched for mining. https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch

Indeed. Not a new driver at all.

What this tells me is that they just didn’t care enough to lock this down hard.

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

#702

Post by BobbyJo »

autokad wrote: post #467
BobbyJo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to look at the planet as a set of resources. Resources grow and shrink, but are definite and limited in any given moment all the same. Generally, spending them on less productive tasks is bad. It's cool they are using solar power vs burning gas/coal, but it doesn't change the fact that those same resources would benefit the planet much more if used in a different capacity. If a billionaire hoarded manufactur…

you should try to avoid zero sum thinking, it only leads bad things and is almost always incorrect.

Zero sum is the reason markets exist. Are you saying markets are bad?

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

#703

Post by [deleted] »

Ciantic wrote: post #121
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. Unfortunately it happens all the time. For instance Nvidia had Quadro lineup, with nicer multi-display settings that to my knowledge was always just driver thing. They never ported those to GeForce line up, and people suffered with displays that wake up too late and all windows were messed up when you waked up your computer. It ha…

[deleted]

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

#704

Post by wtallis »

TomVDB wrote: post #224
wtallis wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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. What you're saying is that due to some irrelevant production related factor, it's totally fine for a software company to price their product based on what the market is willing to pay, but as soon as a pie…

> What you're saying is that due to some irrelevant production related factor, it's totally fine for a software company to price their product based on what the market is willing to pay,

I didn't say it's fine. It's off-topic, because it's a different issue with fundamentally different economic forces at play.

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

#705

Post by Forbo »

chaosharmonic wrote: post #371
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…

> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation I've actually been wondering about this -- are there any major ones that meaningfully provide other kinds of value for all of the computational resources they're using? My understanding of blockchain as a concept is pretty surface-level, so maybe I'm just missing s…

It exists, it's called GridCoin. It's a proof of stake chain that disburses coins based on work units completed on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).

There's a few others that take different approaches like Golem Network Token, Nym, Oxen, etc.

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

#706

Post by impassionedrule »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #494
Medicineguy wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For completeness sake: The BTC network is, by design, setting the difficulty of mining a new block so that its 10 min on avg. Currently there fitting ~2200 transactions in one block [0]. That makes 3.6667 transactions per second. BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically. So you were actually quite generous with 10 transactions per second... [0] "Blockchain Charts" https://www.blockchain.com/charts…

> BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically Which was proposed, and shot down by core Bitcoiners. They aggressively do not want to increase the transaction limit. Miners want transactions to be expensive, because that's where they'll get their money when the mining reward falls again. It's mind boggling that people will complain about banks conspiring to charge them hypothetical fees, then rush to…

They don't want an increase in block size because it makes the network less decentralized. Not "get their money from mining rewards"

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

#707

Post by csa »

Karunamon wrote: post #700
csa wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping someone would give this answer. OK... so what exactly is "ownership"? A buddy of mine mined ~160 BTC (currently about USD $8.1m) back when it was fairly worthless. He left it on a hard drive on one of his many machines. BTC became worth something. He look for said machine and HD. Couldn't find it. That BTC is effectively gone forever. So... who owns it? There are a not small amount of stories like the on…

How is the thrust of this story any different from someone losing paper cash? How many millions/billions have been lost from physical currency becoming inaccessible?

The issue at hand is the potential value of “distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority”.

My point is that most people seem to prefer having a central trusted authority, specifically for custodianship.

That’s why most people put money that is significant to them somewhere in the banking system rather than a shoebox or a tin can somewhere. They want that money to be be traceable, accessible, and recoverable.

There are exceptions, of course, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, IMO.

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

#708

Post by derivagral »

jki275 wrote: post #466
DennisP wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing the miners can do to stop the migration, any more than they can stop you from making your own fork of Ethereum and convincing your friends to run it. The miners can keep running the legacy version, and try to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given the massive community support for PoS, they're not likely to be very successful.

You’re confused. They claim they are going to fork ETH to make a POS fork of it. Now the people claiming this are going to want you to believe that’s the “real” eth- but the miners may not agree. They have no incentive to do so. And yes, they can absolutely keep running the real chain and let the chips fall where they may. Given that course of action benefits them, and the other benefits Vitalik and his whale friends…

As a random user of ETH: I'm going to go to the PoS fork because of the (implied) fee difference. ~$50 for a wire is going to kill the chain (imho), and I don't see miners incentivized to handle that.

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

#709

Post by jki275 »

cbzbc wrote: post #694
jki275 wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that may be true. But none of it invalidates my initial statement. You're arguing with a discussion that didn't happen.

The wider discussion (and this particular thread) was on the environmental cost caused by bitcoin.

And I gave you some input on a specific portion of that.

You then proceeded to excoriate me for not addressing everything in every discussion that has ever happened in your mind about bitcoin.

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

#710

Post by neurostimulant »

Const-me wrote: post #568
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This will only penalise average users. How? Currently, average users can't get their hands on any of these cards because they're being bought in bulk by crypto miners. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, the market will be flooded with cards that have been run 24/7 for months or years, which isn't a recipe for a good experience. The average user can only benefit from getting access to these cards again. nVidia…

> They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads. They can only test against pre-existing software. If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included. In one of my projects I'm using GPGPUs for complicated optimizations in CAM/CAE. I don't use any libraries/frameworks. From nVidia's point of views, my compute shaders are extremely uncommon wor…

> If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included.

I'm not too worried about that. Nvidia has track record of releasing driver updates to address issues in end-user applications. If a legitimate application got accidentally flagged, people will report it and nvidia will whitelist them.

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