241–250 of 818 posts
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"In a gold rush - sell shovels."
Yeah, but don't sell crippled shovels.
Can't drive people to the mining cards they've released if you have everyone using the consumer hardware. As someone who really likes the performance and ecosystem around NVIDIA cards this makes me happy, because I'll probably be able to own one sometime before the heat death of the universe if trends like this continue. But, "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers," Is a load of crock. They have a new minin…
It really isn't a load of crock. For whatever reason NVIDIA has a real interest in making gamers happy. You hear this as being a serious motivation for them even from employees not on the record. The most cynical take on it would be that they want to do this for long term growth. Which if so, is fine. An example of capitalism working.
Nvidia fears that all those customers will vanish over night.
I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?
Lots of people enter the pyramid because they have seen early investors benefit greatly and they want to benefit too. It works very well until people start getting out of the pyramid(selling) and the same thing happens in inverse, people want to recover the money they invested and price plummets.
There are two main reasons a big company like Nvidia can not mine for themselves:
1. Nobody will enter the pyramid in the first place just for enriching Nvidia. People enter a pyramid because they have seen their neighbor making money "out of nothing" and they get the Gold Rush themselves. Like a virus the Rush is contagious by people between them.
2. When prices go up everything is happiness and good feelings. When prices go down the people that have lost their savings will get mad at the company that benefited from their own ignorance or greed.
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It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle. Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free to run at their max capability, not deliberat…
It's been a shift I've noticed over the last ~15(?) years of browsing these and similar forums - as they become more well-known and frequented by the general public, the opinions start to lose nuance and aren't as tightly coupled to the principles from which the forum was borne. Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was planning a massiv…
Principles are borne of small communities because small communities can afford to be principles.
Before software ate the world, the impact that damaging actors had was much more limited. A few computers would get a few viruses here and there but that was it.
We live a world where computers have been integrated into the fabric of society, and where system risks do not have easy, principled answers.
And if principles don't adapt and negotiate with reality, its defenders will just be isolated from the rest of society which can't afford to lose a lot of other things, which include other, possibly more important, principles.
What changed with regards to GDPR was that 15 years ago there weren't Facebooks, Amazons, and other megacorps that had the personal data of 30% of the world's population available for their use. Tech monopolies encroached different product areas.
What changed in 15 years is that we grew up, we acquired power, we became more integrated into society and as such the risk profiles change. You either do, or you become irrelevant like many of the Free Software activists who were a vanguard back then and whose opinion nowadays matters little.
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> refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism I'm not advocating for you not listen to criticism aimed towards your principle. But if your principle gets put to the test and you abandon it, it's no longer something you fundamentally agree on, it was some "light belief" that you had.
This is nonsense. Principles should adapt to the context they're applied in. In principle I'm against big government intervention into our personal lives, but you bet your ass I'm in favour of lockdowns when thousands of lives are at stake. I'm not going to let thousands of my compatriots die out of principle.
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> I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle. I cannot think of any principle that would cause me to object to this. Blind fealty to general purpose computing here conflicts with the very real world impact on non-crypto consumers. If we're being utilitarian, it seems to me that it would be obvious that this is a good move.
I mean, why are non-crypto consumers better than crypto ones from a utilitarian POV? (I play video games and dislike crypto - I'm just asking). I suppose that people do things other than gaming with 3080s, because I would be hard pressed to make a convincing argument that gaming is somehow so much more valuable of a hobby than mining crypto that it's worth the hit to general purpose computing to specifically ban cryp…
They frankly contribute to society in a way that speculators never will.
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I'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I think almost every industry. What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the long run nvidia ecosys…
I suppose the "long term customers" for these GPUs are gamers, right? Don't they also come and go? I don't particularly follow this as I'm not really into games, but it seems to me that AMD has had quite an impressive growth recently. Does that mainly come from people new to the market? I'm actually a "new to the market" buyer, and I bought an AMD mostly because I'm mainly a Linux user and didn't want to take any cha…
Basically, for machine learning, AMD is nowhere - the ecosystem is on nvidia (provided you can buy their stuff). If they can't deliver, then whatever crazy thing AMD is trying in this space (been a few tries) may take hold more. Getting developers access to nvidia becomes key then - games / machine learning tooling etc all then gravitates that way.
For gaming you do end up with some options. Nvidia / AMD / Intel. Wide range here, but been pretty steady need for graphics including top end and lower end options. The OEM's are also customers in this space, everyone going to remote work with virtualized workloads as well if they need a graphics option there and more.
Yes, they are segmenting, but in short run they are giving up $ they would get by selling all stuff with full Eth enabled and perhaps auctioning cards. They'd make a ton in short run, but a few user bases would abandon them. It really is not going to be good for their business if they have another 6 months of supply issues.
I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?
They're right where they want to be.
I find the prospect of being able to add more overhead and potential bugs into a product to remove a niche functionality in a move that reeks of PR marketing driven solution, too be of bad taste. Whilst the overhead will be so small I doubt it will be measurable, it still is not zero and only adds the possibility that some workloads of non crypto currency origins fall foul of this in ways that may not be easy to disc…
I'm not sure its niche. ETH is the 2nd most popular crypto with a $394,657,267,540 market cap at $3,403.15 per as of the timestamp.
And it's most likely a really short lived niche
I mean, the cards are selling at 3-4x MSRP right now. Won’t halving the hash rate just cause the price of the cards to drop to 1.5-2x MSRP and miners just buy twice as many? Possibly good for NVDIA I guess (selling twice the units assuming the can make enough), but I don’t see this helping gamers get cards in hands.
I think it's less about the upfront cost and more about hashes per kilowatt-hour.