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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

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Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#411

Post by babypuncher »

neolog wrote: post #392
babypuncher wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without price discrimination, everyday users end up paying more for a given product while for-profit entities would pay less. When a company releases a product, they price it according to how much profit they want to make per unit sold. Market segmentation allows them to sell their product at a lower margin to lower income users and shift much of that profit burden to corporate customers who can easily afford it. Whe…

Why does Nvidia even want to sell to low-priced buyers, if they are saturating their manufacturing capacity with the high-priced buyers alone?

Because those price-sensitive buyers (PC gamers) are far more likely to be loyal customers down the road than crypto miners, who will immediately stop buying GPUs as soon as mining stops being profitable again.

Nvidia wants to give PC gamers a reason to stay on "Team Green" by making it easier for them to get a card at a reasonable price during this perfect storm of limited silicon availability and insane crypto mining demand.

I actually think that this particular move is more about rate limiting purchases intended for crypto mining than it is about putting miners in a different market segment.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#412

Post by jvol83 »

mrb wrote: post #320
Justsignedup wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on: none of it is malicious. its just the market stabalization problem a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price b) let's charge miners 3x, because they willing to pay 3x, and destroy the scalping market which is VERY anti everything. Scalpers hurt literally everyone. c) let's not de-stabalize nvidia's income again when eth drops in value. They don't want to be beholden to a coin's gamble either. Basi…

c) is nonsense. There are no downsides to a temporary boost in Nvidia's profits, even if it means profits eventually falling back to normal levels when ETH drops in value. Also, LHR (gaming) GPUs and CMP (mining) GPUs share the exact same supply chain and components. When/if crypto demand suddenly drops, Nvidia will still have to deal with the oversupply of components. Having segmented the market between LHR and CMP…

According to Tom's hardware analysis the CMP gpus are leftover Turing architecture that would otherwise have gone to the now less desirable GTX 1660 Ti, or 2080 Ti.

And when they are finally using the new Ampere silicon, it's likely those chips that did not pass QA for being made into a RTX 3080.

So they are getting rid of overstock/dead stock already.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#413

Post by wavefunction »

wbraun wrote: post #2

Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to…

I don't care. I have a 3080 I paid a pretty penny for so that I could play some games in high resolution and do personal machine learning projects. Between the cryto miners and scalpers I don't care what happens to those folks.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#414

Post by karaterobot »

_vertigo wrote: post #145
wbraun wrote: post #2

Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to…

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…

I think you're reading too much into people's reactions. I think this is a good move for Nvidia in the medium and long run. Gaming is the stated purpose of these cards; hashing is an unexpected and temporary phenomenon for them. Ethereum is moving away from PoW, and more regulation is undoubtedly coming to crypto, with its environmental cost likely a compelling bullet point. Why wouldn't they try to get back to their core business of selling GPUs to gamers?

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#415

Post by ajmurmann »

barrkel wrote: post #303
wbraun wrote: post #2

Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to…

It's market segmentation, and it's not a new strategy. The market is bimodal. There's the crypto miners and there's the gamers. Right now, gamers are getting starved out and middlemen are pocketing the surplus selling gaming cards to crypto miners. Nvidia want to capture more of that surplus for themselves, while also taking money from the gamers. Satisfy both markets with different products at different prices, pric…

Given there is just more demand than supply. With this model they are still sitting customers who are willing to pay less for the same good. If there wasn't such a tight supply constraint right now, this strategy would make 100% sense to me. Right now they should just auction the cards off from their website. Keep all the margin and get the cards to the buyer for whom the goods are worth the most

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#416

Post by 0x_rs »

SXX wrote: post #267

It's will be funny to see how HN crowd that support Nvidia here will react when Nvidia going to cripple ML features for the sake of market segmentation.

There's precedent with crippled FP16 performance, so it would not be surprising to see such things in the future to attain market segmentation from consumer cards.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#417

Post by ajmurmann »

slownews45 wrote: post #103
wbraun wrote: post #2

Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to…

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…

> Crypto folks come and go Do they more than gamers? Complaints about miners buying all the graphics cards have been going on for years now

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#418

Post by eropple »

dijit wrote: post #389
eropple wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be just as easier, and probably more truthfully, read as "miners can no longer make the used market a minefield by selling overtaxed consumer cards without disclosing their provenance." Because, yeah, having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market. Great! Cryptocurrencies are not inherently good or valuable and cryptocurrency people aren't special and their world-burning habits an…

> Because, yeah, having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market. This is mostly a myth, miners cards are usually undervolted, and only a subset of the card is used. If your CPU only used it's floating point unit then it wouldn't be as intense as if you were using the whole thing. The only potential issue is thermal damage, but that's hard to place and has to be close to, or in excess of 90…

It's not a myth. These things get racked in stacks of GPUs in what may or may not be actually-cooled data centers. Undervolted or not, when you couple that with constant load you're stressing devices manufactured to consumer specs.

The excusemaking is pernicious.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#420

Post by Franciscouzo »

valuearb wrote: post #156
HappySweeney wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).

Serious miners are buying Antminers, not video cards.

Antminers are for mining Bitcoin, GPUs are mostly used for Ethereum.
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