Right, because GPU's are expensive and scarce because of crypto, and all other inflation, demand and supply chain issues are a completely unrelated topic that just happens to be coinciding... /s
Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
121–130 of 352 posts
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#122Yes.
If you look at it more abstractly and ask if high demand and limited supply are driving up prices, it sounds like a dumb question.
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin is the biggest crypto currency and uses proof of work. As mentioned in the conclusion, ASICs use the same resources as GPUs. This can have an effect on GPU prices. Additionally bitcoin is still the "gold standard" and most crypto currencies follow the price development of bitcoin.
Do you think Bitmain is winning bids for fab capacity against Nvidia/AMD? I guess their newest miner is slated to be on 5nm...
They can probably pay higher prices when mining rewards are high.
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#124One of the craziest videos I saw last year was a mob of people rushing a Micro Center to get their hands on a 3080 TI: https://youtu.be/UNcx9JdC9VM?t=239
We've seen same thing happening with toilet paper.
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you mention anything about the cloud, deep learning training on GPUs and the impact on the environment that has and the increasing costs of training and fine tuning your neural net, they won't care at all, they will still do it after all these years. There is a recent trend to discuss environmental impacts of training deep learning models in papers. See e.g. Latent Diffusion Models (Heidelberg), RETRO (Deepmind)…
Except that I already agreed with the article before you commented [0], so it isn't Whataboutism. (You clearly knew due to your own reply to my comment). [1] Somehow, you thought I brought up the subject, or didn't I just simply agree with the parent comment too? Seems like you rushed to comment towards the wrong person. > ...than cryptocurrencies which are a highly speculative. How can a regulated stablecoin like US…
> Except that I already agreed with the article before you commented [0], so it isn't Whataboutism.
Apologies but I really had a tough time parsing the last sentence in your initial comment for some reason. I see now that you agreed with the article. I'll concede that you were not technically using that strategy in its purest form. You were, however, deflecting to another issue.
> How can a regulated stablecoin like USDP or USDC, or even CBDCs sitting on a cryptocurrency technology like XRPL or the Stellar Network etc. be 'highly speculative'?
I said "cryptocurrencies" to refer to cryptocurrency broadly (so not just stablecoins). I had hoped that was obvious, apologies.
Machine learning has offered tangible benefits for natural language processing (GPT), semantic search (CLIP/faiss indices), digital art (GLIDE/DALL-E) and protein folding (AlphaFold).
Cryptocurrencies certainly promise to solve a lot of very severe issues in the world such as banking for the unbanked but it's less obvious when it accomplishes these goals. Could you list some tangible benefits that have been accomplished already in the crypto scene?
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#126I work in deep learning and had to camp out in front of a best buy to get my hands on some 3090s. A good portion of the people in line with me were crypto miners who were waiting to get more GPUs to add to their collection because they're making money on each one and as long as it's profitable it makes perfect sense for them to buy up more.
I was told that the Nvidia Tesla cards are easier to buy.
It still doesn’t help that the Ethereum hashrate limiter is not imposed on the highest-end card (it’s FHR not LHR). The 3090 (aka 30-series Titan cards) are still really hard to find. The the 24GB of double-sided GDDR6x gets super hot though and all implementations of the card did not take that into account.
The 3080ti’s are easier to find as they’re LHR and price per hashrate ratio isn’t good. What I mean by easier is that bots have a tendency of going after cards with price/ratio.
It doesn’t help either that DDR5 RAM is also highly scalped. PC memory is in direct competition to GPU memory and vice versa.
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#127And what's to blame for Bitcoin's high price? A broken fiat monetary system. I can't believe some people still think that Bitcoin is more speculative than major tech stocks. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Uber, Snapchat... All propped up by money printing. I think if we ran a simulation using hard (non-fiat) money, the net losses of these big tech companies would be even more significant than Bitcoin's losses on electric…
Your answer does not conform to the common model. Let's make it harder to read instead of having a frank discussion.
My problem with it is not the content, it's the totalizing, evangelical approach. In tone it's about a half-step from the goggle-eyed people who want to talk about "international bankers" and how they control everything. I have never had a good conversation with anybody who starts out like that, because they are in the grip of a strongly self-reinforcing worldview.
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#128Right, because GPU's are expensive and scarce because of crypto, and all other inflation, demand and supply chain issues are a completely unrelated topic that just happens to be coinciding... /s
I tried to correct for overall price development. The correlation still persists.
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#129Are you trying to tell me that the price for a thing is affected by its supply and demand? The horror!
Your comment comes from a place of assuming the answer to the question, which is kind of twofold.
Does the profit from proof-of-work mining increase the acceptable GPU price for miners AND is there enough demand from these miners for GPUs due to the profit equation to significantly inflate those prices?
If you assume yes, you get yes as the answer without proving anything.
Re: Are cryptocurrencies to blame for high GPU prices?
#130Right, because GPU's are expensive and scarce because of crypto, and all other inflation, demand and supply chain issues are a completely unrelated topic that just happens to be coinciding... /s
The GPU pricing and availability has been a problem well before the current environment. Well before COVID even.