Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says • Hacker News Board

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#51

Post by zozbot234 » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:08 PM UTC

mrfinn wrote: post #28

World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.

PoW cryptocurrencies are still way more energy- and carbon-efficient than armored vans/trucks carrying valuables around, which is the other accepted method of decentralized, trustless value transfer. We shouldn't call for stuff to be "banned" that we can't even be bothered to understand properly.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#52

Post by xvector » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #38

beachy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a carbon tax and solve the problem at source.

any infrastructure dedicated to the mining of crypto is opportunity cost. Even if you use renewables, that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off. This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand. It's one of the reasons why we have globally barely made a dent when it comes to the increase of renewables a…

> that energy could instead replace traditional energy sources which could be turned off.

This is not true. Often, renewables aren't available to some locations but abundantly available in others. Other times, some people buy electricity from renewable providers and others don't.

With 50-75% of Bitcoin mining being renewable, one thing is clear - it's helped the adoption of renewables and made them cheaper.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#53

Post by gjs278 » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

mrfinn wrote: post #28

World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.

No post body was provided.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#54

Post by gjs278 » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #49

xvector wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for all my energy to be renewable. I don't see why my crypto mining needs to be banned. In fact, estimates peg Bitcoin's use of renewable energy to be between 50-75%. This is a fact lost on HN, which hates crypto at all costs.

That's not how this works. Even if you pay your supplier to buy only renewable energy on the open market, if your house is supplied by a coal power plant then your mining rig is powered by coal, regardless who you're paying for your electricity. Yes it feels good to pay for renewable electricity but ultimately that's not how it works. And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic…

No post body was provided.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#55

Post by YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #48

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RX 6500 XT is a worse card than the RX480 released 5 years ago https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg .

Well is it cheaper than a 5 year old rx480?

It's the same MSRP.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#56

Post by torginus » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

jagger27 wrote: post #9

saulrh wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the entry-level card can run its clock 30% faster than the same line's top-end offering supports the story pretty solidly, IMO. Not supporting 8 GB of vram can't have given them enough breathing room to casually run the clock that fast, so this has to have been decided way up front. Like the article says, it remains to be seen whether this will also make the card bad at gaming, but I think that AMD at l…

Isn't it a power budget and heat dissipation thing? For example the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 GPUs have pretty similar architectures, but the PS5 has fewer compute units at a higher frequency. Surely Microsoft would have loved to clock theirs as high as Sony. PS5: 10.28 Teraflops, 36 Compute Units running at 2.23GHz (variable frequency) XSX: 12.11 Teraflops, 52 Compute Units running at 1.825GHz (fixed)

I love how Mark Cerny managed to spin Sony having to raise the clock frequency of the PS5 GPU to compete with a the XSX's TFlop specs as an advantage. GPUs tend to be memory-bandwidth bound - if you play around with raising the clock frequency by 10% from stock on most GPUs, you won't get 10% more fps, likewise if you drop the frequency by 10%, you won't lose 10% fps.

But with the power consumption scaling with the square of the frequency, the difference in power draw can be absolutely significant. That's the reason many people (me among them) chose to underclock their 5700XTs

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#57

Post by YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #47

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RX 6500 XT is a worse card than the RX480 released 5 years ago https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg .

Do you have a more reliable source than a random Reddit image assemblage?

You can check it yourself on AMDs website.

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#58

Post by Tenoke » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:11 PM UTC

redisman wrote: post #19

My 3070 has a “low hashrate“ sticker on it. I’m sure it’s a fairly trivial firmware flag but I haven’t tried mining on it

I have a 3070 and it mines Ethereum pretty efficiently (not that I currently mine with it).

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#59

Post by vmception » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #39

vmception wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum price crashing is what let you buy it. You might thinking the wrong decade but then the 1080ti didn't exist, and neither did Ethereum.

Looks like I bought it in June of 2018, and BTC was ~$6k, which was $7k down from its previous high in December of 2017. It would drop another $3k by January of 2019. At least, that's what the first graph I found said.

Nobody has used GPUs for mining bitcoin in nearly 10 years, my point was telling you what they were using them for

Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says

#60

Post by xvector » Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #49

xvector wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for all my energy to be renewable. I don't see why my crypto mining needs to be banned. In fact, estimates peg Bitcoin's use of renewable energy to be between 50-75%. This is a fact lost on HN, which hates crypto at all costs.

That's not how this works. Even if you pay your supplier to buy only renewable energy on the open market, if your house is supplied by a coal power plant then your mining rig is powered by coal, regardless who you're paying for your electricity. Yes it feels good to pay for renewable electricity but ultimately that's not how it works. And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic…

> then your mining rig is powered by coal,

And my emissions are offset for the fee that I pay.

Carbon credits, more planted trees, whatever. My net impact is likely lower than anyone that doesn't pay for renewables, even with mining.

> And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it

For PoW, it's the purest form of currency - the value of energy itself.

For other currencies, it's no different than precious metals.

Trust HN to call decentralized technologies enabling pseudonymity/anonymity scams on one hand while advocating for decentralized technologies enabling pseudonymity/anonymity on the other hand.

Also, from my perspective, you should stop eating meat. Your eating of meat provides you nothing but selfish pleasure while causing a ton of carbon emissions - and actual tangible suffering on scales never before seen on this planet. The magnitude of suffering caused is tens billions of times worse than crypto. Let's ban meat first.