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

arstechnica.com

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

#111

Post by kmkemp »

kennywinker wrote: post #63
zozbot234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes, I’ll never forget when I purchased my house and the armored truck delivered my money to the buyer. /s Most transactions don’t need a decentralized trust-less value transfer. But bitcoin is not only attempting to displace the small sliver of transactions that DO need trustless/decentralized

I put a 20% downpayment on my house and it involved a wire transfer that was scheduled for days in the future that required my physical presence at a centralized authority (bank). With Bitcoin, that process takes less than an hour, with very little "fee", and doesn't involve any of the "trust", which was represented in my example by time delays, scheduling, and traveling.

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

#112

Post by 300bps »

Tenoke wrote: post #45
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.

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing y…

This comes up every single time banning cryptocurrency for wasting electricity comes up. Using a clothes drying machine and just about anything else that you can think of that uses electricity is fundamentally different than PoW cryptocurrency.

If I want to use a machine to dry my clothes, I pay for that electricity. This puts a limit on the amount of electricity I can consume to do it.

Cryptocurrency is different. The more electricity you burn, the more money you make. I know this first hand - the computer I'm typing this on is running gminer to mine ETH on flexpool.io with my RTX 3070 card. I've mined $2,800 of ETH in the past 10 months.

Something that most people don't understand is that there is a finite amount of ETH that can be mined per day. Hashrate determines the size of the slice of that pie you get. Therefore the incentive is to consume infinite electricity! Of course miners can't do that because mining gear (i.e. GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, whatever) is hard to purchase and electricity isn't infinite.

But that doesn't stop miners from trying. I know people that do anything they can to acquire GPUs - they have bots combing the Internet, they buy whole systems that have GPUs, rip out the GPU and sell the system, they've signed up for every GPU manufacturer's wait list, they stalk Microcenter, whatever they can do. They seek out areas with cheap or even subsidized electricity and latch onto it like a parasite. It is nothing like anything else you spoke of.

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

#113

Post by dragontamer »

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #107
dragontamer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMD basically released this card 3 times now but this time they scrubbed the whole encoding feature set. Do you not see the difference between GCN, RDNA, and RDNA 2? At a minimum, this RDNA 2 6500 XT has raytracing cores that the two previous versions do not have. I'd assume that most video gamers care more about the raytracing feature (especially as more and more games are using it) than H265 encoding. Remember: R…

Are you suggesting that you could use Raytracing at all in modern games on a low end card like the RX 6500 XT? If you would use it you would lose the marginal performance increase of the updated architecture. Also content creation is a big point for younger generation if it is livestreaming, recording clips or general gameplay. This will both not be doable with this card if you don't have a good cpu. There is no disc…

> Are you suggesting that you could use Raytracing at all in modern games on a low end card like the RX 6500 XT?

Yes?

Minecraft Raytracing and Quake Raytracing are rather low-specs and probably would run on an RX 6500 XT. You might have to drop down to 720p but it probably would run.

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

#114

Post by randomhodler84 »

cedilla wrote: post #94
randomhodler84 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning = Authoritarian Madness. Bans are never the answer unless you are a fascist. This is an attack on general purpose computing. You cannot tell people what they can and can’t do with their machines. You can try, but the smart ones will tell you to go f yourself. Deal with the supply side costs, and let people do whatever math they like.

Poisoning the water supply to increase the margin on bottled water is a valid business plan. Banning that is a good answer, and neither authoritarian nor fascist.

Supply again. Supply!!

The analogy would be you telling people they have to drink that water a certain way and banned from drinking it the way they want. That’s fascism.

Everybody that wants to ban PoW is an authoritarian fascist. Might be an eco fascist, might be a boot licking state loving fascist… still a fascist.

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

#115

Post by tick_tock_tick »

ls15 wrote: post #81
gambiting wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it. Is it worse than, let's say, Christmas in this regard?

Yes

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

#116

Post by waffle_maniac »

gmac wrote: post #104
waffle_maniac wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine washing too.

Ha ha. But clothes dry themselves. Clothes do not wash themselves.

You would be amazed what can be accomplished when you roll up your sleeves.

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

#117

Post by jrockway »

endisneigh wrote: post #96
Tenoke wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing y…

There are plenty of other wasteful activities that should be limited as well. Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use. What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less energy. And so forth. For every conceivable use case…

> Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York?

I dry my clothes on a line in the winter in New York. It's below zero outside, but like 80 degrees and 0% humidity inside my apartment. Clothes dry fast. (And the space was already being heated, because I live in it, and it's against the law for the landlord to allow the temperature to go below 55 degrees, and they are paranoid, so it's more like 80-90 all winter.)

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

#118

Post by waffle_maniac »

javagram wrote: post #109
waffle_maniac wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine washing too.

Machine washing is a significant labor and time saver. People are usually opposed to line drying clothes because of aesthetics and feeling like it makes their neighborhood look “poor”. Luckily quite a few states have passed laws making it illegal for landlords or HOAs to ban putting up clotheslines.

Significant? Who doesn't have 20 minutes to soak and wash their clothes in a bucket? If the goal is to reduce energy usage one should start at the top with large appliances.

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

#119

Post by tim-- »

sudosysgen wrote: post #18
rolleiflex wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they have the Radeon Open Compute project (ROCM) but they seem to be intent on following the tensorflow from a few stable versions behind. Additionally, and likely this is not something they can do anything about, but if you are using a Linux VM instead of running it natively, ROCM does not work. I had attempted to do this to get some use of the AMD GPU that was in my Mac — no dice. The holy grail would be a dir…

If you are using a VM, you can never use your GPU unless you have a very expensive one or a spare GPU to passthrough. ROCm has a direct replacement backend that can even take CUDA code (it's designed to be incredibly similar). It's called HIP. It's just that no one wants to support it. That is actually how TensorFlow on AMD works (mostly), and you can compile the latest stable release that way.

6600XT pass through works fine on QEMU/virtd. There is no need to have multiple GPUs in your machine to have a passable setup.

I can boot into Linux, and swap into Windows in 2 seconds with this setup. I have a dirty 20 line Bash script that deals with detaching the console, and passing the right things to the right place, but it all works.

ROCm on consumer cards does not work well. The tooling sucks. Massively. I don't understand why AMD doesn't have an extra team of 20 devs working just on the tooling.

Using DirectML with Windows Subsystem for Linux gives you better ML GPGPU support then AMDs native tooling.

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

#120

Post by vmception »

qayxc wrote: post #91
vmception wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

BTC and ETH are closely correlated price-wise.

And all crypto assets at the time. People wouldn’t be clamoring for GPUs if Ethereum didnt exist and also capture so much of the market. Its the only proof of work blockchain that people pay so much to use that it frequently exceeds the block subsidy.

so Bitcoin crashing, without Ethereum existing, wouldn't mean anything. thats how I separate the two without it seeming pedantic to me.

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