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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

#161

Post by pph »

vorpalhex wrote: post #74
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…

A single miner uses 1,300W (Antminer S9) and runs 24/7. That is 218,400Wh for a week. A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour, you are using about 38,400Wh. You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single mine…

A modern dryer uses less than 2 kWh for an 8kg run [0]. That means for those 38 kWh you need to run it daily for almost 3 weeks. Normal usage (let's say twice per week) would lead to ~3 kWh energy consumption.

[0] Siemens WT47R400: 176 kWh / year for 160 cycles by energy label, 1.4 kWh for a full run.

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

#162

Post by randomhodler84 »

cedilla wrote: post #141
randomhodler84 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought that was a simple story. No one is banned from drinking poisoned water. What is banned is poisoning other people's water. Really, this isn't that difficult. If you want to make a point about supply, please make a point about supply instead of just repeating the word randomly.

We can all agree we want clean power, which is entirely in the hands of the suppliers. Rather than pushing one’s preferences around on users and forcing them to do your will, why not go after the Coal and Gas producers — the supply.

People get upset when you want to ban things because it’s a bully move. The bully thinks their opinion is true and correct and others must succumb to their will.

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

#163

Post by acdha »

politician wrote: post #88
1ris wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not moving goalposts. If Bitcoin miners waste renewable energy, the users of energy in general move to renewable later. If everybody is using renewable energy exclusivity for everything, is still wastage. PoW only work by adjusting it's consumption upwards to create scarcity, e.g. one block per 10 minutes. At that point we will be useless solar panels, covering land uselessly, etc, etc. Bitcoin is arbitrar…

"Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say? Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable. Authoritarianism isn't an ideal outcome.

They explained the difference for you in the second paragraph: unless any other system, proof-of-waste systems are uniquely bad because the amount of power used isn't linked to any sort of useful activity — it's just a function of how much competing hash capacity there is in the network. Even something like heating your house to 78℉ is a lower category of waste because you won't increase that to 120℉ or start heating the neighborhood park just because your neighbors matched you at 78℉.

This is also in keeping with tons of existing regulations: you can't buy a monitor which uses 2,000W because various governments have caps for how inefficient you're allowed to be. That's far from perfect — or sufficient to deal with the climate change crisis — but it's not like it's some sort of unprecedented imposition on personal freedoms to cap inefficiency.

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

#164

Post by torginus »

qayxc wrote: post #136
torginus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it because of CUDA?

Yes and no. AMD uses different architectures for their consumer grade hardware and their HPC stuff as well (i.e. RDNA vs. CDNA). CUDA support (or rather lack thereof, which isn't AMD's fault) plays a major role w.r.t. software support, but AMD's compute architecture isn't DL-focused either. The MI250X compute part for example has a FP16 to FP32 ratio of 8:1 and a FP32 to FP64 ratio of 1:1; in other words it's an abso…

Ah I see. But wouldn't that mean that hardware-wise, consumer grade AMD stuff is better than for GPGPU, than consumer grade NVIDIA stuff? With the exception of AI and software support, of course.

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

#165

Post by dazeandconfuse »

vorpalhex wrote: post #97
Tenoke wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't make sense to compare 1 person gaming or clothes drying to a specific mining machine. The consideration was about global bans and total outputs from those activities.

Bitcoin mining uses more power than the country of Sweden. [1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

> When you put it all together, that’s a projection of 135.12 TWh in the year, or about as much power as is used annually by the country of Sweden

I don't doubt that bitcoin miners use a lot of energy, but I hesitate to trust a source that doesn't know the difference between power and energy. Also, they're lying about the energy consumption of Sweden, which actually uses 645.7 TW/yr as of 2012 [0]. They number they quote is actually the electricity consumption of Sweden [1], which is like 5x lower.

[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consumption+of+...

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consumption+of+...

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

#166

Post by newbie789 »

jhasse wrote: post #145
cedilla wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work blockchains. It's on the scale of nations. But the main difference is that whatever you compare with those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more people are interested in tumble drying.

Difficulty isn't necessarely increasing. It could also decrease if less people are interested in mining (e.g. when energy prices go up).

No post body was provided.

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

#167

Post by ericd »

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…

Then you can use a drying rack indoors, as Europeans do... They look like this: https://alittlelifeineurope.com/2017/09/10/in-praise-of-the-...

Electrical resistive heating clothes dryers are an enormous energy hog.

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

#168

Post by vorpalhex »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #139
dragontamer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets say Coinbase and Paypal (both BTC processors) stop supporting your website. Do you think that you'll get as many BTC transactions if this happens?

I don’t think you understand how cryptocurrencies work. There ain’t much Coinbase and PayPal can do to stop someone sending coins to my address. I don’t have a website, nor do I care what Coinbase or PayPal do or say.

You can't even access your wallet without an API provider. This includes MetaMask.

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

#169

Post by dragontamer »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #157
dragontamer wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand the practical business realities of the internet. No typical business is going to work with BTC addresses on the raw. They're going to (and currently) using simple APIs like Coinbase API ( https://developers.coinbase.com/ ) to "implement BTC receipts". As far as US business is concerned, the typical payment processor for bitcoin is Coinbase. They handle the bitcoint transfer, transaction…

There are many business that run their own payment infrastructure, BTCPay is the most popular. It is better for the network if people DONT use centralized providers. We all have the power to use decentralized infrastructure. Bitcoin works the way it is intended, that is peer to peer payments. Everything else is just ecosystem, which can be replaced. Coinbase is important as an on-ramp for users for now, yes, but thei…

And the Exim email-server and "bind" DNS server is "decentralized", except everybody uses gmail.com, or even centralized upon AWS.

There's your theory, and there's the practice of the internet and business. In theory, they should be the same. In practice, they're different.

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

#170

Post by sudosysgen »

tim-- wrote: post #119
sudosysgen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

>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.

That's a matter of opinion I suppose, but I don't personally find that passable.

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

DirectML sucks even more than ROCm, IMO. Also, WSL sucks more than a normal VM.

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