Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 264 posts

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

#221

Post by teawrecks »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #175
teawrecks wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that fossils fuels are being subsidized where they should be carbon taxed, and that's the only reason most crypto mining (and many other industries) using fossils fuels is still viable. But I disagree that bans are always authoritarian "madness". We ban things all the time. There are many substances and contraptions that you must hold a license to own or use. We have ban murder. We don't just disincentivize i…

The arbitrary group is nevercoiners, who read something years ago and did some napkin math and drew some very wrong conclusions. They think they are better than the Bitcoiners. The nevercoiners are fascists.

I thought you said this was a war on general purpose computing. Wouldn't the arbitrary group then be anyone who uses a computer?

I don't want to restate everything I said above (which you definitely need to reread before you even consider responding to me), I just want you to see that you are a walking meme and should take a moment to reassess.

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

#222

Post by tim-- »

sudosysgen wrote: post #170
tim-- wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suck…

> I don't personally find that passable

What is a setup that would be passable then? I think a setup like the one that I have described [I believe] would be impossible with Hyper-V or ESXi (though, not that I have even attempted it with either).

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

#223

Post by fomine3 »

ericd wrote: post #167
endisneigh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's time to heat pump

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

#224

Post by qayxc »

torginus wrote: post #164
qayxc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The previous generations of AMD hardware were super popular among crypto miners for that reason.

Most other software focused exclusively on CUDA, so GPGPU on AMD cards is not well supported despite the potential.

Blender is a popular example for this. After discontinuing cross-vendor OpenCL support, which effectively limited GPU acceleration to NVIDIA cards, they added support for AMD cards in the latest version. Even then, only the latest generation of AMD cards is supported for some reason.

Other renderers like OctaneRender still only support CUDA. The situation is just as bleak in video editing software, were major companies like Adobe only support NVIDA and Intel (at least on Windows) or have poor OpenCL support (which users then blame on AMD of course).

There is some hope that software support for GPGPU without CUDA (maybe using Vulkan Compute?) will improve later this year with Intel (re-)entering the discrete desktop GPU market.

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

#225

Post by netizen-936824 »

chii wrote: post #203
vorpalhex wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to interpret your current question as "Who has the authority to ban crypto?" The answer is the government. Governments are restricted to their borders but they do like to cooperate, and so EU may pass a general crypto ban and the EU may even ask the nations it trades with or that want to join to do similar. But there is no real question that a government may ban something in it's borders. "Ah, but I can get…

> "Who has the authority to ban crypto?" > The answer is the government. The gov't is supposed to represent the people's will. So are you saying that it is the will of the people to ban crypto? Aka, is crypto something that is causing harm to society, like heroin addiction etc? Let's go back to the prohibition era - why did the gov't decide to ban alcohol? And why did they re-instate it back afterwards? I argue that…

Was it the "will of the people" to ban all drugs? Because that's not how I remember it. Specifically one good example is how MDMA got banned, tons of psychiatrists and psychologists went to court to speak out against the ban and the judge agreed with them. Did the DEA give a shit? Absolutely not. Banned.

Not to mention, the US forced the anti drug ideology on the rest of the planet through economic coercion

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

#226

Post by randomhodler84 »

teawrecks wrote: post #221
randomhodler84 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arbitrary group is nevercoiners, who read something years ago and did some napkin math and drew some very wrong conclusions. They think they are better than the Bitcoiners. The nevercoiners are fascists.

I thought you said this was a war on general purpose computing. Wouldn't the arbitrary group then be anyone who uses a computer? I don't want to restate everything I said above (which you definitely need to reread before you even consider responding to me), I just want you to see that you are a walking meme and should take a moment to reassess.

A living breathing walking meme. Are we not all? I’m not worried about this persona at all. It is purposefully as it should be. It services this role. We both agree you can’t stop people doing math.

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

#227

Post by bavell »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #181
dragontamer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin doesn’t care about businesses. It doesn’t care about peoples wishes. It doesn’t care that everyone else is using Gmail. It provides a peer to peer, censorship resistant append only ledger for transactions secured by cryptographic signatures and proof of work. That is all. And that is plenty.

I agree. I think you two are talking past each other to a degree - Bitcoin the protocol is decentralized, Bitcoin the ecosystem in 2022 is moderately centralized in various ways.

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

#228

Post by bavell »

ruined wrote: post #131
randomhodler84 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how it is centralized? Because… it isn’t.

there's only one blockchain

Depends on if you count hard forks as new chains. Successful hard forks require decentralized consensus to follow the new chain.

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

#229

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

friendlydog wrote: post #149
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.

In 2019 the US used 18.27 billion gallons of fuel from airlines. If we limited flights to once a week we would save an amazing amount of fuel and increase flight occupancy, and decrease consumption as people would need to decide if the trip really needed a week layover if they couldn't take care of the problem in a 24 hour period. Much more than crypto consumption unless I am wrong. Edit: Commercial aviation makes up…

I'm up for doing both!

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

#230

Post by vlovich123 »

xhrpost wrote: post #80
vlovich123 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typical drying machine pulls about 2-6 KW while running. A cryptomining rig pulls about ~1.2 KW while mining. A drying machine runs for an hour a week. Let's say 2 hours a week. That's 12kWh per week at the high end for drying. A cryptomining rig running 24/7 ends up using 201 KWh for the same time period. That's 16x more taking the most pessimistic clothes drying usage, so I'm not sure how you're concluding "use…

OP is probably talking cumulative energy. The vast majority of households probably have dryers in the US. The vast majority of households also DO NOT have crypto mining rigs.

It's currently close. Bitcoin alone uses 91 TWh globally [1]. US dryers consume ~60 TWh [2]. However, one of those is seeing exponential energy usage while the others is very mature and stable.

I'm also shocked that people do laundry so often. Not sure why people are doing more than one or two loads per week and that's a problem the government could look at tackling (not so much with PoW coins).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...

[2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ene_14060901a.pdf

Post reply on HN