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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

#231

Post by bavell »

chii wrote: post #206
Xylakant wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no love for bitcoin, but I always hate this comparison. It’s useless. Sweden uses much more energy than it uses power (as pretty much every country) and it also exports power usage by buying finished products. Why is the power usage not compared to something useful? The power or rather energy usage of the global banking network for example?

When people compare energy usage like that, they are making an implicit argument that the energy usage of bitcoin is a "waste". This is what i dislike about the argument that PoW should be banned - that it wastes energy that could otherwise have been used for something else. I argue that it is not a waste, because the person who is paying for the energy does not consider it a waste. No one else can make this judgemen…

Agreed with the "waste" argument. I won't defend the huge power consumption but the energy spent is strictly useful in a utilitarian sense - every joule spent makes it that much harder to perform a 51% attack. Ideally, the energy used to secure the network is widely/evenly distributed among nodes for maximum security benefit (though not usually how it plays out).

However, to say it's all a waste is just an emotional argument because you don't like it. That's fine but it's opinion, not objective fact.

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

#232

Post by sudosysgen »

tim-- wrote: post #222
sudosysgen wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

I agree witht the latter part about Hyper-V or ESXi, for it to work one would need a virtualizable GPU or two GPUs, so that both OSes can have a graphical environment concurrently.

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

#233

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #216
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take issue with the statement "it makes tax evasion stupidly easy". The moment you touch any US-based exchange, your information is up for grabs by a variety of agencies from IRS to various LEOs. It may make doing the deed easy, but it does not really change much. It has been years now since blockchain made it into mainstream. There are companies specializing in selling blockchain insights. Unless we are not talkin…

> I am paying for it. If you don't like my use, either raise the price or, well, leave me alone. Residential miners are using subsidized electricity. We do that so Grandma can afford to be warm and run her dryer. If we forced miners to use commercial electricity plans then they would in fact pay a whole mess more.

I find this argument odd. Is the electricity used by the business somehow different than the one used by grandma? Are these currents used by the business somehow more special? No. If anything, based on my dad's experience as a shop owner, businesses pay much higher rates than individuals. They are not subsidizing grandma. They are subsidizing bureaucrat lives. That is all the there is to it.

Still, let us say that I accept your argument, some miners actually bought various electricity producing entities. Now what? Are you going to argue they can't use the electricity they generate or are you going to argue that we can then force them out of business some other way. Either undermines some tenets of US society, but I am curious now.

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

#234

Post by philistine »

IanCal wrote: post #160
samwillis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is literal legislation about energy efficiency of consumer goods (such as dryers), our houses have to be built to be environmentally friendly with good insulation to stop wasted energy, governments are banning plastic packaging. But crypto should be except? No, crypto should be legislated so that it’s energy usage is limited. To think otherwise is an enormous step backwards. I cannot understand how this is not…

Those are very different things. My dishwasher is rated based on specific cycles, but I'm legally allowed to use it as frivolously as I want. I can run an A+++ rated dryer with a single sock in and send the photo to the police. We don't limit energy use but inefficiencies. The equivalent in crypto would be to rate hardware by hashes per joule. Crypto things are different because the incentives are different. I'm ince…

We are looking down the barrel of a gun. The gun is cryptomining's thirst for electricity destroying all our gains to diminish climate change. Your arguments may be right, but you are on the wrong side of our survival as a civilization.

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

#235

Post by gjs278 »

kennywinker wrote: post #177
zozbot234 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers Cryptocurrencies support escrow transactions, where a mutually-trusted third party (e.g. an arbitrator) can decide whether the transaction should go forward if buyer and seller disagree. This is still "trustless" compared to other systems because it only depends on mutual trust wrt. each individual transaction, not on a pre-defined central authority.

Right, so my conveyancer (trusted by me, and my lender) escrows the money (lent to me by a bank that trusts me) via blockchain. How is this better than the current situation, where wire transfers are used, except 1) smaller fees 2) massive carbon footprint? Because I didn’t see any armored cars involved to offset the PoW energy. I’m not saying blockchain is useless - just i see no use for it when it comes to the way…

No post body was provided.

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

#236

Post by gjs278 »

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#237

Post by snicker7 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #13
snicker7 wrote: post #10

AMD consumer cards are unusable for GPGPU. Utter garbage. It’s not just mining. I would not have bought them if it weren’t for their open source driver. I hope Intel Arc fares better.

The higher-end cards are inherently very very usable for GPGPU, it's just the tooling around them that sucks. As for lower end cards, that's because they are low-end.

Not even. ROCm does not support any current-generation enterprise cards.

Compare this to Nvidia or even Intel where I can run GPGPU API's (CUDA, oneAPI) on low-end, consumer-grade hardware.

The problem, ultimately, is that AMD does not even care.

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

#238

Post by sudosysgen »

snicker7 wrote: post #237
sudosysgen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The higher-end cards are inherently very very usable for GPGPU, it's just the tooling around them that sucks. As for lower end cards, that's because they are low-end.

Not even. ROCm does not support any current-generation enterprise cards. Compare this to Nvidia or even Intel where I can run GPGPU API's (CUDA, oneAPI) on low-end, consumer-grade hardware. The problem, ultimately, is that AMD does not even care.

It's not officially supported, but it does seem to work, don't know if there are any bugs.

I agree that AMD is dropping the ball.

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

#239

Post by xhrpost »

vlovich123 wrote: post #230
xhrpost wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.nytim…

Honestly surprised it's that close.

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

#240

Post by killingtime74 »

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…

Your example shows the opposite of what you intend. Civil aviation has many positive effects. Bitcoin is questionable in this regard and yet is a non negligible fraction of a massively socially significant activity like flying
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