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AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

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Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#21

Post by arthurcolle »

junon wrote: post #14
ev1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards

This is the first I've ever heard of this, wow. I have an nvidia card and certainly do "business-like activities" with it, not at any particular scale but for my own income and whatnot. Is this something I should be considering moving to AMD over?

Yeah I was surprised by this as well, but apparently you cannot use NVIDIA cards to run enterprise deep learning workloads ("in a data center")... was super super shocked to hear this.. like isn't this one of the primary use cases...?

Bizarre

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#22

Post by ttt0 »

Shared404 wrote: post #9
ttt0 wrote: post #3

Wait, so there are people who are expecting hardware manufacturers to dictate to users what their products can or cannot be used for? Is this the war on general purpose computing I've been hearing about?

My understanding is that Nvidia's move was universally condemned. AMD's just taking advantage of Nvidia's blunder.

Until today I was convinced that not breaking your products was just an industry standard.

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#23

Post by xiphias2 »

varispeed wrote: post #18
nickysielicki wrote: post #4

This would mean a lot more if ROCM worked on these cards. These cards are capable of a lot but the software stack (OpenCL) leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t know what AMD is doing, to be honest. You would think that they’d want to get this all working ASAP so that they can serve as an alternative to nvidia for ML and gpgpu. I guess there’s so much demand for Nvidia between ML and cryptocurrency and gaming that AMD…

I'd like to see them trying to beat M1 rather than chase the GPU game. Apart from gaming these GPUs have little use in day to day computing. Maybe you encode a video once in a while, but it does not make huge difference whether it will encode in 10 or 5 minutes.

If you look at the success of TikTok and YouTube, video editing was never as great market for electronics suppliers as now. I don't care about it either, but that's just because I'm not an influencer.

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#24

Post by xiphias2 »

axaxs wrote: post #5

Honest question...why are either AMD(or Nvidia) or retailers not raising their prices until stocks build? It seems like econ 101, prices rise when demand outstrips supply. But that isn't happening at the retail level. Instead scalpers are buying them en masse, and doing the price fixing. Something I've always wondered, but wasn't sure who to ask that would know nuances of doing so.

It's the same reason why you can't get a COVID vaccine for $1000: fear of reputation problems.

Tesla is doing supply/demand based pricing though, so I think NVIDIA could get away with it as well as long as it gets the communication right.

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#25

Post by smitop »

arthurcolle wrote: post #21
junon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first I've ever heard of this, wow. I have an nvidia card and certainly do "business-like activities" with it, not at any particular scale but for my own income and whatnot. Is this something I should be considering moving to AMD over?

Yeah I was surprised by this as well, but apparently you cannot use NVIDIA cards to run enterprise deep learning workloads ("in a data center")... was super super shocked to hear this.. like isn't this one of the primary use cases...? Bizarre

IIRC you have to use their more expensive Tesla cards for these use cases. These cards are basically the same as consumer GPUs with more permissive driver licensing

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#26

Post by convery »

jsheard wrote: post #10

AMD doesn't particularly need to limit RDNA2 mining because those cards are inherently less desirable for miners. RDNA2 is designed around relatively slow memory with a big chunk of on-chip cache to compensate, which works quite well for games but the random memory access pattern of crypto mining blows the cache and bottlenecks on the slow underlying memory bus. https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/amd_s_rx_…

There's a lot of different crypto algorithms. Some will work better on AMD, some on Nvidia, some regardless of memory and some dependant on large cache. A miner will benchmark their card against the popular algos and choose the most profitable one. Which is one of the main complaints when Nvidia limited ETH algos, that miners would just switch to ZHash with a percentage or two less profitability and thus it would do nothing about the shortage while possibly triggering false-positives for gamers.

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#27

Post by rrss »

ttt0 wrote: post #22
Shared404 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Nvidia's move was universally condemned. AMD's just taking advantage of Nvidia's blunder.

Until today I was convinced that not breaking your products was just an industry standard.

nope, hardware vendors have been introducing artificial restrictions in some products for market segmentation for decades

e.g. ECC support in CPUs, mods to turn radeon into firegl / geforce into quadro, fused off cores

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#28

Post by retrac »

xiphias2 wrote: post #24
axaxs wrote: post #5

Honest question...why are either AMD(or Nvidia) or retailers not raising their prices until stocks build? It seems like econ 101, prices rise when demand outstrips supply. But that isn't happening at the retail level. Instead scalpers are buying them en masse, and doing the price fixing. Something I've always wondered, but wasn't sure who to ask that would know nuances of doing so.

It's the same reason why you can't get a COVID vaccine for $1000: fear of reputation problems. Tesla is doing supply/demand based pricing though, so I think NVIDIA could get away with it as well as long as it gets the communication right.

I suspect that has more to do with the fact that Pfizer, Moderna, etc. would find themselves nationalized if they did that. In marked contrast, Pfizer has had no qualms in the past pricing as high as the insurers will pay, with things like their HIV drugs.

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#29

Post by xiphias2 »

retrac wrote: post #28
xiphias2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same reason why you can't get a COVID vaccine for $1000: fear of reputation problems. Tesla is doing supply/demand based pricing though, so I think NVIDIA could get away with it as well as long as it gets the communication right.

I suspect that has more to do with the fact that Pfizer, Moderna, etc. would find themselves nationalized if they did that. In marked contrast, Pfizer has had no qualms in the past pricing as high as the insurers will pay, with things like their HIV drugs.

Isn't Bill Gates working on getting the price of HIV vaccine (and all other vaccines) down by joining all the poor countries of the world together in an organization?

It's sad that Pfizer doesn't do that from itself though :(

And of course the HIV vaccine is not working yet, but the research is promising.

Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

#30

Post by mancerayder »

rrss wrote: post #27
ttt0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until today I was convinced that not breaking your products was just an industry standard.

nope, hardware vendors have been introducing artificial restrictions in some products for market segmentation for decades e.g. ECC support in CPUs, mods to turn radeon into firegl / geforce into quadro, fused off cores

486 DX versus SX, wasn't it? That was my childhood intro.
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