Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

blogs.nvidia.com

281–290 of 762 posts

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even $2000 video cards are sold out I'm speechless

It doesn't surprise me. My 2yo GPU is selling in EU for double the price I originally bought it from the same retailer. Its the first time computer hardware is actually not depreciating but gaining value as it ages.

When I upgraded to a 3070 I sold my 1080 Ti for 50% more than I paid for it and at this point I think I could have gotten more (it was a blower so not exactly a desirable card though). Cost me 100 bucks after tax to do the upgrade. Then I scored a 3080 and sold the 3070 for $700 plus shipping.

It's to the point where I'm thinking about selling my "backup" 1060 3GB card, but if my GPU died then I would be in real trouble because lol at getting ahold of GPUs right now.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#282
post #269

I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…

The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…

> skeuomorphism of gold mining

I'm gonna steal that one, thanks. :D

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long term road map for Ethereum 2 is 100k transactions per second. This is a theoretical maximum and it will likely take years to get there. This defies your assertion that scaling cannot ever be achieved with current crypto approaches.

100k transactions per section w/ serializability and all of the other things required to satisfy real-world concerns like fraud and regulatory constraints?

Bold of you to assume that the crypto-crowd have seriously taken fraud and and consumer protections into account. Crypto-currencies are a poor technical “solution” to a socio-economic problem, and while this remains the case associated problems (regulatory constraints, etc) will continue to be things that are relegated to the “don’t care/won’t fix/too hard” basket at worst, and stapled on as an afterthought at best. That’s before we even get to the hardcore libertarian mindset that is incredibly prelevant in crypto-currencies.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even $2000 video cards are sold out I'm speechless

It doesn't surprise me. My 2yo GPU is selling in EU for double the price I originally bought it from the same retailer. Its the first time computer hardware is actually not depreciating but gaining value as it ages.

Yeah I sold my 1660 GTX for £40 more than I paid for it after 2 years. Was shocked.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#285
post #243

Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on…

Maybe it's time to create an adversarial network that can figure out how to mine on the GPU without causing it to halve the hash rate, train that network on an NVIDIA GPU, and shove it to them.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#286

While I hate the GPU shortage, I dont think this is the right way to go. Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.

Off topic but does Tesla still software limit their batteries? I always cringed at that; just knowing something exists that isn't being used to it's full potential

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#287
post #215

Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? Will people who already bought these cards for mining have to watch out for updated drivers or firmware? This is an absolute nightmare scenario which will come back to haunt Nvidia for years. I can't believe they approved this. It'll be interesting to see how games perform on the newly gimped cards people already…

>Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too?

Maybe? It would make sense because ML use cases are professional and there's a lot of money to be made there.

This isn't without precedent. Quadro cards have always been 99% GeForce cards with some special bios magic to de-gimp them for CAD or VFX applications. They charge 4x the price because they know that workstations running $50,000 a seat software can afford the premium.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#288

I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…

The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency dom…

I'm not sure why you would compare Visa with Bitcoin, unless you had no idea what you were talking about.. Visa does not enable one to transact without the rest of the banking system. It's useless on its own. Really pointless point of reference.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#289

I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…

Just wait until they'll limit ML/DL using those heuristics because you're supposed to buy specialized hardware and let gamers play their games.

First they came for the miners, and I did not speak out.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#290
post #243

Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on…

Someone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was artificially reduced. It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some heuristic decides that mining is happening. https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu... There's speculation that the limiter might actual…

So we’ll see mod chips for GPUs soon?
Post reply on HN