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.
Isn't it because of CUDA?
Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
61–70 of 264 posts
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The RX 6500 XT is a worse card than the RX480 released 5 years ago https://i.redd.it/oyxyoxmch2a81.jpg .
I'd expect otherwise actually. RDNA is far more efficient at gaming. GCN was compute-focused (higher TFLOPs, but weaker in practice). Case in point, micro-benchmarks show that VRAM latency is ~100 nanoseconds on RDNA, but ~300 nanoseconds on GCN. RX 6500 XT is aimed at roughly the same specs as the RX480, but should perform slightly faster in practice, along with Raytracing support, Infinity Cache and therefore faste…
Further, given the prices of RX480 and modern video cards, even if they were on par, if you can actually GET RX6500XT for $200 today, then:
1. It sucks from big picture perspective, as we are "back where we were 5 years ago"
but
2. It's great from pragmatic perspective, as we are otherwise today in "Wish I could afford a card from 5 years ago" / "there's no such thing as a budget GPU" stage.
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#63World 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.
PoW cryptocurrencies are still way more energy- and carbon-efficient than armored vans/trucks carrying valuables around, which is the other accepted method of decentralized, trustless value transfer. We shouldn't call for stuff to be "banned" that we can't even be bothered to understand properly.
Ah yes, I’ll never forget when I purchased my house and the armored truck delivered my money to the buyer. /s
Most transactions don’t need a decentralized trust-less value transfer. But bitcoin is not only attempting to displace the small sliver of transactions that DO need trustless/decentralized
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#64World 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.
I pay for all my energy to be renewable. I don't see why my crypto mining needs to be banned. In fact, estimates peg Bitcoin's use of renewable energy to be between 50-75%. This is a fact lost on HN, which hates crypto at all costs.
> I pay for all my energy to be renewable.
That's not how it works. It just means that instead of everyone using 10% renewable energy you use 100% and 9 other people use 0%.
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#65World 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.
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…
Machine drying clothes unnecessarily is right up there in the wastefulness stakes.
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#66World 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.
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…
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 "uses as much if not more energy".
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#67World 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.
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…
Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year. Where would be the limit of that? When that requires the energy of a big country? (We are quite away from that as far as I know [1] ) A heavily industrialized continent? More than the whole world?
It's absolutely crazy. I know that there's a big lobby behind mining, I absolutely respect what they have being doing protecting Bitcoin i.e. and making the project survive... even if it somehow completely lost it's original purpose. But FFS guys what's the purpose of having cryptocurrencies if the cost of that is aiming to destroy the world, or much more probably, to win a last minute complete cryptocurrency ban from all governments with the handy climate change as an excuse?
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’d only partially solve it: we don’t want to waste renewable power which could be going to something of value.
You are moving the goalposts. If Bitcoin miners pay for renewable energy, they are no longer harming the environment. Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for? Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you. There is no evidence that Bitcoin's usage of renewables is preventing others from paying for renewables too.
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 arbitrary scalable wastage to create arbitrary, artificial scarcity.
The point is: Energy wasted is energy wasted. Bitcoin will eat everything till the point where some external factor prevents further expansion, e.g. how much are we willing to hurt the environment and ourselfs in exchange of the block reward. The person with the highest threshold wins.
It's not really not complicated. This is literally the last scene of the hitchiker, where they plan to kill all trees, so they can use the leaves for currency. The success of bitcoin makes be loose all hope in humanity.
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#69World 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.
Banning = Authoritarian Madness. Bans are never the answer unless you are a fascist.
This is an attack on general purpose computing. You cannot tell people what they can and can’t do with their machines.
You can try, but the smart ones will tell you to go f yourself.
Deal with the supply side costs, and let people do whatever math they like.
Re: Radeon RX 6500 XT is bad at cryptocurrency mining on purpose, AMD says
#70World 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.
You don't need a specific ban. Just even the playing field for traditional finance. Either make cryptocurrencies follow normal banking/financial laws or make laws for traditional finance more liberal. Cryptocurrencies and especially PoW based ones are a terrible, slow, inefficient and vulnerable technology which wouldn't survive a day of fair competition.
What is “fair competition”? Can you define it?