[HN Gopher] GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Restrictions Have B...
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GeForce RTX 3060 Ethereum Mining Restrictions Have Been Broken
Author : optimalsolver
Score : 143 points
Date : 2021-03-16 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (videocardz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (videocardz.com)
| ccmcarey wrote:
| There's also the fact that a few days ago Nvidia released a
| signed driver that disabled the restrictions [1] _by accident_.
| But now that the signed driver is out, anyone can just revert to
| that at any time and mine whatever they want.
|
| Fantastic failure to a flawed endeavour.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-
| rtx-3060-...
| Shadonototro wrote:
| i'm pretty sure they did this to prevent a class-action lawsuit
|
| limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this is
| illegal
| etrautmann wrote:
| I'm curious how this is different from shutting down a paid
| service or removing software features. Seems like there's a
| large grey area.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > limiting a product after a purchase, i'm pretty sure this
| is illegal
|
| NVIDIA announced this limit _prior_ to public availability
| and it made widespread news, meaning everyone who bought a
| 3060 could reasonably be expected to know about the
| restriction. No chance for a class action.
| Shadonototro wrote:
| source?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| A month ago on HN, for example (a couple dupes were
| merged into that iirc):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > could reasonably be expected to know
|
| I'd wager I know about 1% or less of how restricted 99% of
| what I buy is.
|
| There's probably some term or condition on my water bill
| saying I can't export it to Cuba or use it to moderate
| nuclear fission.
| nikanj wrote:
| I'm quite surprised if there isn't a binding arbitration
| clause somewhere, which blocks class actions
| belltaco wrote:
| Plus Nvidia can offer a full refund of the MSRP, fully
| knowing that even used cards go for more.
| chunkyks wrote:
| I have my cheque from Sony for OtherOS class action sitting
| on my desk. The cheque is dated 09/16/2019 [nine years after
| OtherOS was disabled via firmware], and it's for three
| dollars and two cents.
| aeruder wrote:
| Still makes me mad. I bought a device that plays PS3 games
| and runs Linux and then Sony said I have to choose.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| They can just revoke the signature, right?
| __s wrote:
| Only if network access can access revocation
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| cool cool cool. I never wanted a new video card anyways.
| HugoDaniel wrote:
| This could drive the bigger question of the feasibility of
| hardware imposed restrictions.
| ohiovr wrote:
| That took longer than I thought it would.
| CivBase wrote:
| Hopefully they give up on the idea for future cards. NVIDIA
| shouldn't decide what I can do with my GPU.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| That's the same idea as for GeForce/Quadro. Gaming GPUs are
| crippled so that they work poorly with professional software
| (ex: CAD).
|
| AMD does the same thing with Radeon/FirePro.
|
| I don't expect Nvidia to give up on that. And to be honest, for
| me personally, it is a good thing. I don't mine and I don't
| CAD, having GPUs unavailable for the former and overpriced for
| the latter results in more affordable prices for myself.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| "The GPU maker seemed confident that its restrictions couldn't be
| defeated, even claiming it wasn't just a driver holding back
| performance. "It's not just a driver thing," said Bryan Del
| Rizzo, Nvidia's head of communications, last month. "There is a
| secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and
| the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate
| limiter.""[1]
|
| Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing.
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/16/22333544/nvidia-
| rtx-3060-...
| viraptor wrote:
| I don't think the comment was wrong. The driver is limiting the
| rate and the card validates you're using a signed driver. It's
| still the whole protection system, not just the driver.
|
| I.e. you couldn't update the driver yourself. That relevant
| "hack" seems to be the official beta/development driver without
| the restriction. (The other solutions don't modify anything)
| optimiz3 wrote:
| How would the card validate you're using a signed driver? The
| card only sees what the driver sends it, so presumably the
| input could be spoofed. Also the card is not the root on the
| system's TPM.
|
| Usually it's the reverse - normally drivers validate that the
| card's firmware is signed.
|
| As an example, people would hack AMD Polaris card firmware
| memory timings for better mining performance.
|
| To do so you needed to disable the firmware signature check
| in the AMD driver, and to do this you needed to disable the
| driver signature check in Windows.
| chris37879 wrote:
| Yeah, people seem to forget those mining GPUs that were
| released specifically to prevent their resale in the
| aftermaket gaming community that people still managed to
| get to output video _despite the cards lacking physical
| ports_. They did it with a modded driver.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| Sounds interesting. Any link for info about this?
| kaszanka wrote:
| Is it some Looking Glass [1] kind of thing, or did they
| add physical ports to some unused traces or something?
|
| [1]: https://looking-glass.io/
| viraptor wrote:
| I did rely on the assumption that some check exists. Of
| course it could be spoofed, but that could be hard enough
| to require reverse engineering the whole driver to figure
| out. Or the limit could rely on the identification done on
| the card itself and sent back.
|
| Either way - my point is, we don't have enough details to
| say the original description from nvidia was wrong.
| lupire wrote:
| > "There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060
| silicon, and the BIOS"
|
| What does this person think "driver" means?
| serf wrote:
| >Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing.
|
| sort of makes one wonder how many whizz-bang hardware features
| get advertised that are little more than just software, but are
| oversold as unique physical engineering methods/techniques.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Reminds me of how every modern silicon has a "cutting edge,
| future technology" neural network built into.
|
| Then you notice the asterisk and realize it's just an
| accelerator (usually just a few instructions with some
| dedicated logic) and all the NN is still in software.
| elcomet wrote:
| And you notice the NN software doesn't even use the
| accelerator half of the time
| bitL wrote:
| You meant NVidia Quadro/Titan workstation performance?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I understand that pretty much the only difference between
| $3000+ "professional" GPUs that get certified for AutoCAD and
| other workstation systems are identical to $1000 "gaming"
| GPUs, just with a different on-card BIOS/firmware and
| e-fuses. I remember ages ago that people were able to simply
| re-flash their ATI Radeons into FirePro cards and that
| unlocked higher performance in some applications.
|
| Same thing with Cisco switches for port-unlocks and Tesla
| cars (EAP and FSD are just software features, assuming you
| have HW2+, and rear heated seats are standard, just not
| activated unless you pay to enable it if you didn't get the
| cold-weather package when you ordered it).
| taf2 wrote:
| sorta similar to cars that can get over the air updates and
| suddenly accelerate from 0 60 faster then before...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Yeah, little known fact. The Tesla Model 3 Performance
| and the Model 3 LR AWD _have the exact same batteries and
| motors_. There 's literally nothing stopping Tesla from
| offering an even higher performance boost for LR AWD
| owners to grant the same 0-60 as the Performance model,
| but they don't because it would cannibalize Performance
| sales.
| salawat wrote:
| Keep in mind, Nvidia does have some genuinely good process
| mastery around handling encryption intended to keep users
| from utilizing hardware in ways they don't intend, and
| creating trusted computing platforms where safety critical
| systems are concerned.
|
| https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/
| i...
|
| They've moved from keeping that sort of thing in EEPROM's
| to burnable fuses from what I understand, and I'm pretty
| sure what I'm aware of is pretty far behind state of the
| art.
|
| If they've managed to set up the key management as well as
| they have and keep things hush-hushed enough to keep the
| nouveau folks obstructed, this seems either like an
| uncharacteristically careless mistake, or some seriously
| well executed malicious compliance from somebody.
|
| Either way. I still find it irritating to the extreme that
| this type of thing only seems to happen to the detriment of
| users. Nvidia wins either way. Miners or gamers will buy
| out their cards.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > I understand that pretty much the only difference between
| $3000+ "professional" GPUs that get certified for AutoCAD
| and other workstation systems are identical to $1000
| "gaming" GPUs, just with a different on-card BIOS/firmware
| and e-fuses. I remember ages ago that people were able to
| simply re-flash their ATI Radeons into FirePro cards and
| that unlocked higher performance in some applications.
|
| Yep. I have an old laptop with an Nvidia Quadro FX770M GPU
| that (hackintoshed) macOS sees as a Geforce 9600M GT and
| runs the included Geforce drivers quite happily on because
| the FX 770M so close kin with its consumer counterpart.
|
| In fact, in a twist of irony for years the supposedly-more-
| stable Quadro Windows drivers had a power state bug with
| this card that would cause the laptop to bluescreen if the
| GPU tried to ramp down to an idle state. The only solution
| was to prevent the GPU from idling or to run a different OS
| with more generic drivers.
| Impossible wrote:
| Raytracing (RTX) is largely a software thing, although real
| hardware got added to improve ray-triangle and ray-AABB
| intersection performance.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Funny how it turned out to just be a driver thing.
|
| Marketing dude lies through his teeth, news at 8.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| New idea: Break the cards.
|
| A gamer doesn't need mathematical perfection. 99% of gamers
| wouldn't care if a card game rendered something slightly off, a
| pixel or two out of place on a 8k screen. A slight mathematical
| error wouldn't be noticed. But that same math error would destroy
| any mining efforts. So I propose that, rather than feeble
| attempts at software-based DRM, that Nvidea actually break the
| cards. Add in a tiny math error that gamers won't care about but
| that will render the cards useless for anything requiring exact
| calculation.
|
| This would of course be very difficult to design.
| Jonnax wrote:
| I'm always amazed how consumers will demand less for their
| money.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Intel managed this accidentally with the FDIV bug: for certain
| very specific values, floating point division gave the wrong
| answer.
|
| Then there was the traditional rigged demo solution; one
| generation of cards behaved differently when the program
| running was named QUAKE.EXE. That is now almost standard, since
| part of the reason NVIDIA driver downloads are so large is a
| huge pack of compatibility tweaks for specific games.
| simias wrote:
| Modern engines render scenes in multiple passes, iterating over
| the same framebuffer until everything has been rendered.
| Engineering such a flaw in a way that wouldn't lead to dramatic
| cascading effect will indeed be very difficult to design.
|
| Note that sometimes games do need absolutely exact results, or
| at the very least reproducible results. For instance sometimes
| you want to use something like `glDepthFunc(GL_LEQUAL)` which
| will only accept a fragment if its depth is equal to the depth
| buffer's value. A small fudging here would cause potentially
| large visual issues.
|
| I'm not saying it's impossible but I expect that it would
| create a lot of headache as random, potentially unmaintained
| games would start glitching here and there.
| tpxl wrote:
| Which would also make the cards useless for any GPGPU
| workloads.
| ali_m wrote:
| That might actually suit NVIDIA's interests just fine - they
| could sell uncrippled GPGPU-capable cards at a premium whilst
| claiming that they're helping to protect the supply of cards
| for gamers. However I think it would be difficult to do this
| without also breaking rendering pipelines.
| tantalor wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what they want? To only allow the cards to
| be used for gaming, not compute tasks like mining.
| csharptwdec19 wrote:
| The problem with that however is that games might be using
| the GPU for non-visual things such as physics or AI. Would
| those 'off by one' errors impact those tasks?
| postalrat wrote:
| Yea. But in a good way.
| X-Cubed wrote:
| Look at the Dolphin blog posts for loads of examples of where
| minor math errors add up to completely break a game.
| sodality2 wrote:
| This would split the market for ML as well.
| wmf wrote:
| Approximate ML is a hot research topic.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The other big use and market nVidia wants to have is ML
| installations for data centers though. Those also want perfect
| math and are pretty big business for nVidia. Also no one is
| running an 8k monitor off a 3060 or particularly well off of a
| single card usually. Also I dread trying to track down a
| rendering bug and finding out it's an intentional defect in
| cards, effects are getting pretty intricate and with raytracing
| small errors will accumulate over the multiple bounces.
| justwalt wrote:
| I definitely wouldn't buy something that had been intentionally
| crippled, on principle. Even if it were a very slight
| crippling.
| jy3 wrote:
| Can anyone enlighten and explain why there were restrictions in
| the first place?
| MereInterest wrote:
| Remember about ten years ago, how there was a fad to raise
| money, then use it to buy every single item on the shelves of a
| small convenience store? The intention was to keep small
| locally-owned stores in business by buying more from them.
| However, even though it brought a lot of profit on that one
| day, it meant that the shelves were empty for the next few
| weeks. The regulars saw that, and needed to find somewhere else
| to shop. The regulars left, and some never came back, leaving
| the store in worse financial position as before.
|
| Cryptocurrency miners are driving up the prices of GPUs. NVIDIA
| wants to make sure that they have stock available for their
| regular customers, because that is where the long-term profit
| comes from. Ramping up production is not feasible on the short
| time scale that cryptocurrencies have been around, nor is it
| known whether cryptocurrencies will be around for long enough
| to recover such an investment.
|
| TL;DR: Cryptocurrency miners are messing up the long-term GPU
| market, and NVIDIA is trying to maintain that market.
| madamelic wrote:
| >Ramping up production is not feasible on the short time
| scale that cryptocurrencies have been around, nor is it known
| whether cryptocurrencies will be around for long enough to
| recover such an investment.
|
| Bitcoin has been around since 2010. They've had plenty of
| time to realize this was coming. Even the thickest person
| could've spotted this wave coming in 2013, in addition to the
| continued rise of computer and console gaming.
| Rule35 wrote:
| But they didn't want to think about it for even five minutes
| and figure out a friendly way to do this. They should have
| given gaming sites purchase invites to hand out to members.
|
| There are other ideas too, higher prices on raw hardware but
| cash-back incentives if bought with games or gaming hardware.
|
| Now everyone hates them. AMD couldn't have paid for such
| marketing. AMD gives everyone ECC support, unlocked cards.
| They're (currently) the anti Intel/Nvidia, and the market
| darling.
| nullifidian wrote:
| The official reason is availability -- it's nigh impossible for
| a gamer to buy a GPU right now for something close to MSRP. The
| real reason is probably a desire to prevent miners from selling
| their GPUs on the second hand market, thus increasing sales of
| new GPUs.
| madamelic wrote:
| The problem isn't miners. The problem is no one wants to stop
| bots and scalpers from buying them en masse.
|
| If eBay prevented scalping and e-commerce created bot
| protections, demand would stop being absurd.
|
| Nvidia stopped selling cards on their site because they
| couldn't figure out how to prevent bots from buying them all.
| Not to mention Nvidia is selling cards directly to large
| miners by the pallet load.
| zokier wrote:
| Nvidia is still trying to fulfill orders for 3080 from launch
| day. The availability problem is real. They do not need to
| artificially increase the demand for their GPUs if they
| already are selling way more than they can deliver.
| arianon wrote:
| That's true today, but will it remain true when the
| cryptocurrency bull run ends, we enter a bear market, and
| mining becomes far less profitable? Not just that, but the
| most profitable coin to mine, Ethereum, is on track to move
| away from Proof-of-Work, so we can expect a lot of second-
| hand cards to be sold at fire-sale prices in 2022.
| Guthur wrote:
| There is evidence that many of the new GPUs are being bought by
| crypto miners and there is vocal out cry because some feel
| these cards should be for consumers (gamers), which is frankly
| bizarre.
| MereInterest wrote:
| I don't know what is bizarre about it. I think
| cryptocurrencies are fundamentally flawed due to their
| environmental impact, and should be banned on that merit
| alone. Add in the inability to reverse fraudulent
| transactions and their role in the rise of ransomware, and
| cryptocurrencies are easily something that should be banned.
|
| I don't see it as bizarre to be frustrated that one's hobby
| is being priced out of reach by what amounts to an
| environmentally-damaging pyramid scheme.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >I think cryptocurrencies are fundamentally flawed due to
| their environmental impact, and should be banned on that
| merit alone
|
| A GPU is a GPU, why is it's environmental impact fine if
| it's 31 million people pretending to be a cowboy in RDR2
| but bad if it's being used for financial transactions.
| MereInterest wrote:
| For the same reason that sending a letter to a friend is
| different from using the "Send-a-Dime" chain letter. One
| is something that improves the human condition and brings
| enjoyment, while the other is a pyramid scheme with
| negative externalities under the guise of a get-rich-
| quick scheme.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The same number of financial transactions can be handled
| with an exponentially smaller amount of energy. A secure
| distributed ledger of financial transactions does not
| inherently _need_ nearly this much computational power to
| maintain, as is evidenced by Ethereum 's impending move
| to proof-of-stake.
|
| You can't really say the same for video games. To reduce
| the carbon footprint of a user playing RDR2, you either
| need newer more energy efficient hardware, or you need to
| alter the experience the game provides to make it less
| computationally expensive.
| nybble41 wrote:
| > A secure distributed ledger of financial transactions
| does not inherently need nearly this much computational
| power to maintain, as is evidenced by Ethereum's
| impending move to proof-of-stake.
|
| You can claim that as evidence _after_ Ethereum has
| actually moved to proof-of-stake and operated in that
| mode for a significant length of time without any notable
| vulnerabilities. Proof-of-stake has some known drawbacks
| compared to proof-of-work; in particular, at least in
| naive implementations, there is nothing to prevent a
| malicious party from staking the same coins in multiple
| chains (forks) simultaneously, a flaw which proof-of-work
| systems are specifically designed to avoid by making the
| proof depend on each chain 's history. One assumes that
| the Ethereum developers came up with some sort of
| mitigation for that issue, among others, but it has yet
| to see real-world testing with significant funds at risk
| should it fail.
| hughw wrote:
| It seems like a good strategy for NVIDIA to prevent losing
| market share among gamers. They could maximize profits near
| term by seling cards at whatever the market will bear. But
| they'd yield their gamer share to AMD, and that would have
| long term negative consequences.
| josefx wrote:
| Officially it is a supply/demand issue. The crypto miners are
| buying up all the high end cards, so NVIDIAs main target
| audience (gamers, workstations, etc.) end up empty handed.
|
| What a lot of people seem to think: Used up cards could end up
| flooding the market while miners migrate to the newest cards,
| cutting into NVIDIAs profit or NVIDIA wants to make more money
| by selling pure mining cards that can't be reused for anything
| else.
| mamon wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me: why don't they simply price
| their cards 3x higher and sell them all to miners? Selling to
| the highest bidder is kind of "Capitalism 101". Their profits
| would skyrocket.
|
| And what about gamers? Well... they can buy used previous gen
| cards from miners.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| My take on this is that Nvidia knew fine well that their code
| would be broken. And in short order too.
|
| I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers, and possibly
| their investors, that they're "doing something about those bad
| cryptominers that are making us loads of money".
|
| Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture
| guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!"
| maxden wrote:
| I thought they were trying to stop used up cryptominer cards
| from flooding the graphics card market. So this doesn't help
| Nvidia in that respect.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers
|
| Nope, this is price discrimination so that Bitcoin miners buy
| their more expensive mining card. They don't want this to be
| broken.
|
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
| amelius wrote:
| > Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I
| picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!"
|
| https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/
|
| > Oculus Founder to Match $5,000 Reward for Anyone Who Can
| Jailbreak Quest 2
| simias wrote:
| I was also wondering why nvidia felt the need to step in.
| Selling cards is selling cards, having too much demand doesn't
| seem like a problem they should want solved.
|
| Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to
| be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages
| their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar
| issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition.
|
| If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are
| buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?
| etrautmann wrote:
| There is the issue that miners tend to dump the used cards on
| the market much sooner than a gamer would.
| M277 wrote:
| The problem is that the mining bubble is temporary, and when
| it crashes, these miners dump their cards in the used market
| with _very_ attractive pricing.
|
| In 2018, something similar happened; ETH mining became
| unprofitable and the result was that used Pascal cards were
| available for the cheap in the second hand market. The
| problem for NVIDIA? Turing, the successor to Pascal, released
| in September 2018.... and many people, instead of buying
| that, just bought used Pascal cards.
|
| IIRC, NVIDIA even commented that high end sales were low
| compared to previous generations in an quarterly report.
|
| Granted, the second hand market cannot be solely blamed for
| this, as Turing was really unattractively priced. (They
| shifted each tier up, so the $370 GTX 1070 was replaced with
| a $500 RTX 2070)
|
| These mining cards cannot be used for gaming (this is not the
| first time NVIDIA releases dedicated mining cards. 2017 had
| P106 mining cards as well, and when people tried using them
| for gaming on the cheap++, NVIDIA blocked it through a driver
| update) and thus reduce the risk for NVIDIA in the future.
|
| ++there was some software that allowed you to render on a
| GPU, and output video from another GPU like the dedicated
| iGPU of Intel CPUs. Looking Glass, I think? But I don't fully
| remember. These days, this functionality is actually
| integrated into Windows 10.
| elorant wrote:
| You forget the other part of the equation. Gaming companies.
| If gamers can't get their hands on decent hardware they'll
| stop buying games altogether. Thus the pressure doesn't come
| from consumers alone.
| Rule35 wrote:
| They anticipated selling stripped down cards to miners for a
| higher price.
|
| If they wanted gamers to have these cards they would just
| give out purchase invites via gaming hardware sites like
| Gamer's Nexus. They already make deals to supply OEMs before
| general retail, so all the gaming hardware being build is
| getting a supply either way.
| throwaway8581 wrote:
| Market segmentation is always better if you can pull it off.
| That way you can optimally serve two demand curves instead of
| just one. Sell more units at a lower price to gamers, for
| higher total profit from gamers, and sell at an even higher
| price to crypto miners, for a higher total profit from
| miners.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| And those miner cards can't become gamer cards so gamers
| will need to buy a new card instead of an old high end
| miner card when crypto falls out of style again.
| jperry wrote:
| They crippled their Geforce cards in terms of mining while
| simultaneously launching different, more expensive, dedicated
| mining cards[0].
|
| [0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's _possible_ those cards are being made with chips that
| are too defective to output video. Unfortunately only Nvidia
| knows for sure and they 're not going to say anything
| truthful about it.
| Rule35 wrote:
| If the cards were cheaper, or even the same price but
| available, then I doubt there'd be an outcry. But they
| charge more, for a surely defective part.
|
| It'd be like buying a car and finding a clause that says if
| you manage to make money off of it they'll take a
| percentage or "brick" the hatch or something, to prevent
| your profitable usage. Nvidia should back the fuck off and
| just sell a product.
| [deleted]
| rcxdude wrote:
| Even if they were cheaper miners wouldn't like them: one
| thing which substantially reduces miners' operating costs
| is the resale value of the GPUs they are using. They can
| buy a GPU, mine on it for a year or two, and then sell it
| for ~50% of its original value (or even higher in today's
| markets). The mining cards with zero resale value (which
| will much more quickly become landfill) would need to be
| substantially cheaper to make this worthwhile.
| SloopJon wrote:
| I haven't seen any pricing on the CMP cards yet. Are you sure
| they're more expensive?
| babypuncher wrote:
| If they could actually enforce this then I would be all for
| it. Crypto mining is the biggest and most pointless waste of
| energy since nuclear weapons testing. All these crypto miners
| are just making the planet hotter, while pissing off people
| who have more legitimate uses for these cards but cannot
| realistically obtain one because they are being hogged by the
| miners.
| spaced-out wrote:
| Tell me about it. The company I work for uses tons of video
| cards to run ML models for online advertising/customer
| profiling/etc..., and it's gotten noticibly more expensive
| thanks to crypto miners.
| panzagl wrote:
| Nuclear weapons testing kept us from using nuclear weapons,
| worth it.
| px43 wrote:
| Who is "us"? Surely you don't mean the USA.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshim
| a_a...
| px43 wrote:
| Eh, the vast majority of these cards are used by people who
| are rendering fantasy worlds so they can run around
| pretending to be an elf, or a soldier, or some other stupid
| thing. Lots of them are full grown adults too, just wasting
| time that they could be doing something meaningful with.
|
| That's way WAY dumber than powering a next generation
| global financial infrastructure.
| antiterra wrote:
| While we're at it, let's get rid of the other meaningless
| stuff, like fiction novels, watching sporting events,
| poetry, visual arts, theater, and being a tired
| technocrat with shallow self-righteous ideas about what
| is and isn't meaningful.
|
| Of course, most gamers don't game 24x7 while their multi-
| GPU rack is pegged at 100% either.
| madamelic wrote:
| Wow, that's new. A cryptocurrency proponent who hates
| video games.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I don't know why they thought that would work for their
| marketing though. Every tech news source I follow saw right
| through that. And it was reasonable to be upset at the
| restriction because someone buying the card for their gaming
| machine would be the most affected if they wanted to try to
| make back some of the cost of the card by mining when their
| computer is idle.
| simias wrote:
| It was my understanding that you need very cheap electricity
| for cryptomining to be worth it, am I mistaken? If not I
| suspect that most people don't really have a good incentive
| to mine coins, unless the use it to heat up their flat or
| something (and assuming that they don't have more efficient
| heating available).
| etrautmann wrote:
| As a technical point.
| literallycancer wrote:
| 5700 XT makes about 6-7 USD a day, depending on electricity
| cost. It hasn't really been a factor for a while now. You'd
| make profit even in Germany.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Every penny spent on electric heat would be more
| efficiently spent mining.
| simias wrote:
| Not necessarily, if you have access to a heat pump for
| instance you could get much more efficient and cheap
| heating than a mining rig would offer you. You could also
| be heating your home using natural gas or some other
| resources costing a lot less than electricity in some
| markets.
|
| Being able to reuse the heat from mining does make it
| easier to break even of course, but given how competitive
| the sector is I doubt that it's enough to offset the
| costs in most places.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Yes, a heat pump would be better. I was thinking of what
| most renters have available - baseboards and portable
| heaters.
|
| Cover the costs, maybe not. Offset, certainly.
| zokier wrote:
| Even if they knew that it will be broken quickly (which I also
| assume they did), it wasn't still necessarily lip service; even
| slight deterrence against miners during launch probably helped
| to get more cards in the hands of gamers, which was the
| intention. Of course it is impossible to know how big of an
| impact it really had, but I'd like to think it had at least
| some for the so important launch day orders.
| chris37879 wrote:
| > helped to get more cards in the hands of gamers
|
| Well, you know, except for the cards that they binned
| specifically so they could be sold as 'mining' cards. There's
| no such thing, these are all 3060 GPUs, the mining cards have
| a slightly different firmware that wasn't even able to do the
| one thing it was supposed to do.
| capableweb wrote:
| > which was the intention
|
| Neither me, _Understated_ or you know exactly why nvidia did
| what they did. What we do know, is that ultimately they
| answer to their shareholders and they have to show profit.
| Their motivations for why they do the things they do, can
| usually be boiled down to: "because it makes us more money".
|
| Nvidia probably doesn't care where the graphic cards go,
| miners or gamers, as they still make the same amount of
| money.
| __s wrote:
| You can want brand loyalty. If Nvidia cards are soaked up
| in mining & game devs start optimizing more heavily for AMD
| gpus, suddenly Nvidia loses market capture of gaming gpus &
| end up at the whim of crypto. Miners are also much less
| brand loyal, someone comes out with a better hashrate/$
| card & you've lost your customers
|
| So there's arguments for miners not being a diverse
| customer base that would encourage wanting to keep gamers
| in line. But I'm saying this without knowing any details,
| so I don't know
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| Gamers will be around in 10 years, miners might not be
| cinntaile wrote:
| Perhaps this segmentation has some contractual clauses that
| effectively bans companies from buying gaming cards to mine
| with? They're not enforceable everywhere in the world, but if
| it covers a big chunk of the cryptomining world then that's
| probably good enough. That way they can charge a premium for
| mining cards.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Nvidia already did this once before: their driver license
| specifically prohibits you from using GeForce cards in
| datacenters. Only Tesla-branded cards (no, not the car maker)
| are licensed for use in a datacenter.
|
| The license is pretty much unavoidable, even if you're using
| Nouveau, because the cards won't work at all unless you give
| it's power-management processor an Nvidia-signed binary to
| run, and Nvidia won't sign Free replacements for that binary.
| libertine wrote:
| At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders
| value, and nothing else.
|
| They shifted part of their production capacity to release
| dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle,
| because they can't be used by anyone else.
|
| They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders
| value, and nothing else.
|
| It's for a long time. This is just the latest layer.
| libertine wrote:
| You're right!
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It's mostly short-sighted shareholders looking at quarterly
| results. I'm not sure long-term shareholders like the games
| NVIDIA is playing with the companies.
|
| They lost Tesla for self driving, Waymo didn't even consider
| them, even though they had early advantage in AI. Comma.ai
| started with NVIDIA chip as well. I think Jen Huang is
| brilliant, but he's listening to the wrong people.
| xwdv wrote:
| What's wrong with that? Being an NVDA shareholder isn't some
| select privilege for an elite few. Just buy the stock. I'm
| currently holding an NVDA position worth over $300k off a
| modest investment I made 5 years ago. To attack companies for
| delivering value to shareholders is just jealousy, and speaks
| ignorance of the market.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >modest investment
|
| >$300k
|
| You live in a reality that is much different than most
| Americans, Europeans or Asians. Reasonably, the average
| person can maybe get a single share, and being willing or
| able to blow $500 on a single share is rare. Get back down
| to earth, you're part of an extremely privileged group of
| people that fully benefits from your shares, while actual
| customers do not get to see returns.
|
| Putting money in a company is not work. You are not owed
| anything.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Regarding your last sentence... That is opinion not fact,
| there are a lot of laws protecting shareholders.
|
| But I generally agree with the rest of your comment, an
| investment of approximately $20000 in a single stock 5
| years ago is not a modest investment for the average
| individual.
| patrickaljord wrote:
| > You are not owed anything.
|
| He is owed whatever the price someone is willing to pay
| for his shares which for now seems to be around $300k. He
| is not owed anything else though.
|
| > Putting money in a company is not work.
|
| He did work for that money, and he did take a risk
| investing it in these shares, a risk many were not
| willing to take. This is what he is being rewarded for
| now. Doesn't make him a hero or whatever of course.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > He did work for that money
|
| How do you know that? People who have lots of money often
| did not work for it, it's inherited.
|
| > he did take a risk investing it in these shares
|
| People often talk about investment risk like it's a real
| thing, but it's not. You can either afford it or you
| can't.
|
| If you can afford the loss its not risky, it's just
| gambling.
|
| "I'm taking all the risk, I deserve most of the benefit"
| is just bullshit rich people talk to avoid the fact that
| the people who actually do all of the _work_ deserve more
| of the upside.
| literallycancer wrote:
| Most people in the highest net worth lists are self made.
| Inheritance doesn't help you that much if you are
| retarded. Mostly it's gone in one or two generations.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This is basically just rich people propaganda, and it's
| straight up not true.
|
| The majority of the top 400 richest inherited at least 1
| million.
|
| And of the ones who did not inherit that much, often they
| were given that kind of money as seed money from family.
|
| Straight up 20% of the top 400 richest were literally
| born in the top 400.
|
| Knock it off with this self-made malarkey. It's just not
| true.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >a risk many were not willing to take.
|
| A risk many _cannot_ take. For a company as large as
| NVidia, the risk of it collapsing is basically nil. The
| risk of itsInvesting at random in the stock market gives
| you a pretty much guaranteed growth on average.
|
| However, many of us cannot blow 20k. We can't blow 10k.
| We can barely blow 1k. Once again, OP ought to have a
| little bit of humility and recognize his incredibly
| privileged position.
| literallycancer wrote:
| Here's an idea. Don't buy shit you don't need and you'll
| have more to spend on stock plays.
| foobarian wrote:
| > "blow"
|
| Implying this is some frivolous expense akin to gambling
| your savings away at a casino or buying an expensive car
| is the wrong mindset. This is not entertainment; saving
| for your future and retirement is a life impacting matter
| that people need to take seriously. Yes I can't afford to
| and won't blow $3k on a fancy new TV. But I can afford to
| set aside $100 a month to put into a stock account even
| if I skip eating out or having a fancy phone plan.
| teitoklien wrote:
| Many don't , but that's mostly on them , stop blaming
| others for misfortune.
|
| And dragging them down too.
|
| Humility is a good thing Tiptoeing near snowflakes is
| not,
|
| He never mistreated or harped at anyone He just said his
| opinion that he likes the stock. He wasn't shitting on
| poor people.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| "This is not just for the elite few"
|
| "I have a modest 300k position"
|
| When you look at these two statements in close proximity,
| you feel that there's perfect humility to the fortune of
| that position?
| literallycancer wrote:
| What are you doing on a software board then? California
| houses cost at least 2-3 mil. What's the home ownership
| rate? Are you implying that all Californian home owners
| are part of some elite?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I struggle to see this is a good faith argument.
|
| My income is in the "2%". I also entirely understand that
| that makes me in "the elite few".
|
| > California houses cost at least 2-3 mil.
|
| You mean "houses in a few select neighborhoods and
| locations", such as SF, more prestigious areas in LA.
| Also, they don't. Median SF house price: $1.4M.
| Sunnyvale, $1.6M.
|
| Not "at least 2-3M". And certainly not in conjunction
| with this:
|
| > implying that all Californian home owners are part of
| some elite
|
| The median Californian home price is $700K. So no. But
| since you seem to imply that California is somehow
| defined as "places where homes cost $2-3M" then yes,
| absolutely. If you own a home worth $2M+ you are
| unequivocally "one of the elite". You may not be buying a
| new private jet every five years, but you are also
| entirely capable of a lifestyle that the VERY VAST
| majority of Americans have no chance of attaining.
|
| For reference, a $3M mortgage with a substantial
| downpayment results in a mortgage payment of nearly
| $14,000/month, which with Jumbo loans requires an annual
| income in the region of $800K/year.
|
| Please don't try to continue an argument that says that
| someone making just shy of a million dollars a year is
| somehow neither privileged nor elite.
| xwdv wrote:
| I have a 300k position _as a result of a modest
| investment of about $20k I made 5 years ago_. Christ, I
| never said $300k was the modest investment and on a forum
| filled with software developers making 6 figures I'm sure
| more than a handful can invest $20k toward their future
| retirement.
|
| Of course now I've been pelted with downvotes and no one
| will remember what I actually said.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Even then...
|
| "60% of Americans could not come up with $400 for an
| unexpected expense".
|
| Based on that, what proportion of Americans could afford
| to put even $20k into the stock market, _let alone call
| it a MODEST $20k_?
| [deleted]
| MereInterest wrote:
| The median US net worth is about $121k [0]. When you're
| talking about having $300k available to put into stocks,
| and saying "Just buy the stock.", that is something
| entirely out of reach for the majority of people.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/select/average-net-worth-by-age/
| meddlepal wrote:
| Boo hoo? Whats your point? Nobody has a human right to
| affordable graphics cards.
| fortyseven wrote:
| Aww. Game over for the discussion, so you metaphorically
| flip over the table? Geesh.
| MereInterest wrote:
| xwdv started his post by saying that having significant
| stock was not something restricted to an elite few, and
| then followed up by giving examples that directly
| contradict that point. My goal wasn't to comment on the
| graphics cards themselves, but rather to add support
| against the pervasive and self-destructive idea that
| maximizing the value of the shareholders is the sole duty
| of a corporation.
| zapdrive wrote:
| The OP said they opened their position 5 years ago, when
| the price of NVDA was 20 times less. So they probably
| only invested about $15K out of that median $120K net
| worth.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The median net worth represents assets you own, not cash
| on hand. When someone has a median net worth of 120k that
| is likely the value of their house minus the outstanding
| debt their car and their pension fund, and unless you're
| willing to take a loan out on your house to gamble on the
| stock market, the median American does not have 15k to
| buy stock. In fact the median American can barely cover
| 400$ in emergency bills.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-
| secr...
|
| Not to mention that it would be insane for someone to
| pump their entire savings into the stock of an individual
| company.
| lupire wrote:
| > take a loan out on your house to gamble on the stock
| market, t
|
| Most homeowners do this.
| Rule35 wrote:
| Legally wrong with? Nothing. Brand-wise? Huge. Gamers and
| miners hate them for this.
|
| As a shareholder I'd imagine you want continuing revenue,
| not a short bump before the market switches to AMD.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Why would gamers hate them for this?
|
| The whole point was to try and free up more 3060 supply
| for gamers.
| belltaco wrote:
| Getting a strong vibe of 'let them eat cake'.
| Ballas wrote:
| Well, in this case it looks like NVIDIA themselves broke the
| restrictions - or at least they are not present in the beta
| drivers.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Not quite the 3 days after release predicted in the original
| thread, but impressive and entirely unsurprising nonetheless.
| jleahy wrote:
| I got my first even downvotes for suggestion that it would be
| rapidly cracked in that thread, followed by a lot of 'Nvidia is
| full of smart people' comments.
|
| There always seems to be a persistent optimism for the
| effectiveness of this kind of thing. For example how long DRM
| or anti-piracy methods on games will be effective for.
| Jonnax wrote:
| It wasn't cracked. Nvidia released a driver which didn't do
| the restriction.
| tehbeard wrote:
| > Nvidia is full of smart people
|
| If that were truly the case I wouldn't have to deal with
| multiple fuck ups caused by Nvidia releasing drivers with
| improper signing (windows seems fine with it, but virtualbox
| runs into issues with it due to hardening checks.)
| Findeton wrote:
| These mining restrictions are... interesting, given that Ethereum
| is about to move towards staking rather soon anyway ..
| falcolas wrote:
| I've been hearing this - "moving towards stakes soon" - for at
| least a year now.
| Rule35 wrote:
| They have it running, and people are making money off of it.
| The difficulty now is social, convincing people to switch.
| qeternity wrote:
| No, it's commercial: convincing the miners to switch who
| obviously have a vested interest in perpetuating PoW
| nootropicat wrote:
| >soon
|
| The earliest likely merge date is Q1 2022. The only exception
| is if the situation is urgent (miners attacking, or nicehash
| having a dangerously high percentage of hash) - in this
| situation the merge itself could be done in a month I think.
| varispeed wrote:
| In my opinion they set their prices too low and have not invested
| enough in fabs. The demand now way exceeds their capability to
| manufacture and unfortunately the only way to "restart" is to set
| prices to a level that will allow building the capacity to
| satisfy the demand at lower price point. They can try doing those
| PR tricks, but they'll just waste even more money without
| addressing the problem.
| my123 wrote:
| NVIDIA doesn't own any fabs, they don't really have a choice.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Interestingly. I was watching some interviews with the
| founders of 3DFX, and when asked about why the company died,
| their straight answer was: because they bought a fab.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I thought it was because 3DFX started to compete with their
| own hardware partners?
|
| 3dfx was a chipset vendor - whether or not they fab their
| own chips shouldn't matter all-that-much: it's who makes
| and sells the boards that counts. The Voodoo1 and early
| Voodoo2 cards were made, packaged, and sold by hardware
| partners like Creative, Diamond, etc - but with the Voodoo3
| and later SKUs of the Voodoo2, 3dfx did it all by
| themselves, so why would the miffed Creative Labs and
| Diamond lend their sales channel expertise to 3dfx? PC OEMs
| like Dell, HP, etc also probably had deals with Creative
| for their Sound Blaster, and it wouldn't surprise me if
| Creative politely asked them to not buy 3dfx-made boards in
| exchange for a sweet discount on Sound Blaster cards...
| mywittyname wrote:
| Yes, exactly this, they bought STB Systems and began
| manufacturing their own boards. I wasn't sure how much of
| the manufacturing process this entailed.
| coolspot wrote:
| Regardless of the competition with hardware partners,
| GeForce 256 blew it with nothing on the 3dfx side to
| respond with.
|
| Fun to read discussion here:
| https://m.slashdot.org/story/7743
| trishume wrote:
| If they raised prices they'd still make more money, rather
| than the money going to scalpers, and they could offer TSMC
| more money for more fab time, which TSMC could take into
| account when planning future fabs.
|
| As far as I can tell the reason they don't raise prices is
| that the PR hit they'd take from all the gamers hating them
| for it would be a bigger deal than the additional revenue.
| my123 wrote:
| They went to Samsung instead to get more capacity this gen.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| The had to reduce prices on the 3xxx series due to poor sales
| on the 2xxx series, it just so happened that crypto growth was
| happening at the same time. It was a bad situation, but raising
| prices doesn't solve the problem.
| pjc50 wrote:
| So, does anyone have any technical details on how this works?
| Both what the block was in the first place and how it was
| defeated?
|
| I imagine it has something to do with how Etherum is mostly
| integer math and boolean operations for hashing, while gaming
| workloads tend to be floating point, but I'm just guessing.
|
| Another factor in the background: the pandemic has caused a
| _worldwide_ fab capacity shortage. Lots of manufacturers are
| running around with their hair on fire trying to book fab slots.
| Even car production is being held up due to IC shortages.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Also your AV gear. One of the factories of a premium DSP
| supplier burned down, and now no-one can get DSPs for their
| home theatres.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Link?
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-factory-fire-
| sh...
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Same factory made chips for Audio production hardware too. In
| fact I think anything using SHARC components has been hit
| pretty hard. Just a bad year all around for chip
| manufacturers across the board.
| ev1 wrote:
| Apparently it's gotten even worse in the last month, since
| Samsung and NXP's fabs are in winter-blizzard-disaster Texas,
| and TSMC is in a once-in-a-century level of drought area
| wmf wrote:
| Most of Samsung's fabs are in South Korea; the Austin fab is
| a minority of their production.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Isn't this less due to Covid than to increased demand from
| different sectors like automotive, etc?
| rcxdude wrote:
| I don't know of any detailed analysis, but apparently the block
| is based around the patterns of memory access etherium mining
| produces (etherium's proof of work is designed to be memory-
| bandwidth limited to discourage the use of FPGAs and ASICs in
| mining, on the perhaps mistaken basis this would prevent the
| kind of centralisation present in bitcoin mining). It's quite
| plausible that the implementation of the proof of work could be
| adjusted to avoid this detection, though depending on the level
| of sophistication of the recognition it may have been difficult
| to do without impacting performance.
| pyrox420 wrote:
| No one could have seen that coming... No one!
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| These miners are really getting on my nerves: not only they are
| polluting the planet (1% of electricity in 2018 was for
| cryptomining), but are driving off the budgets of whole deep
| learning practitioners
| niels_bom wrote:
| A counter argument I heard recently: all of the work and
| resources we need to have physical money is comparable in
| energy needs and environmental consequences.
|
| I have no source at hand.
|
| I'm also not sure what to think of it.
| godelski wrote:
| I purposefully waited a bit to build a new computer (first one
| I've been able to build for myself and not others!) seeking the
| new AMD and Ampere cards, with the purpose of being able to do
| some research on my home machine and not a lab one. I figured
| I'd have to wait a month or two after launch, no biggie, but I
| got my 5900x last week and still can't find a 3080. This
| shortage is insane and no one seems to be doing anything about
| it. I'm extra peeved at NewEgg's shuffle system which I'm
| pretty sure someone that just took a week of a stat's class
| could tell you that they are giving the edge to bots and
| scalpers. While I'm peeved at the miners, I'm also upset that
| retailers aren't combating them and helping consumers.
| exdsq wrote:
| I'd argue deep learning is just as much a waste for most
| businesses anyway
| LispShmisp wrote:
| Strong argument.
| glouwbug wrote:
| Most business logic neural nets simply train into what
| could've been an or-gate
| coolspot wrote:
| Shh!
|
| You can't get a $700k/y salary for being an "OR-gate
| logic engineer", but you can for being an "AI engineer".
| lupire wrote:
| 0.1%, not 1%
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| PC gaming alone wastes the same amount of energy. There are
| also consoles and the whole industry of game creators
| surrounding it. In my eyes they are both useless and pollute.
| Some get kick out of games, some out shitcoins.
| SirYandi wrote:
| I would not call video games a waste of energy. Leisure is
| important.
| cheeze wrote:
| Huge difference between running a graphics card at 100%
| capacity (ok, most eth miners underclock but still use a good
| amount of wattage close to 100% of the time) and someone
| playing a video game for a few hours after work one day.
|
| Nowhere near the same amount of energy. Gaming certainly
| doesn't use 1% of the planets energy, for example...
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| It does - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28539647
| 5_Taming_th...
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The same amount?
|
| What gamers are running multiple GPUs in a game 24/7 with
| 100% utilization?
|
| I don't think it even comes close.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Exactly as predicted the day the NVidia announcement came out.
|
| And a good thing too.
| coolspot wrote:
| Now if someone could enable full CUDA on RTX 3060/3070/3080,
| that would be noice!
|
| And multi-stream video encoding while we are at it.
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