[HN Gopher] Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 an... ___________________________________________________________________ Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards Author : wglb Score : 246 points Date : 2021-05-18 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.bleepingcomputer.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.bleepingcomputer.com) | superbaconman wrote: | I'm on the fence about switching from console to pc, but I've | still been trying to get a 3000 series card anyway. The ability | to use the cards for ml and crypo in addition to gaming is | appealing, but moves like this just make me think sticking to | xbox and my gtx560 is best. | agloeregrets wrote: | > I've still been trying to get a 3000 series card anyway | | ...I think I know why you can't get one. In all seriousness | though, using GPUs for mining has trashed the gaming market and | made entire realms of PC gaming inaccessible to lower income | people, it's an incredible shame. | icoder wrote: | Is there some merit in comparing this to regulating concert | prices? There too one might argue to let the market determine the | price, but there too that might lead to a very unequal situation | for many, that may eventually backfire. | hosh wrote: | In other news, Nvida has cards specifically designed for | professional miners: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ | | https://hothardware.com/news/msi-cmp-30hx-card-debuts-for-et... | o_p wrote: | How hard can it be to reverse engineer the drivers and remove the | protections? Theres economic incentive now after all | MauranKilom wrote: | "remove" how? The card BIOS is not going to let you just flash | any random driver you cooked up. | nyjah wrote: | I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't | understand the answer. | | Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the | cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves? | 0x5f3759df-i wrote: | The best way to get rich during a gold rush is to sell the | shovels. | | They're right where they want to be. | rocqua wrote: | Because in the long term, they probably can't rely on mining | for income. And if they stop selling gpus for a while, they are | going to destroy their customer base. Gamers will get angry, | people who use CUDA will look for alternatives, enterprise | supply chain managers will look for more reliable manufacturers | (AMD). | | Essentially, this move would wreck their basic business. And | dropping that business for crypto is very risky. It is also | probably not what investors would expect. | warent wrote: | Probably because it's just not their business. They don't need | to confuse their objectives with bitcoin to get rich, they're | doing exceptionally well without it | amelius wrote: | Then why is Elon Musk trading Bitcoins? Tesla makes more | money trading Bitcoin than selling cars. | | https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money- | trading-... | rvanlaar wrote: | Tesla stopped accepting bitcoin. | https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/tesla-stop- | accep... | amelius wrote: | This was about trading Bitcoin, not accepting it as a | payment method. Plus, it doesn't really change the | question. | Daishiman wrote: | Because Tesla's most valuable product aside from the cars | is the memes. | | I am not kidding. It seems a substantial proportion of TSLA | buyers aren't really interested in its fundamentals but | like what Elon tweets out. | throwaway292893 wrote: | In addition to the revenue from selling cars. The GP was | asking why Nvidia doesn't stop selling their cards and use | them to generate bitcoin as a mining company. | | Tesla simply took some of their cash and invested in | Bitcoin, they didn't shift production or pivot their | business. | | The fact that they made money off of the investment and | whether or not it was more than their revenue is | irrelevant, the move didn't affect their core business, it | was just lucrative. | contravariant wrote: | This is just an uneducated guess but is it possible that | Tesla is just a company investing heavily in R&D of cars, | and hasn't really begun to run a profit yet alongside some | somewhat profitable speculative Bitcoin venture that Elon | Musk's somehow put under the same roof? | | According to that article if you split out the emission | credits as well then they've made around -200% more profit | selling Bitcoin and -600% more profit with emission credits | than selling cars. | | The fact that both are negative should tell you something's | gone awry. | IncRnd wrote: | Tesla and Nvidia are entirely different from each other. | Tesla's business model has been built on government | subsidies, while Nvidia's business model is to sell | product. One needs to create profit somehow, and the other | is able to alienate one segment of purchasers in preference | of another. | lottin wrote: | Just because Elon Musk does something it doesn't mean it | has to make sense. Tesla's shareholders can trade bitcoins | themselves. They don't need Tesla to do that. | maerF0x0 wrote: | I would suspect the reason is marginal electricity cost. Nvidia | likely has to pay full marginal price on electricity whereas | miners maybe geo located with cheaper electricity, or | marginally free electricity (such as so called stranded energy | or used in places where heat is already being created by | electric heaters, but one could get marginally free computation | done) | Griffinsauce wrote: | It would destroy their business? | | They'd have short term massive gains but it wouldn't be | sustainable. | CPAhem wrote: | Nvidia want to charge more for cards that can mine crypto | currencies. Just like they want to charge more for the same | product if it is used in data centers. | | It's a way of artificially segmenting the market. | est31 wrote: | Actually that's what some companies in the ASIC supply chain | have done when the first bitcoin ASICs came out (2014ish I | think?). That's probably because of the kinds of people in | those companies, and the kinds of markets those companies | operate in, i.e. solely in the bitcoin mining market. Nvidia | and AMD mainly sell their GPUs for various other use cases | other than mining, and the mining uses are quite recent. Nvidia | is also known for building different products for different | market segments, and they do have dedicated GPUs made for | mining. I.e. in 2018 they forbode machine learning uses in | datacenters of their consumer hardware in their EULAs, to push | people to their professional hardware instead. | https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge... | gspr wrote: | For the same reason that many companies that happen by chance | to have real estate as their most valuable asset don't wanna | pivot to being real estate companies. | themodelplumber wrote: | Can you imagine? They could do anything, they could create a | corporate utopia. | | I wonder if the corporate psychology is similar to human | psychology. In which, far from being run by a green field | thinker like you, they are short-term oriented, and mainly | backwards-looking for the sake of emotional security--we | already know best what works for us. | patrickk wrote: | Because they're in the business of manufacturing and selling | GPUs, not speculating on volatile crypto markets which could | nosedive 90%+ in short order and drastically cut the | profitability of mining. | | If they suddenly changed strategy like this, their stock price | would be hammered instantly and there would be a clamour to | replace their CEOs and boards. | smaddox wrote: | Because the value would tank when they tried to sell off all | the Bitcoin, etc., that they mined. | valuearb wrote: | Because BTC is down 30% in the last month? | 988747 wrote: | No one mines BTC on GPU, and Etherum is up 100% from two | weeks ago. | | Ok, I understand that NVidia does not want to mine | themselves, but why on Earth won't they just raise the prices | to the level miners are willing to pay? | | "We want to sell to gamers, not miners" is the stupidest | excuse ever. Isn't capitalism all about selling to the | highest bidder? Why do they even care about who buys their | product? | | EDIT: Also, think about this: gamers that are considering | upgrading their hardware get additional incentive - Etherum | mining makes buying this new, shiny GPU basically free. | Typically, after 9-12 months the initial investment is paid | off. Without the possibility of mining many gamers will delay | the decision about buying a new GPU, hurting NVidia sales | further. | rurp wrote: | >Isn't capitalism all about selling to the highest bidder? | | Capitalism _can_ be about that, but there 's a lot more to | it than simply charging the highest price possible on every | transaction. For example, loss leader products and free | trials are common across industries. I don't have any | insight into Nvidia's thinking specifically, but they might | believe that cultivating the gaming market by not pricing | gamers out of their product in the short term has much more | longterm value than going all in on of the most volatile | industires in the world. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | Gamers are the reason why Nvidia exists, it's a hard thing | to let go of. | | It would be like FB shutting down the blue app and pivoting | to Tinder. | Ericson2314 wrote: | Hah, this comparison very much feels right. | Androider wrote: | They do, the mining specific cards are more expensive / | hash rate. It's just market segmentation. | slver wrote: | > Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep | the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves? | | Bitcoin costs more to mine than the power bill you'll receive. | This is why increasingly most malware happens by stealing power | one way or another. And I don't think NVidia and AMD are in the | stealing power business. | edave64 wrote: | People are buying these cards for other coins that are still | profitable to mine on the GPU. | gruez wrote: | >Bitcoin costs more to mine than the power bill you'll | receive | | he's talking about cryptocurrencies in general, not bitcoin | specifically. Mining ETH with recent-ish is currently | profitable unless your electricity is very expensive (50+ | cents). Besides, bitcoin mining is dominated by ASICs and | there really isn't really any point in using hacked computers | to mine it because there are more profitable coins (ones | using ASIC resistant algorithms). | saurik wrote: | While having the cards is tablestakes, and newer cards can do | more for less, in the end--even for Ethereum--you really still | are spending more on electricity than hardware, and so you can | have all the cards in the world and still not be able to mine | crypto effectively. Most mining is thereby done in other places | in the world where the externalities on power generation and | use (clean or dirty, both) are less well tracked, with the | occasional place in the US--such as the plants in NY that are | being booted back up just to mine crypto--where people are | actively trying to make it illegal. I would imagine a lot of | the mining done in the US ends up being either to "launder" | (not quite the right term) money (buying lots of power and | converting it to untraceable crypto for illegal activity... | kind of a reverse laundry ;P) or with "stolen" power (as is the | case of a college student mining in their dorm room). | willhinsa wrote: | With today's ETH prices, electricity costs are a fraction of | the revenue from mining. Like, on the order of less than 10%. | root_axis wrote: | Cryptocurrency value is extremely volatile, businesses need | stable income streams to plan for development and growth. | Further, just owning cryptocurrency isn't enough, it has to be | converted into spendable money so that the business can pay | employees and fund other business expenses, at Nvidia's scale | this creates a lot of financial friction and undesirable | complications. | chongli wrote: | Why mine gold when you could make a fortune selling shovels? | xwdv wrote: | Why sell shovels when you can just buy shares in the company | selling shovels? | fassssst wrote: | Why buy shares when you can just go outside and be happy? | OminousWeapons wrote: | Risk. When crypto inevitably crashes again they will be left | holding the bag on a huge set of cards that may not have great | resale value. Selling the cards is safer and also aligned with | their core business competence. | fay59 wrote: | I absolutely despise cryptocurrency, so this may not be | accurate, but my understanding is that they're only reliable if | many independent people mine. If NVIDIA kept all its GPUs and | mined Bitcoin instead of selling them, it could control more | than 50% of the hashing capacity. This could allow NVIDIA to | double-spend bitcoins, the possibility of which would probably | crash confidence in the asset. | clarkmoody wrote: | GPUs are no longer used to mine Bitcoin. They would lose lots | of money trying. | lukifer wrote: | > they're only reliable if many independent people mine | | Sort of. It's a matter of establishing trust with buyers, | holders, and the ecosystem. If a hypothetical 51% owner | behaved as a good citizen (which is to say, their incentives | were publicly aligned towards preserving value rather than | exploiting double-spends), the confidence wouldn't | necessarily erode. (Contrast with a nation-state or other | hostile actor who performs a 51% attack with the express | intent of theft or undermining trust, which has happened with | smaller cryptos.) | | The three largest BTC miners combined have been well over 51% | of the hashpower for years now, and they could collude to | crash or exploit BTC if they wanted; it's simply not | currently in their interest. Yet more evidence that while | Proof of Work was a clever hack in the original BTC | whitepaper, it doesn't inherently lead to decentralization, | and is functionally indistinguishable from Proof of Stake | with extra steps. | IncRnd wrote: | Are you saying that GPUs are now competitive with ASICs when | mining bitcoin? | fay59 wrote: | I have no idea what people use to mine cryptocurrency these | days and quite frankly I would rather it all stop, so no, | I'm not saying that. | amelius wrote: | They could start a bunch of subsidiary companies. | lottin wrote: | They would always be suspicious of collusion. | LASR wrote: | Same reason why they are not an investment bank investing in | stocks, or building skyscrapers in Dubai. | | It's not their business. They've built over the many years, a | very defensible business out of expertise (and IP). That | expertise is unique and resilient to the whims of a speculative | investor hive-mind. | | More practically, they just wouldn't be able to compete. | Against companies that build ASICs specifically for mining, the | tech they have, while is viable for the small-time gamer-miner | demographic, does not have good returns on a larger economies | of scale. | FinanceAnon wrote: | "In a gold rush - sell shovels." | amelius wrote: | Yeah, but don't sell crippled shovels. | yoz-y wrote: | There are more than enough people out there that want to | just play games or do research. Miners are only making | nvidia look worse. Their core demographic is getting | disenchanted because what good is a great cheap graphic | card, if you can never buy one. | IncRnd wrote: | There are more purchasers than cards available, so they are | intentionally limiting purchases by miners with this method | in preference to gamers. They don't want to sell their | shovels to miners right now. | diplodocusaur wrote: | How do you know they didn't? | bumbada wrote: | Because cryptocurrencies are basically a pyramid scheme, the | money for early investors is made by huge amounts of new people | entering the pyramid. | | Lots of people enter the pyramid because they have seen early | investors benefit greatly and they want to benefit too. It | works very well until people start getting out of the | pyramid(selling) and the same thing happens in inverse, people | want to recover the money they invested and price plummets. | | There are two main reasons a big company like Nvidia can not | mine for themselves: | | 1. Nobody will enter the pyramid in the first place just for | enriching Nvidia. People enter a pyramid because they have seen | their neighbor making money "out of nothing" and they get the | Gold Rush themselves. Like a virus the Rush is contagious by | people between them. | | 2. When prices go up everything is happiness and good feelings. | When prices go down the people that have lost their savings | will get mad at the company that benefited from their own | ignorance or greed. | social_quotient wrote: | "Because cryptocurrencies are basically a pyramid scheme, the | money for early investors is made by huge amounts of new | people entering the pyramid." | | I think your viewpoint could use some revision. You've either | described any typical investment but I Uber it as a pyramid | or you misunderstand the goals of crypto. | [deleted] | whoomp12342 wrote: | jokes on them. Next crypto currency will be mined as a roblox | mod. | rsuttongee wrote: | I mean, the cards are selling at 3-4x MSRP right now. Won't | halving the hash rate just cause the price of the cards to drop | to 1.5-2x MSRP and miners just buy twice as many? | | Possibly good for NVDIA I guess (selling twice the units assuming | the can make enough), but I don't see this helping gamers get | cards in hands. | Zandikar wrote: | Nope. These are new SKUs (LHR variants), not a patch that | retroactively applies to existing stock/sales. If anything, so | long as crypto demand persists, this will result in a upward | influence on the scalping price of the currently existing non- | crippled 3070's and 3080's. Technically Nvidia has existing | mining SKU's (their HX skus) so new supply is still entering | the market, but its unclear exactly how things will balance | out. In the short term (assuming demand remands high for crypto | cards), I'd expect scalped pricing to go up, not down. And | that's assuming these LHR's arent compromised like the original | mining-crippled 3060's have been. | sp332 wrote: | I think it's less about the upfront cost and more about hashes | per kilowatt-hour. | rsuttongee wrote: | Ah that makes sense, I forgot about power usage. | throwaway879 wrote: | Using a made up but probably good enough analogy, if scientist | created a blackhole in the lab that could end up sucking in the | entire planet and the solar system, would it be OK for someone to | jam the mechanism that sustains it? I think of PoW gambling | casinos slash Ponzi schemes (Bitcoin) in the same way. If the | governments don't have any motivation to stop the mayhem, then | the company whose products are being used to create that | blackhole should step in. I never liked Nvidia, but this is a | necessary decision. | bobviolier wrote: | Note that unfortunately they actually have a set of cards that | are better suited for crypto.. they just don't want you to use | these. | webinvest wrote: | I can't blame you for using a throwaway account for a comment | like that. Many cryptocurrencies provide value while video | games suck time and value. | koluna wrote: | I'm sorry, spit my coffee over the keyboard. What value does | cryptocurrency provide other than sucking the world's | electric energy for meaningless calculations? | mrkramer wrote: | Like I said for electricity, aren't you free to do with your GPU | whatever you want?! | | This is anti-consumer they should be sued. | | Just like ISPs wanted to slow your traffic for services they | don't like and didn't succeed hardware producers can not limit | what you do with your purchased hardware. | kaldorf wrote: | Other people doing research etc. _need GPUs_. If rich people | started to hoard all food or ffp masks, shops would intervene | first (they did during the hoarding last year) and the | government would follow if that wouldn 't help. | mrkramer wrote: | I guess you are referring to the Tragedy of the Commons[0] | but in the market efficient economy there should be enough | producers(supply) to serve high aggregate demand. This action | by NVIDIA only shows that GPU industry is highly concentrated | and that more competition is needed. It seems like NVIDIA is | a victim of its own success since it can not produce enough | GPUs. | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons | 988747 wrote: | And if they simply raised prices and made huge profits, | they could afford building their own fab, or at least | outbidding other companies for TSMC/Samsung/whoever fab | capacity... | lvl100 wrote: | Too little too late? I think mining has peaked with ETH POS shift | weeks away. We will soon find out how much of Nvidia's business | was truly driven by crypto versus what they conveyed to investors | in the past. | agilob wrote: | >Too little too late | | Just on time for ETH to move away from PoW! It's almost like | NVidia waited for ETH | TameAntelope wrote: | Does this mean my pre-crippled 3080 is now going to be worth even | more on the secondary market? | pvarangot wrote: | I would say yes. | mrkramer wrote: | Read Adam Smith. | [deleted] | Havoc wrote: | > company's dedicated GPU for professional mining | | What a world. What do you do for a living? Professional miner. oh | no not that kind of miner. | | Anyway...I'm guessing it's again only the eth hashing algo that's | crippled. | badkitty99 wrote: | Nvidia contributing directly to the energy waste | jacquesm wrote: | NVidia has a supply problem. Imagine making something that is so | popular that you continuously run out of stock for the people | that you originally intended your product for. The normal | solution would be to crank up production to the point where you | can supply all of your customers. Might even get some better | economies of scale out of it too. | | This is the dumb way to deal with the problem. Besides the fact | that it will get hacked it alienates a good chunk of their | customers who would be happy to drop more $ if there were more | product. | mjlee wrote: | I'm not sure this really is all that good for gamers. It'll solve | the short term problem of lack of supply, sure, but in a years | time we'll instead have a whole bunch of e-waste mining cards and | a very thin second-hand market for gaming cards. All upside for | Nvidia though! | Grimm1 wrote: | Can't drive people to the mining cards they've released if you | have everyone using the consumer hardware. | | As someone who really likes the performance and ecosystem around | NVIDIA cards this makes me happy, because I'll probably be able | to own one sometime before the heat death of the universe if | trends like this continue. But, | | "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers," | | Is a load of crock. They have a new mining focused product line | they want miners purchasing and they get the convenience of the | nice gamer PR from this to run it behind. | | Company gonna company. I'm not saying it's a bad thing by the | way, just don't think they're all pro gamer or doing it for | reasons besides money. | cortesoft wrote: | Their stated purpose is still true. They want to get these GPUs | to gamers and their mining GPUs to miners. | dheera wrote: | I think there are better ways than intentionally crippling a | general purpose compute platform. | | On the surface, the easiest, cheapest way to alleviate the | situation would be to require government ID for purchases and | limit it to 1 GPU per person, and relax the limitations for | educational institutions doing ML research. | | A more serious way to do it would be to administer a test | that you take in person (similar to the DMV); you pick either | a gaming skill test or a machine learning test, and if you | pass, you get to buy 1 GPU. This takes a bit more resources | though, logistically, and although it sounds silly I think it | would work. | neither_color wrote: | This is what my local microcenter does. They have a sign | when you walk in saying ONE gpu per customer per 30 days, | and they write down your license number to make sure. I | still was never able to get one(because people camp outside | the store the night before deliveries) but I appreciate | their effort. | gameswithgo wrote: | It really isn't a load of crock. For whatever reason NVIDIA has | a real interest in making gamers happy. You hear this as being | a serious motivation for them even from employees not on the | record. The most cynical take on it would be that they want to | do this for long term growth. Which if so, is fine. An example | of capitalism working. | Vespasian wrote: | Either proof-of-stake or ASICs are gonna make GPU Ether | mining rather short lived. | | Nvidia fears that all those customers will vanish over night. | SXX wrote: | They only fears that those consumers gonna sell their used | hardware which gonna cause drop demand for GPU for a long | time. | Vespasian wrote: | Well if the invisible hand off the market works in favour | of me for once, I'm not gonna complain | ericmay wrote: | Can't it be both? Seems like a win-win for Nvidia and gamers. | | I can genuinely see a company like Nvidia getting a lot of | customer feedback and maybe employees actually caring that | gamers can get their hands on Nvidia's cards. | erjiang wrote: | It makes sense to me that gamers as a market are more likely | to be brand-loyal and gaming is also more moat-able than | hashing. | | For miners, they just want whatever does more hashes per | second. There's no loyalty there and the hardware is | competing solely on hash/power/cost. For gaming, you have | proprietary software and APIs like "RTX"-branded stuff, game- | specific driver optimizations, etc. where you can better | defend yourself against AMD. | | So for Nvidia, if they're going to sell X GPUs either way, | they'd rather sell to gamers than miners to help preserve | their gaming market share which plausibly has more long-term | value. Just my guess, at least. | gruez wrote: | I think the cynicism is akin to apple removing the | charger/headphones from new iPhones. They claim it's for | environmental purposes, and maybe they really do care, but | many think it's just a cash grab. | rundevilrun wrote: | companies are people too! | munk-a wrote: | It is legitimately difficult to get a 3080 right now and I | suspect that Nvidia is actually eating a lot of bad PR for it | now. That said, if society turns around and starts viewing | mining as a significant climate change issue then building | hardware to specifically support that market is likely going to | be another PR disaster. | | I suspect Nvidia's marketing team has grown too comfortable on | consistently edging out AMD for ray tracing and isn't the | sharpest bunch of tools in the shed. | tshaddox wrote: | It doesn't seem like a load of crock to me. I don't know why | they would even bother creating a separate line for miners | unless they were worried about essentially telling the whole | gaming market "too bad" indefinitely. That might be more | lucrative in the short term because miners are willing to pay | more than gamers for the same card, but nvidia probably don't | want to just burn their bridge to the gaming community. | NazakiAid wrote: | A major bad point with this is when the mining cards become | obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a | computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So | realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to | gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used | graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card | instead). Short term fix, long term problem. | | I was thinking they could maybe get a second use in industry | however they mostly buy new cards (from my limited knowledge on | it). | | Nvidia knows the strats to make $$$ in the long term under the | guise of the good guy. | bentcorner wrote: | How big is the used market for graphics cards though? Common | advice is to avoid buying used unless you also price in the | risk that the card was used as a miner and hasn't been taken | care of. | | Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you | could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform | higher-end previous-gen parts. | ollien wrote: | I don't have a citation for how massive the used market is, | but I can tell you without a doubt that people in my circles | buy used cards, and that I commonly heard it as advice to | save a buck. | loeg wrote: | My most recent card purchase was used. I bought a used GTX | 1070 for $230 in 2019, when the 2000-series was new. I've | been happy with the price and performance; it hasn't died or | anything. | | > Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, | you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform | higher-end previous-gen parts. | | This wasn't true at the time. The high-end parts just have | many multiples of the compute units of the low end cards. | Nvidia 3xxx isn't 100% faster than 2xxx or 1xxx on a per-unit | basis, and the x080 cards have several times the compute of | the x030 or 50 parts. | | Another relevant concern is GPU RAM; the lower end parts just | have less RAM. Game performance completely falls over if more | RAM is needed than the card has. Very large displays need a | ton of GPU RAM. | paxys wrote: | There are tons of use cases for GPUs outside of output to a | display: audio/video encoding, render farms, scientific | computing. | rubito wrote: | This is incorrect since the onboard HDMI output can be used for | that as well (or a secondary GPU). | justaguy88 wrote: | Graphics cards without display outputs are still useful, you | can use them for VFIO and gpgpu workloads | gruez wrote: | What's the market for second hand GPUs for scientific | computing, compared to second hand GPUs for gaming? | kevingadd wrote: | NV sells tons of cards used for things other than mining and | video output already. The mining cards can be repurposed for | those use cases (compute, machine learning, etc) | wbraun wrote: | Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that | its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an | attack on general purpose computing. | | Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer | and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, | such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can | run is a whole new level. | | I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this | behavior by Nvidia. | hosh wrote: | I remember reading about this earlier in the year. What may not | be apparent from this article is that Nvida is also selling GPU | cards specifically designed for miners. | | https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ | creato wrote: | It is unfortunate, but it is less unfortunate than the behavior | of crypto miners. Freedom is great when people aren't using | their freedom to infringe on other people's freedom. | arthurcolle wrote: | How is someone mining on GPUs they bought themselves | infringing on your freedom, pray tell? | munk-a wrote: | I suspect this definition issue is partially due to | cultural issues - freedom means different things in | different parts of the world. Outside of the US societal | freedom and the freedom from pain are valued over the | individualistic freedom valued in the US. | | I don't think either view is absolutely correct after | having lived in a few different' societies - but there are | valid points to support a view where individual freedom to | act isn't the primary freedom to protect (i.e. protecting | the freedom for everyone to live a healthy life better | enables all individuals to achieve a greater degree of | freedom as a society than being individually focused). | | I really think there's a philosophical disagreement on what | freedom is at the core of a lot of the libertarian vs. | socialist arguments. | belltaco wrote: | The extra power usage is destroying our planet all for | someone to try and make a quick buck, and causing shortages | of GPUs during a pandemic where mental health from | entertainment like gaming is valuable and stops people from | going outside and getting/spreading the virus. The | incentives for crypto all are f'ed up right now. The ETH | PoS switch can't come soon enough. | arthurcolle wrote: | So earning income is less important than letting people | play video games? Let's just say I'm unconvinced by this | argument. | munk-a wrote: | I think it's quite fair to say earning income is less | important than allowing people to achieve happiness and | video games are a pretty well known way to accomplish | that. | knorker wrote: | Would you say the same if you could mine bitcoin by | buying up as much medicine as you could, and burning it? | | Because if you think the above behavior isn't "earning | income" clearly better than "play video games", then your | argument falls completely flat. | arthurcolle wrote: | this is a total false equivalence. you're really | comparing computing hashes to buying medicine and | destroying it? | PragmaticPulp wrote: | I don't know any gamers who can game 24/7, 7 days a week | with multiple GPUs. | | Mining and gaming aren't even close to comparable in | power usage. | ReptileMan wrote: | The moment Trump and Covid just don't deliver the current | ROI of clicks for the media, suddenly we started hearing | about how terrible crypto electricity usage is. | | The same way plastics are suffocating the fishes got | forgotten the moment everyone started to litter the world | with masks and packaging from food delivery. | | It is manufactured news story the same way that next one | will be. | fastball wrote: | What if you're only mining with renewables? | | And I'd actually like to see a study on the positive | mental health benefit of gaming, because I'm skeptical. | | Also the idea that you need a primo GPU in order to game | is a bit silly. And if you're the kind of person that | absolutely _needs_ the best graphics in order to enjoy | gaming, please see my point no. 2 about mental health. | shagie wrote: | > What if you're only mining with renewables? | | The issue isn't the "we're using renewable energy - see, | this doesn't make things worse." It also doesn't make | things better. Whats more, its increasing the consumption | of energy which is at the core of the problem. | | It would have been even better to push that renewable | energy out onto the grid (and also not increase the | consumption of power for crypto mining). | | Switching all new power consumption to renewable doesn't | improve things because the baseline of non-renewable is | still there. We need to reduce existing and switch | existing to renewable. | | I suspect a bit of Parkinson's law is in place with | energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law | -- The key is to stop making it worse (by mining crypto | and trying to justify it with "but its from renewable"). | onethought wrote: | I mine on renewables and with 3000 series gpus. I didn't | want to do any of this, I ended up here because my energy | retailer decided to tax me for exporting too much energy | to the grid. So short of earthing the electricity, my | solution was to burn it up in mining, and improve my | solar roi. | | The 3000 series gpus are the most efficient hashes/watt. | So actually by disabling this, you are driving people | towards less efficient/worse for the environment ASICS | machines. | | Yes I batteried my home, and use my solar on everything I | can first... there is still excess... especially at peak. | | Pretty sure this dismantled most of your argument. | icoder wrote: | This is a bit of a two wrongs don't make a right: the | fact that your energy retailer is taxing you doesn't (by | itself) make it 'right' to use that energy for mining. | | Ofcourse I totally understand you do as you do, on an | individual basis, but that just stresses the point that | this can only be regulated at the group/population level. | Axien wrote: | Out of curiosity, has the mining yet payed for the | rig/card? | istorical wrote: | You are the exception of all exceptions. What percentage | of GPUs being purchased for the purposes of crypto are | for reasons like yours vs being bought by already wealthy | conglomerates and mining groups to further enrich the new | crypto multi-millionaire/billionaire class. | fastball wrote: | It's not anyone's responsibility to make things "better" | for you or anyone else. | | The person I was replying to said that mining was | destroying the planet. This doesn't seem particularly | true to me if you're mining on renewables. | whydoibother wrote: | Aren't most miners in China and use coal power? Seems | like it is contributing to destroying the planet then. | drexlspivey wrote: | > increasing the consumption of energy which is at the | core of the problem. | | How is consuming energy a problem? There is a blob of | infinite energy on the sky and practically all of it is | wasted. | henriquez wrote: | I'm not sure how crypto mining infringes on anyone's freedom? | bl0b wrote: | Could you explain how you see crypto miners as infringing on | other's freedoms? | | I certainly agree with your first sentence, and think NVIDIA | crippling hash rates on their GPUs is the lesser of two evils | - just because I think crypto miners are a) wasting massive | amounts of electricity and b) messing up prices in the GPU | market. | Valmar wrote: | Let's see... crypto-miners hoarding GPUs by the tens, | hundreds, even, driving up GPU prices for the non-miner. | Also, when the cycle busts, hoards of cheap, abused mining | cards flood the second-hand market, making it difficult for | companies to sell fresh cards, and also possibly hurting | the company's reputation when an abused mined-on GPU fails | prematurely. | | Miners can whine, all they want, but something needs to | happen to hamper their greed for virtual money. | seneca wrote: | > Freedom is great when people aren't using their freedom to | infringe on other people's freedom. | | Other people driving up the price on something you want is | not "[infringing] on other people's freedom". It's an | inconvenience, but you're still completely free to buy at the | inflated price. | dorkwood wrote: | Could the price ever reach a point where you would say it | infringes on the general public's freedom to purchase? Or | are all prices simply greater and greater inconveniences? | Vrondi wrote: | No. There is no constitution of any nation which says you | are owed the freedom to be guaranteed that a luxury good | (like gaming graphics cards) will be available when you | feel like buying it. Market scarcity of luxury goods has | no infringement on anyone's freedom. Just like market | availability of luxury cars or gold jewelry in no way | infringes on anyone's freedom. | Siira wrote: | People hate competition. It's not like the big tech is made | out of bricks. The small timer says competing users of GPUs | are evil, the Apple lawyer bullshits on how they can't even | allow mentions of alternative payment gateways less the | security gods become angry. | willis936 wrote: | Indeed. I buy fast computers because they are fun toys. What if | I want to play around with password cracking on my gaming | machine? Is the hardware going to detect that I am running hash | algorithms and throttle it? Is this a game reserved for state- | level players behind closed doors? | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > What if I want to play around with password cracking on my | gaming machine? | | Currently, you'd have to pay $2500 or more to buy a scalped | card anyway unless you get really, really lucky with | something like the Newegg Shuffle. | | If they break the mining incentive, they're going to drop the | price of these cards and also make them more available. | | I'd rather have a hashrate limited card that I can actually | buy at a reasonable price than a fully unlocked card that | can't be obtained for anything less than 3X MSRP. | willis936 wrote: | Well, the article does say that it will only be in a future | revision of cards. I already bought a new 3070 from a | friend for a mere 10% over the (already ludicrous) MSRP. | | What about when ETH moves to PoS or the crypto market | crashes? The concern is that this feels more like a ratchet | in a bad direction rather than a temporary fix. | kemonocode wrote: | It angers me too, and most people are definitely getting upset | with the wrong party- it is not to say crypto miners are | magically devoid of guilt or that there aren't issues with | scalpers, but these are all, deep down, supply issues that have | sprung due to an over-reliance on Just-In-Time manufacturing. | Pandemic-induced shortages merely compound what was already a | problem. | barrkel wrote: | It's market segmentation, and it's not a new strategy. | | The market is bimodal. There's the crypto miners and there's | the gamers. Right now, gamers are getting starved out and | middlemen are pocketing the surplus selling gaming cards to | crypto miners. | | Nvidia want to capture more of that surplus for themselves, | while also taking money from the gamers. Satisfy both markets | with different products at different prices, prices that leave | less money on the table. | the_cat_kittles wrote: | a succinct, correct explanation imo. if your angry, it should | be at crypto before anything else. a largely useless tech | that has lots of negative externalities, like this one. | ajmurmann wrote: | Given there is just more demand than supply. With this model | they are still sitting customers who are willing to pay less | for the same good. If there wasn't such a tight supply | constraint right now, this strategy would make 100% sense to | me. Right now they should just auction the cards off from | their website. Keep all the margin and get the cards to the | buyer for whom the goods are worth the most | smoldesu wrote: | I dunno, the freedom fighter in me thinks this is a terrible | idea, but my rationale says that it doesn't make much of a | difference. Nvidia's hash rate limitation is really their way | of telling miners that they aren't interested in their | business. I _suppose_ I could see Nvidia taking a hard left | turn here and stopping acceleration for other things (like ML | and physics calculations), but why would they? CudNN and PhysX | are already such massive investments to them that throwing it | out would break comparability with several games /apps and | outrage the professional/consumer market. | | So given how few choices Nvidia has, I think I trust them to | call this. At the very least, it should reduce their hardware | demand to tolerable levels, so they can focus on securing | better silicon rather than simply _more_. | tshaddox wrote: | Don't these hardware manufacturers already deliberately reduce | the performance of some chips just so they can sell them for | cheaper without actually developing and manufacturing an | additional line of chips (i.e. price discrimination)? This | doesn't seem much different. | Siira wrote: | Price discrimination is evil. Perfect discrimination leads to | products having zero economic worth to the consumer. | tshaddox wrote: | It's easy to think of it that way. But here's another way | to think about it: a manufacturer has two assembly lines | for two different products which are sold at two price | points. As they scale up production, they realize that they | could realize significant economies of scale if they | combine their assembly lines and only produce the more | expensive product, but then apply an "artificial" | limitation to half of those products so they can still sell | to both markets. Is it somehow wrong for them to offer the | same two product lines to the same two markets, but just | with a more efficient manufacturing process? | nickff wrote: | De-rated units are usually chips that didn't perform as well | as they could have. A variety of manufacturing discrepancies | (defects) can cause excess heat dissipation or non-functional | cores. | | Selecting what a given unit should be rated to (clocked at or | enabled to do) is often known as 'binning', and is common | throughout the electronics industry. | neither_color wrote: | That's called binning but it's not as bad as it seems and it | reduces waste. The way chips are manufactured all the high | end and lower end variants come from the same process, but | the company can only guarantee the performance of the higher | binned ones. | neither_color wrote: | While I wholeheartedly agree that nvidia should do this, what | bothers me is that they take functionality away without adding | anything in or lowering the price. They are selling a | "technically" inferior SKU for the same price. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | > While I wholeheartedly agree that nvidia should do this, | but bothers me is that they take functionality away without | adding anything in or lowering the price. | | Vendors are selling cards at 10-50% above MSRP and scalpers | are selling them at 200-300% of MSRP precisely because | they're usable for mining. | | By breaking the mining incentive, they _are_ dropping prices | for consumers. Considerably. | CardenB wrote: | Due to supply constraints, retail does not represent the true | price. 3080s are generally going for $3k on eBay right now. | Their move is allowing the price of the card to LOWER back to | retail price. | lacker wrote: | They aren't really "selling" the unlocked RTX 3080, though. | They go for $2500 on ebay, and you're essentially winning a | lottery if you manage to get one at the advertised $800 | price. In practice acquiring a restricted RTX 3080 is going | to be a lot cheaper than acquiring an unrestricted one. | exmicrosoldier wrote: | I work in SaaS. Availability is a key feature. | | A service with more features that I can't use is less | valuable than one with less features that I can use whenever | I want. | Scarblac wrote: | In an abstract sense, yes. | | But crypto with proof of work is such a huge energy wasting | uselessness that any action against them is welcome. Besides if | they don't, then their old markets will disappear because they | can't get cards anymore and start doing other things, and then | when crypto is made illegal or crashes for good, they suddenly | lose their whole market. | saurik wrote: | But this isn't an action "against" mining: this is just so | they can use DRM techniques to build the computational | equivalent of a network neutrality violation to price | discriminate a high value use case to their CMP HX line. | bb88 wrote: | If I were a chip manufacturer like NVDA, I would pursue the | crypto market with a special chips for each different crypto, | to move the crypto market off their gamer line. | | Then let the crypto people pay 6x for 4x performance using half | the power, e.g, meanwhile using that income to fund the | research for the the 3nm, 2nm, 1nm production lines. | emsy wrote: | If we didn't have such a dire chip shortage I would be upset on | principle, but I see this as a move that's supposed to help | long time customers get a hand at a _Graphics_ card at a | reasonable price. Once mining will ebb off, those customers are | unlikely to keep buying Nvidia products so it's entirely | understandable why they would do this. Also, it's not like on | iOS where the company whitelists apps, this is a very specific | blacklisting. | varispeed wrote: | What is the business case for prioritising casual non-tech | customer over bulk order specialist customer? | PragmaticPulp wrote: | The casual customer will still be buying GPUs 10 years from | now. | | The bulk order GPU miners will stop ordering GPUs the | minute mining becomes unprofitable. With proof-of-stake and | ASICs on the horizon, this could happen rather abruptly. | | When miners are done with GPUs, they're going to unload | them on the secondary market. The used GPU market is going | to be flooded with GPUs that have been overclocked and run | with the demanding synthetic workloads 24/7, which is going | to create a high failure rate. This is going to sour a lot | of people who buy those used mining cards and experience | failures later. | | In short: They're gaining goodwill with the long term | customers at the expense of the short-term customers. This | is fine, because the short-term customers will disappear | soon and the long-term customers can consume all of their | production anyway. | vladvasiliu wrote: | This doesn't really make sense to me. What would the | "casual customer" do if nvidia didn't introduce this | segmentation? Would this completely halt the gaming | industry such that 10 years from now no one would even | consider buying a GPU? I don't believe that. | | Also, if they're able to produce both consumer GPUs and | miner GPUs to meet both demands, what's stopping them | from doing it now? Is it not worth their while at current | prices, so bumping the miner GPU prince by a significant | amount would change that? Why not just increases prices | as it is? It seems to me that the actual price charged by | amd and nvidia isn't that outrageous, it's just that the | cards are bought well in advance and possibly scalped | later. | yoz-y wrote: | Nvidia does not want to hike the prices because last time | they did this in the same circumstances they lost a lot | of goodwill. | patrickk wrote: | Actually GPUs used for mining are typically undervolted | to keep power costs down, and by running them 24/7 there | is less thermal expansion and contraction so they're not | expected to fail at higher rates than other GPUs. | | Source: I used to mine ETH years ago on used AMD GPUs | when that was still profitable. From perusing mining | forums this is still standard practice. I eventually sold | all the GPUs and all of them worked flawlessly. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | Doesn't really matter. Running a card 100% 24/7 is still | harder on it that gaming a couple hours per day. | | GPUs are relatively reliable, but fans less so. The | failures are usually an early death of the fan, which | can't be replaced without strapping something else to the | shroud with zip ties or watercooling it. | | Miners aren't usually impacted because the failures | happen after several years. It's the downstream buyers | who lose out and then associate the brand with premature | failure. | mdoms wrote: | They're also instantly selling every single GPU they can | produce either way, so there's no downside. | NovemberWhiskey wrote: | This - plus if all the new GPUs are going into ETH miners | rather than gaming rigs, what incentive will game | developers have to target new features or optimize for | them? | bee_rider wrote: | And it is a pretty common complaint that companies | sacrifice long-term interest for short term concerns. It | is interesting to see a company apparently intentionally | make the opposite decision (and have people still | complain). | dlp211 wrote: | Isn't this true of any and every decision? There will | always be people with different opinions, so when a | decision is made, those on the "losing" side of that | decision will complain. | capableweb wrote: | "If we didn't have such a dire X I would be upset on | principle, but I see this as a move that's supposed to help | ..." | | What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it | get challenged? Then it's just a opinion, which is fine by | itself and it's ok to change opinion, smart people do it all | the time. But don't call it a principle. | | Unlikely that mining will disappear because NVIDIA limits a | specific algoritm/client software/however the limit is | implemented. It will, like most "limit for your self- | protection" systems, eventually be broken. Miners are already | not afraid of picking apart the components they are using, so | neither software nor hardware is safe. | emsy wrote: | I think your criticism is valid, but I don't think it's | sensible to adhere to principles in a black and white way. | For me, the minor restriction put in place by Nvidia is the | lesser evil when you consider that they could just as well | sell out to the miners and drastically increase their | margins. In fact, I think it's a very sympathetic move. I | don't think "it will be broken" is a good argument, because | the intent displayed by Nvidia does matter. | ALittleLight wrote: | Their intent is to limit what people can do with their | hardware. That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell | the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do. | | I think cryptocurrency is a scam and I'll be glad if/when | it goes away and graphics cards become cheap again. | However, I will never support hardware manufacturers | infringing on the idea of general purpose computing for | the sake of their business model. | | If they want gamers to get more graphics cards then make | so many graphics cards that everyone will be able to | afford them. Don't try to artificially limit what the | hardware can do. | istorical wrote: | If it suddenly became wildly profitable to buy all of the | bread and rice and any form of carbohydrate from food | manufacturers and grocery stores and burn it in a field, | would it still be morally wrong for food producers to | figure out a way to cripple the utility of their food | products by making them unburnable? Is there some | capitalist principle or moral principle of the free | market that overrides all other human needs and values? | | What is the principle you are defending and at what point | does it become less important than other principles? | ALittleLight wrote: | If the choice was between restricting food - i.e making | it less profitable to burn, to make it more available to | the hungry and letting food be free and the hungry | starve, then that's a pick between the best of two bad | options. Clearly it's better to feed people than let food | be unrestricted. | | In this case though the choice is between restricting | hardware to give gamers more affordable GPUs. The benefit | doesn't match the cost. | | The principle is something like freedom or ownership. | Arbitrary restrictions are bad because freedom is good. | By definition arbitrary restrictions aren't needed | (arbitrary) and reduce freedom (restriction). | nitrogen wrote: | Freedom is only good until an incentive aligns that | causes harm to the long-term stability of an industry or | society. Right now, people who want to create value | cannot do so because a paperclip maximizer has found a | way to exploit the system for its own gain. Nvidia's | move, futile as it may be, aims to maintain the stability | of the GPU market for professionals and consumers, the | actual value producers of society. Crypto mining does not | produce true value commensurate to the burden it is | currently placing on all other industries that use | computing power. | stale2002 wrote: | > Their intent is to limit what people can do with their | hardware. | | Not really. The intent is to get graphics cards in the | hands of gamers and professionals, instead of in the | hands of crypto miners. | | That is the end goal here. If you have a better solution, | of how to do this without people getting around it via | reselling, ect , please suggest it. | ALittleLight wrote: | My solution is not to do that. Make and sell the cards to | the people who will buy them. If you're selling out make | more and/or raise prices. | stale2002 wrote: | > If you're selling out make more and/or raise prices. | | What if you want to raise prices only to crypto miners, | and not raise them for gamers/professions, in order to | support your long term customers? | | There are lots of very good business reasons to provide | preferential treatment to a specific customer base, and | to raise prices on a different customer base. | | It is called price discrimination, and is very useful. | | Do you not support companies making obvious business | decisions like this, with their own company, that have | large benefits to their existing customer base, as well | as being perfectly rational from a business perspective? | | Having crypto miners subsidize an existing customer base, | makes a lot of business sense, and helps out a lot of | people. | | And it is all done, with people making voluntary | decisions with the products that they choose to sell. | Don't buy the product, if you don't like it. | gpanders wrote: | > Their intent is to limit what people can do with their | hardware. That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell | the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do. | | If you need to run millions of hashes per second then buy | one of the non-LHR models. No one is forcing you to buy | one of these chips and Nvidia is not taking anything away | from you. | | This is like saying that Intel limits what people can do | with their hardware because they make both i3 and i9 | chips. There is a spectrum of options to fit more | people's needs. | emsy wrote: | >If they want gamers to get more graphics cards then make | so many graphics cards that everyone will be able to | afford them. Don't try to artificially limit what the | hardware can do. | | If there are poor people why don't they print more money? | But seriously, I addressed this in my reply: there is an | ongoing chip shortage in the industry (besides the fact | that it may not make sense to scale a production line for | a demand surge). | tshaddox wrote: | > What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when | it get challenged? | | Huh? To me, refusing to even acknowledge or entertain | criticism for one's principles is one of the worst things I | can imagine. Principles ought to be routinely subjected to | criticism, no different than scientific theories. | capableweb wrote: | > refusing to even acknowledge or entertain criticism | | I'm not advocating for you not listen to criticism aimed | towards your principle. But if your principle gets put to | the test and you abandon it, it's no longer something you | fundamentally agree on, it was some "light belief" that | you had. | mdoms wrote: | This is nonsense. Principles should adapt to the context | they're applied in. In principle I'm against big | government intervention into our personal lives, but you | bet your ass I'm in favour of lockdowns when thousands of | lives are at stake. I'm not going to let thousands of my | compatriots die out of principle. | ALittleLight wrote: | This is just imprecise statement of principle. It's more | like you're against the government intervening unless | they're credibly doing it to save lives. If someone | discovered how to turn a microwave into a nuclear bomb, | presumably you'd support government intervention to | collect all the microwaves, even if they had to intervene | a lot in our lives. Likewise, you support government | intervention to reduce covid deaths, etc. | tshaddox wrote: | Sure, you could just say that your "principles" are | simply the entire exact sequence of actions you take in | your life. That way you could by definition never change | or violate your principles. | | But usually people use "principle" to refer to a | relatively concise statement that can be applied to a | large variety of situations. | ALittleLight wrote: | I'm not familiar with any definition of the word | principle that includes the idea of "concise". | | Principle as I'm using it here is a moral belief or | guide. It's less a description of what you do and more an | explanation for why you do what you do. | tshaddox wrote: | I just mean that it must be more concise than a lookup | table from every possible situational input to the | recommended output. The same is implied by the term | "explanation." | tshaddox wrote: | Replace "principle" with "scientific theory." Why | shouldn't principles be subject to tests and criticism? | just-ok wrote: | In the same way that a scientific theory was meaningless | if it failed a test, a principle was meaningless if it | needed to be adjusted when actually put to use. | tshaddox wrote: | Superseded scientific theories aren't all "meaningless." | Newton's laws of motion are superseded, but they aren't | meaningless, and you presumably wouldn't say that | scientists who updated their beliefs in the face of new | evidence and explanations were doing anything wrong. | void_mint wrote: | > What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when | it get challenged? | | The realities of life make most principles less finite than | one would hope. If Nvidia doesn't want to rebrand as a | crypto-hardware company, they're going to take action so | their products and brand match _their principles_. | UnFleshedOne wrote: | How big is each of your principles (in terms of information | complexity) that they cover significant enough number of | all possible conditions and circumstances? | just-ok wrote: | I'm sure plenty of people would agree to an absolute "I | don't steal" principle--one that covers a pretty | significant number of conditions & circumstances-and yet | not go back to the register when they accidentally walked | out of the grocery store with something, or compromise it | more significantly under stress of hunger. In this case, | one could argue "I don't steal" was never a principle | they actually held. | renewiltord wrote: | A principle is a moral heuristic so you don't have to scan | to root of your moral argument tree on every moral | question. As a heuristic, it attempts to compress the moral | space down and will naturally have exceptions. | | As a compressed form of your moral judgment, it is also | useful for you to quickly communicate your position on the | moral space, and it is up to participants in social | interactions to decide whether or not someone is good at | this moral judgment compression. | | For instance, I have a principle not to lie in general. | Most social participants know that this does not constrain | me from lying in specific situations. After repeated | interactions they can tell whether this principle of mine | is held in a manner that's useful to them. | | The same principle also allows me to quickly judge | situations that require me to lie. Is it okay for me to | tell this person that their house is painted poorly? Well, | I have this anti-lie principle so that pulls me toward | "yes". I might have other principles that pull me in other | directions. | | Of course you can treat principles as immutable moral rods. | This presumably has some value to you. In general, people | do not act in this manner, however. | just-ok wrote: | I think your loose definition of "principle" does not | meet many others': it's definitely intended to be | stricter than a heuristic. | | Of course even though you can have _relaxed_ principles, | e.g. "I usually don't lie" vs. "I don't lie," I think the | point here is that if you believe or preach a particular | "principle," but then adjust it for yourself when it's | convenient (for example a "just this once" scenario), it | was never a principle to begin with. | vehementi wrote: | No. Only the miners. All for this. | cortesoft wrote: | You can still buy unlocked GPUs. What is wrong with creating a | new product people want? I want a gaming GPU that is powerful | and reasonably priced and actually available to be purchased. | Unless Nvidia does this, how else can they provide that product | for me? | nucleardog wrote: | And unless Nvidia does this, what does their market look like | in 5 or 10 years? | | People won't wait around not upgrading their systems forever | because the price of their cards has been bid up by crypto | miners to unaffordable levels. | | At some point Nvidia simply won't have a consumer market | anymore. They'll let go of a market-leading position in | favour of the crypto miners. | | What are they going to do when the crypto mining goes away? | Uberphallus wrote: | Yes, it sucks, but the tragedy of the commons is real[0]. Not | that I defend NVs solution, but I think the problem is worse | overall. | | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons | m3kw9 wrote: | Not at all, part of the reason is crypto miners buy up all the | supplies and gamers can't buy them. Then when crypto prices | fall they dump old cards back onto the market. It hurts both | sides | NortySpock wrote: | It looks like this is tied to the hardware, so miners should | look to avoid a particular manufacturing run of a SKU. | | Personally, I'm ok with this approach as it's tied to the | hardware, and can be researched by everyone ahead of time to | avoid "Model X, manufactured from Y to Z dates". Hopefully this | can be determined from the SKU + serial number easily by a | human reading the serial number. | | It's not a software driver change nerfing the card remotely, | which I would be absolutely against. It appears it could be | eventually reverse engineered and bypassed, which I'm also ok | with. | | It's also not immediate e-waste as miners will avoid it anyway, | and gamers can just use the card as normal regardless of the | manufacturing run -- this isn't hardware that lacks video | ports. | wpietri wrote: | I'm all for it. My system with a 3080 had a hardware issue so I | needed to swap it for a new one. It took me weeks of | shenanigans with the vendor because they couldn't get a new | card to send me a new system. And that was after a month's wait | to get the original system, also due to supply constraints. I | have actual work to do, and am fine with NVidia making it | harder for make-money-fast potlatchers if that means I can | actually buy their product to do useful work. | colordrops wrote: | I bought an MSI desktop with a 3080 specifically for gaming. | I didn't even know you could mine ethereum with a 3080 until | after buying it. I've been running a miner using power from | my solar cells when I'm not gaming. I don't deserve to have | my card crippled. Fuck NVidia. | | EDIT: Ok, I bothered to read the article. This is a hardware | measure for new cards, not existing cards. | knorker wrote: | No matter if you think of what's happening here, NVidia is | _clearly_ not the bad guys in this story. | _vertigo wrote: | It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on | here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, | I would expect people on HN to object to this move on | principle. | | Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in | principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare | example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free | to run at their max capability, not deliberately hamstrung, | etc. etc. - to me, this kind of ties in with the "software | should be free" principle) conflicts with a more immediate | desire to play the latest video games (lol). | | Harder to take the principled approach when you've been waiting | "like 11 whole months for the 3080 I mean seriously dude". | aeternum wrote: | How do you feel about laser printers and color photocopiers | refusing to photocopy government currency? | _vertigo wrote: | What, you mean because they are legally obligated to refuse | to do so? | michaelmrose wrote: | The free market and personal liberty aren't magical tools | that when combined produce a functional system. From the | outside the GPU market is probably unfixably broken. Capacity | to manufacture is an extremely expensive investment that will | be wasted if cryptomining on GPUs becomes merely somewhat | less effective. Meanwhile GPUs are being driven out of the | price range where their natural market can actually afford | them. | | Imagine if it were so profitable to haul small trailers of | goods around for amazon that basic passenger cars went from | 20k to 70k and nobody was interested in expanding car | manufacturing to meet the new demand because the capacity | might well go to waste next year. It would be untenable. | | If car manufacturers started selling cars that were | deliberately shitty at towing but still worked great for | moving people from A to B I think they can be forgiven. | | We want freedom to use our hardware but we need to have a | functional market as well and this one has been broken for | years with no sure end date. | gruez wrote: | > It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many | people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I | would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this | move on principle. | | Sounds like free speech. People were all for unrestricted | free speech... until the right wing started using it. | pavel_lishin wrote: | I think it's hard to take the principled approach when you | see that the result of sticking to principles results in | large organizations enriching themselves while ignoring the | myriad externalities. | | At least, it makes you re-evaluate your principles. | _vertigo wrote: | What, externalities like energy waste? If that's the case, | why target ETH, isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon?[1] | I admit I don't really know if what Nvidia is targeting | applies to both pre-merge and post-merge ETH | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586 | formerly_proven wrote: | > isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon? | | Ethereum is going proof of stake soon for a few years | now. | thereare5lights wrote: | > I would expect people on HN to object to this move on | principle. | | I cannot think of any principle that would cause me to object | to this. | | Blind fealty to general purpose computing here conflicts with | the very real world impact on non-crypto consumers. If we're | being utilitarian, it seems to me that it would be obvious | that this is a good move. | _vertigo wrote: | I mean, why are non-crypto consumers better than crypto | ones from a utilitarian POV? (I play video games and | dislike crypto - I'm just asking). I suppose that people do | things other than gaming with 3080s, because I would be | hard pressed to make a convincing argument that gaming is | somehow so much more valuable of a hobby than mining crypto | that it's worth the hit to general purpose computing to | specifically ban crypto | istorical wrote: | I think the missing factor here is that mining groups are | sort of like neo-feudalists. | | If crypto ends up becoming the de facto world currency, | then mining groups that are already wealthy purchasing | all available stock of GPUs to mine and further enrich | themselves is sort of like if 70% of land was owned by | wealthy nobles, and they used the profits from their land | ownership to purchase all new land-producing/discovering | capital and therefore become the owners of all new land | coming onto the market. It's like the worst nightmare of | those worried about income inequality. And it just so | happens to affect retail consumers who just want "land" | for other purposes than becoming richer. | nitrogen wrote: | I use my GPU to render visualizations for my work and for | educational YouTube videos. It's not just gaming, but | even then, belittling gaming is kind of silly. | Entertainment has value too, and that entertainment | supports lots of actual people doing actual work. | | And crypto itself is the biggest hit to general purpose | computing outside of the walled garden world of phones. | What computing can be done if crypto speculation consumes | all available computing power? | Daishiman wrote: | Content creators, specialty industrial systems, R&D | researchers, and designers are core customers of nVidia's | products too. | | They frankly contribute to society in a way that | speculators never will. | wpietri wrote: | No principle exists in a vacuum. In practice, all are | balanced against other principles. | | Let's run with your "software should be free" as an example. | Licenses like the GPL family apparently work against that, in | that they add restrictions. But so-called "viral" licenses | aim to maximize a different kind of freedom for a larger | number of less powerful players. Some call this hypocritical, | but it's just balancing principles while taking into account | outcomes. | | Another way to put it is that principles for most aren't | religious commandments; they're mental tools to push the | world toward a set of preferred results. | babypuncher wrote: | Without price discrimination, everyday users end up paying | more for a given product while for-profit entities would pay | less. | | When a company releases a product, they price it according to | how much profit they want to make per unit sold. Market | segmentation allows them to sell their product at a lower | margin to lower income users and shift much of that profit | burden to corporate customers who can easily afford it. | | Where I take issue with this practice is when manufacturers | start suing users who modify their own hardware to enable | features that they didn't pay the manufacturer for. Tesla | selling heated seats as a software upgrade is a good example. | It's fine if they want to build the hardware into every Tesla | and only enable it for users that pay for it, but suing | customers who modify their vehicle to turn on the heated | seats on their own is way out of line. | | I don't think Nvidia is going too far here, unless they start | suing customers who try to write custom drivers that bypass | the limitation. | neolog wrote: | Why does Nvidia even want to sell to low-priced buyers, if | they are saturating their manufacturing capacity with the | high-priced buyers alone? | babypuncher wrote: | Because those price-sensitive buyers (PC gamers) are far | more likely to be loyal customers down the road than | crypto miners, who will immediately stop buying GPUs as | soon as mining stops being profitable again. | | Nvidia wants to give PC gamers a reason to stay on "Team | Green" by making it easier for them to get a card at a | reasonable price during this perfect storm of limited | silicon availability and insane crypto mining demand. | | I actually think that this particular move is more about | rate limiting purchases intended for crypto mining than | it is about putting miners in a different market segment. | akersten wrote: | It's been a shift I've noticed over the last ~15(?) years of | browsing these and similar forums - as they become more well- | known and frequented by the general public, the opinions | start to lose nuance and aren't as tightly coupled to the | principles from which the forum was borne. | | Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years | ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was | planning a massive law to regulate the way you can process | data that internet browsers voluntarily send to your server, | there would be principled outrage. But, speak ill of GDPR on | today's HN, and you'll quickly find yourself inundated with | anti-tech talking points. | | The filter bubble doesn't last forever :) | pjc50 wrote: | Or perhaps those of us who've been here since Fidonet are | weary of nuance-free libertarianism. _Shrug_ | Daishiman wrote: | Not really. | | Principles are borne of small communities because small | communities can afford to be principles. | | Before software ate the world, the impact that damaging | actors had was much more limited. A few computers would get | a few viruses here and there but that was it. | | We live a world where computers have been integrated into | the fabric of society, and where system risks do not have | easy, principled answers. | | And if principles don't adapt and negotiate with reality, | its defenders will just be isolated from the rest of | society which can't afford to lose a lot of other things, | which include other, possibly more important, principles. | | What changed with regards to GDPR was that 15 years ago | there weren't Facebooks, Amazons, and other megacorps that | had the personal data of 30% of the world's population | available for their use. Tech monopolies encroached | different product areas. | | What changed in 15 years is that we grew up, we acquired | power, we became more integrated into society and as such | the risk profiles change. You either do, or you become | irrelevant like many of the Free Software activists who | were a vanguard back then and whose opinion nowadays | matters little. | orangecat wrote: | _It 's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many | people on here are supporting this move._ | | Unfortunately, I'm not surprised. Support for general purpose | computing and user freedom has fallen substantially in the | last several years. Look at iOS, where many geeks are happy | to have a megacorporation tell you what you're allowed to run | on "your" hardware. | karaterobot wrote: | I think you're reading too much into people's reactions. I | think this is a good move for Nvidia in the medium and long | run. Gaming is the stated purpose of these cards; hashing is | an unexpected and temporary phenomenon for them. Ethereum is | moving away from PoW, and more regulation is undoubtedly | coming to crypto, with its environmental cost likely a | compelling bullet point. Why wouldn't they try to get back to | their core business of selling GPUs to gamers? | babypuncher wrote: | You say that, but but you might change your tune if 4 months | from now you can easily buy an Nvidia card because miners | stopped buying them while AMD cards are still scarce. | void_mint wrote: | At some point, someone has to take action against harmful | behavior, right? In the last few years, we've seen tons | extremely problematic behavior arise out of well-principled | technology (all of social media, cryptocurrency, etc). Groups | of people say "When will we do something?!?!?!", and then, when | something is done, other people say "But the principle of | ___!". | | Sometime, someone has to do something about problematic | behavior. The US government isn't going to do anything about it | (as is evidenced by reality), but private companies are more | than welcome to shape their products to match that company's | intended vision for their product. Twitter didn't want fascist | rants, Nvidia doesn't want all of their cards to be hoarded by | crypto miners. | cma wrote: | Do you really believe Nvidia is being an enforcer here to | "take action against harmful behavior"? It's just price | discrimination. They saw they were leaving money on the | table. Unless they thought it a huge PR win to do it, it's | probably not much different in motivation than the previous | thing with them segmenting out datacenter use. | behringer wrote: | As a gamer, I'd much rather they take miner's money for | miner's uses and leave me able to play games in my spare | time. | imbnwa wrote: | I can't believe this is so downvoted. So I, a gaming | consumer, have to compete with bots every release because | there's so much money in accommodating miner demand for | the same cards? That's ridiculous | kyboren wrote: | No, that's arbitrage. | katbyte wrote: | It's how I feel about getting a ps5, scalpers grab your | all the inventory and I refuse to buy one from them so | here I am just given up on a next gen consolfor the near | future | void_mint wrote: | > Do you really believe Nvidia is being an enforcer here to | "take action against harmful behavior"? | | Nvidia has deemed crypto mining harmful to their brand and | product and have taken action against it, so yes I do | believe that. | | > It's just price discrimination | | And? | undersuit wrote: | I felt similar anger for similar decisions. GPUs are complex | pieces of hardware present in so much of our world but we are | reliant on the manufacture to provide a driver to control the | hardware. An open(source) driver is nice but doesn't allow you | to do anything not documented, and open hardware is an | nonstarter for capitalism with our weak IP laws(but hey let's | protect a drawn mouse indefinitely.) | | Nvidia has done things like this before and it can get worse. | Imagine a future GPU where only authorized drivers have access | to certain features, and I'm not talking about the difference | between consumer and workstation GPUs unlocking a few obscure | openGL functions in the drivers. | jp_sc wrote: | It does, but that the fact that the ponzy scheme that is | cryptocurrency hasn't been made illegal by now should angers me | even more. | floil wrote: | It's not a whole new level. An aspect of Quadro differentiation | has, since ages ago, been based on selectively disabling | features that the consumer gpus silicon was capable of. It's | the same strategy here. | | This makes sense to Nvidia because it creates a segment | differentiation and will allow them to charge more for the | higher hash rate parts. | michaelmrose wrote: | What if they do it effectively and AMD GPU end up twice as | expensive because gamers and miners have to compete for cards | and the miners want 30 and you want 1. | caconym_ wrote: | My next GPU is going to be one that a) supports the features I | want, and b) that I can actually go out and buy without putting | hundreds or thousands of dollars into some economic parasite's | pocket. It's not just "hard" to buy high-end GPUs right now-- | it's _impossible_ unless you make a lifestyle out of chasing | them down. | | If this has any effect on anybody who isn't a crypto miner, | it's going to be to open up possibilities and/or save them | money. I have trouble finding fault with that, and we're | surrounded by far more egregious erosions of our "right" to buy | and use general-purpose computers. | floatingatoll wrote: | Cryptomining angers me on a deep level far more than the | nascent attempts of Nvidia to segment it. I think they're doing | an incompetent job of diminishing the value of it, but at least | they're making an effort to do so. | | Cryptominers are a far greater threat to general purpose | computing than Nvidia. They ought to be compelled by law to | purchase carbon credits for their mining, to offset the | environmental destruction their petty "get rich quick" efforts | have inflicted on the planet, enforced through Coinbase et al. | and with noncompliant (offshore) exchange/wash platforms | blocked and their users prosecuted through national laws and | international agreements. Cryptominers and the malware they've | created makes a very strong argument for walled gardens with | enforcement and review of applications, simply because the vast | majority of PC users are worse than useless at preventing | misuse of general purpose Windows. | | I also think this proves Apple right on integrating the GPU on- | die with the CPU, and not selling the CPU standalone at all, | because Apple -- unlike Nvidia and AMD -- is having no such | trouble with miners on _their_ general computing platform. This | issue is for whatever reason restricted to DIY PCs, and | cryptomining will be the end of DIY PCs if this keeps up. | | (Perhaps you meant "DIY computing" rather than "general purpose | computing"? I definitely see Nvidia's steps as interfering in | the build-your-own computing market, but if it keeps the DIY | computing market from dying off in favor of Apple, isn't that a | _desirable_ outcome?) | LeftTriangle wrote: | Yes. Everyone disagreeing with you is just making excuses for | manufacturers to turn customers into serfs. | bouncycastle wrote: | GPUs by definition are not general purpose computers. Remember | the G in GPU stands for Graphics, not General. | outworlder wrote: | > I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this | behavior by Nvidia. | | I was thinking about buying NVIDIA for the next GPU based on | performance numbers alone. | | However, against it there's: | | 1) Terrible Linux support(and history). This is specially | important now that most of Steam's library runs on Linux | without issues. It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running | almost perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as | Windows. In the case of AMD, with open source drivers. | | 2)Control freak shenanigans (see also: this thread). This is | doing nothing to address the GPU shortage. It's just dishonest | market segmentation. | | 3)Their completely unacceptable behavior regarding reviews. | They were punishing reviewers that didn't place enough emphasis | in ray tracing. They would be blacklisted just by saying it's | not important (which I happen to agree with). They handled the | situation horribly. | endgame wrote: | 4) Crippling the ability to GPU passthrough (subpoint of (2), | I suppose) | navaati wrote: | To give them credit when it's due, they recently lifted | this limitation. | TacticalCoder wrote: | All I can say is that that company well deserved Linus | Torvald's famous middle finger: "NVidia has been the single | worst company we've ever dealt with, so NVidia F--- YOU!" | | And they certainly haven't disappointed since back then. | | Petty. | godelski wrote: | > It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running almost | perfectly on DAY ONE with the same performance as Windows. | | I'm looking at Cyberpunk right now (because it is on sale) | and Steam says it is windows only. Most of my Steam library | doesn't work on linux, what are you running differently? I'm | only just getting back into games after a long hiatus. | krastanov wrote: | Pretty much the only non-native games I can not run on my | Linux computer are the ones that incorporate anticheat | detection. I just use Proton, as it is built in to Steam. | Origin games do cause some headaches, but usually because | of the origin client, not because of the game. Examples of | "heavier" games that run fine for me at highest settings | (radeon 580): subnautica, tomb rader, mass effect | (andromeda), alyx, population one. | babypuncher wrote: | Windows-only games can run on the Linux version of Steam | using a feature built into the app called Steam Play, which | allows games to be run on unsupported platforms using | compatibility layers. Steam comes bundled with the Proton | compatibility tool, a fork of Wine maintained by Valve. It | has very high compatibility, as long as you aren't looking | to play competitive multiplayer titles. | | Here's a community maintained compatibility list: | https://www.protondb.com/ | godelski wrote: | Thanks!!!! I found the option. I've heard great things | about proton just didn't realize I had to flip a switch. | coolspot wrote: | 1) I have NVidia RTX 2060 in my Linux laptop (Lenovo Legion) | and NVidia RTX 3070 in my Linux Ryzen desktop. | | Previously had 1060 in Intel Linux desktop. | | Zero issues. | pizza234 wrote: | I'm on the same boat, however, it's a bit unclear if parent | is complaining [also] about their open source support. | Their antagonistic position towards open source (AFAIK | there's no comparison to AMD<>Nvidia open source drives) is | a big issue for me. | dr_zoidberg wrote: | The driver you are using is a BLOB that comes from closed | source. Many people who use Linux are against that, and | would rather have open source drivers (which I think nvidia | used to have but discontinued?). | slownews45 wrote: | I'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I | think almost every industry. | | What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing | long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by | the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and | increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy | nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the | long run nvidia ecosystem. | | Crypto folks come and go. Serve them on a short term basis with | something at a higher price point or make them lock in long | term orders | | Almost every business works this way. Long time regular | customer - you get pricing option A. Rando runs in with lots of | cash? You don't let them destroy your long term customer | relationships, but sell them some extra / high margin stuff if | they are willing to pay enough. | | Intel just went through this ecosystem pain with ARM. They said | no to doing iphone chip. Now an ecosystem has built up around | ARM with far more investment than would have been there without | apple leading the way. | ajmurmann wrote: | > Crypto folks come and go Do they more than gamers? | Complaints about miners buying all the graphics cards have | been going on for years now | akersten wrote: | If this works (spoiler: it won't, it will be cracked within a | month), it will create more e-Waste as miners will toss their | no-video-output-mining-only cards after they're no longer the | latest tech, instead of being able to resell them to gamers, | thinning the used graphics card market, forcing more gamers | to buy new from nVidia instead of rebuying old cards online. | | That makes me angry, it should make you angry too. | joe_the_user wrote: | I don't like Nvidia's approach for other reasons (mostly | 'cause market segmentation raises prices in the end imo). | But I'm pretty sure miners very price oriented. They'd sell | rather than trash whatever cards they have. And it seems | unlikely they'd be using any unsellable cards since those | are energy inefficient. | | There's a shortage of Nvidia card/chips after all. | | Edit: Now I read the article, this is literally only being | added to new cards and with a warning. | slownews45 wrote: | Right - old cards will still work. And they would DEF | sell 1,000 cards at $500/card even if that's a fraction | of retail. | eropple wrote: | This can be just as easier, and probably more truthfully, | read as "miners can no longer make the used market a | minefield by selling overtaxed consumer cards without | disclosing their provenance." Because, yeah, having ex- | miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used | market. Great! | | Cryptocurrencies are not inherently good or valuable and | cryptocurrency people aren't special and their world- | burning habits and desires need not be privileged. | dijit wrote: | > Because, yeah, having ex-miner cards burn out is a | pretty common thing on the used market. | | This is mostly a myth, miners cards are usually | undervolted, and only a subset of the card is used. | | If your CPU only used it's floating point unit then it | wouldn't be as intense as if you were using the whole | thing. | | The only potential issue is thermal damage, but that's | hard to place and has to be close to, or in excess of | 90-110c. | eropple wrote: | It's not a myth. These things get racked in stacks of | GPUs in what may or may not be actually-cooled data | centers. Undervolted or not, when you couple that with | constant load you're stressing devices manufactured to | _consumer_ specs. | | The excusemaking is pernicious. | krapht wrote: | ? My CPU actually underclocks itself if I am running a | heavy AVX-512 workload. Actually, back when I had it in a | cheaper motherboard, my system would crash because the MB | couldn't deliver enough power to the CPU. | | But I agree with the first sentence. Lots of miner cards | are undervolted because what matters is performance per | watt, just like many server cpus. | slownews45 wrote: | Being angry / outraged / upset is somewhat newer on HN. | | Not discounting it, but I tend to be more interested in the | . well . interesting conversations and questions then to go | down the angry / upset / outraged path. | | The no video out cards used in mining are already out of | gamers hands. If they throw them away (they won't - | existing product is working fine) they would no need to buy | non-gaming product. Finally, I think you underestimate the | value of the existing product, if they did want to resell | into gaming market they would probably find success. | luma wrote: | They are clearly marking the new models with a new suffix | on the model number. As someone who has been trying for | months to buy a 3080 and has zero interest in crypto, this | is fantastic news... IFF it means I can actually purchase a | card. | | This doesn't make me angry, and I don't think it should | make you angry either. | akersten wrote: | The e-Waste part is what should collectively anger us, | but I'm glad you're able to buy your card. | joshuahaglund wrote: | I'm personally angry that this whole crypto ponzi scheme | has gotten so big. That miners are producing e-Waste is | the least of its environmental impact. | nitrogen wrote: | Has anybody written about the opportunity cost to society | of technological resources going to crypto mining instead | of to consumers, creators, and scientists? I'd be | interested in reading such an analysis of cost/benefit of | crypto vs. creation with the limited supply of hardware | and electricity. | christkv wrote: | Not to mention the massive amount of electrical power | consumed to perform the calculations. | at-fates-hands wrote: | You aren't joking! | | From March 2018: | | _Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, "is nothing." | The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are | building sites with tens of thousands of servers and | electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to | power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms | race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these | operations will soon be considered small-scale._ | | For people clamoring for renewable energy, this is an | obscene amount of energy needed to do a single task - | mine bitcoin. Which should make it even more obscene that | all of that energy is being used for what? The benefit of | a few people. Staggering to think how common this is and | the article even states a 30 megawatt system is small | compared to some of the other sites that are out there. | | https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoi | n-m... | randomhodler84 wrote: | Keep being angry. It will be much larger in future, and | use magnitudes more energy. Either make peace (with the | drumbeat of human progression), or spend your days being | angry at something you don't understand. Your choice! | joshuahaglund wrote: | randomhodler84, have you heard the phrase "last man | holding the bag?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagholder | This crypt ponzi scheme turned the natural progression of | itself into a meme that reinforces itself. But GME is at | $180, so you could be right. Stupidity could yet win and | our future could be doomed to feed an ever increasing | amount of resources into accounting. I hope it's just | mania and we can go back to regular low energy databases | to keep track of funds. | [deleted] | sokoloff wrote: | The amount of e-waste seems like worrying about the trash | created from discarded plastic bottles of windshield | washer fluid as the environmental impact of cars. | lstamour wrote: | What about the electricity cost for powering the card. | Doesn't that outweigh the e-waste part by a significant | margin? | | Just because a card can't be used by gamers doesn't mean | the card must be tossed, there are plenty of non-gaming | uses such as AI. You'll probably see an aftermarket for | both types of cards. | | Also, like regular graphics cards, newer versions are | highly prized so one might say that graphics cards as an | industry is already all about e-waste. Unless you'd like | to buy my Radeon 9800 or my GTX 1070? They're still | perfectly good for gaming... except everybody wants the | new RTX ray tracing etc. | zaptrem wrote: | I sold a very used GTX 1070 on eBay for $325 only three | months ago. | k12sosse wrote: | I got mine after a 6 months wait on EVGA.com. Worth the | wait. Best of luck | skjoldr wrote: | ...Why would you toss a perfectly working piece of | equipment that brings you profit? If anything, there is a | second hand market for mining cards for those who want to | set up a mining farm for cheaper with a bit more risk. | [deleted] | earthtolazlo wrote: | Proof of work makes me angry. I have a difficult time | getting too upset over any attempt to curtail it. | mrgordon wrote: | I'm not sure it curtails it rather than just generating | new card types that can only mine coins and then are | garbage | randomhodler84 wrote: | Don't be angry. Just try to understand it. It's all we | can ask. | ChoGGi wrote: | Nvidia isn't doing it for their customers, it's to reduce the | aftermarket price drop next time crypto drops. | Justsignedup wrote: | To add on: | | none of it is malicious. its just the market stabalization | problem | | a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price | | b) let's charge miners 3x, because they willing to pay 3x, | and destroy the scalping market which is VERY anti | everything. Scalpers hurt literally everyone. | | c) let's not de-stabalize nvidia's income again when eth | drops in value. They don't want to be beholden to a coin's | gamble either. Basically as it stands Nvidia is far invested | into eth's value and if it drops their sales drop sharply | because of a massive influx of cheap supply. | knz_ wrote: | > a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price | | Consumer GPUs had far from a 'stable price' before the | mining boom. | | GPUs have more than tripled in MSRP once you factor in that | NVIDIA has moved lower-tier chips that previously only | featured in their lowest end x50 and x60 tier GPUs up the | stack and started selling them for $400+ MSRP. Look at the | GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, against the 3060 | which launched at an MSRP of $330. | | It's even worse at the high end. Flagship GPUs like the | 980ti and 1080ti launched at MSRPs of $650 and $700 | respectively, now the high end GPUs are $1200 (2080ti) and | $1500 (3090). | | > none of it is malicious. | | It absolutely is malicious. NVIDIA is trying to stop a | strong second hand market from being formed so that they | can continue to charge ridiculous prices for GPUs that | should be 1/2 to 1/3 their current price if the market was | healthy. | munk-a wrote: | I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then | miners would be buying less of them. Miners are a black | hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite | amounts of processors since they know (or strongly | believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty | quickly. | | I think Nvidia has some problems and their chips should | be cheaper - but if that were the case then this solution | (splitting the markets into regular consumers and miners) | would be even more necessary. | | I also disagree with it being malicious, I think it's a | perfectly reasonable decision to attribute to some pretty | sane decisions around market preservation. We here know | about miners eating up the GPU supply, but for the | average consumer Nvidia is just hording their chips or | they're idiots that didn't produce enough - no matter | what the imagined reason they're the people between the | average consumer and shiny ray tracing in minecraft. | knz_ wrote: | > I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper | then miners would be buying less of them. | | It would increase supply by forcing fabs to scale (would | take years anyway, but should happen sooner rather than | later). | | > Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can | absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they | know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for | themselves pretty quickly. | | And that isn't going to change even with these limited | GPUs. Mining with ethash is still profitable even with | the halved hashrate, and other algorithms like kawpow and | cn-gpu are not limited at all. | | The only thing that's going to get rid of PoW mining is | the entire shitcoin market tanking. As long as the bubble | continues there's going to be idiots spending money on | scalped GPUs. | flyinghamster wrote: | > Look at the GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, | against the 3060 which launched at an MSRP of $330. | | Looks like I'll be hanging on to my 960 for the | foreseeable future, then. I'm not interested in mining, | but I've started thinking a bit about playing with CUDA, | and I'm suddenly a lot less interested if Nvidia might | decided to gimp my work because I inadvertently did $FOO | that is commonly done by miners. | acomjean wrote: | I notice Microcenter has limited gpu sales to one per | customer per month. | | Its weird when brick and mortar are like limiting sales, | but on the other hand, they want to keep pc builders happy. | | https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/7334/graphic- | ca... | slownews45 wrote: | nvidia could take advantage of eth craze in short run and | auction cards or chips. They would make a ton more in short | run. But crypto folks would be only customers (in short | run) and rest of market would risk migrating away from | them. | | Crypto is very very frothy, so preserving some supply to | bread and butter / ecosystem supporting sales makes a lot | of sense to me. | savant_penguin wrote: | Except that miners will simply workaround the downgrade | software (as they did in the past) and regular consumers | will be the only ones with crippled hardware | smoldesu wrote: | Nvidia is implementing a hardware fuse system (a-la the | Nintendo Switch) to prevent firmware manipulation. I | can't speak to how secure these new cards will be, but | the Tegra was an absolute pain in the ass to work with. | It took a year before people even figured out how the | firmware was loaded, much less how to interoperate | between custom and official ones without blowing a fuse. | To this day, approaching half a decade since the Switch's | launch, you cannot coldboot the Switch into custom | firmware. | | Considering Nvidia's history with hardware DRM, I think | there's reason to be scared. Plus, they've undoubtedly | paid attention to the community as the Switch was | exploited, and probably intend to further secure the | firmware interface with what they've learned. | longhairedhippy wrote: | I think the big difference here is there is no money | behind hacking the Switch, it's an interesting problem to | a small(ish) subset of people. There's tons of folks that | would make actual hard cash off those hacks which will | make them much more invested in finding out how to work | around the solution. | Deukhoofd wrote: | Reading the Nvidia announcement it's not a software | upgrade, but a change in hardware. It only affects cards | made after late May. | gsich wrote: | They said that previously. Then they released an unlocked | BIOS by "accident". | mrb wrote: | Nvidia did not say it will be a hardware limitation. In | fact, they will almost certainly implement it in | software. For example a "Lite Hash Rate" card will | probably have a bit permanently set to 1 in the | firmware/eeprom. The driver will read the bit, and | arbitrarily enforce the restriction on such LHR card. | This solves potential legal issues of retroactively | crippling cards already out in the market, since only new | cards sold from now on as "LHR models" will have the bit | set to 1. | | But miners will find another software hack (just like | they did for the RTX 3060 earlier) to bypass the | restriction. | munk-a wrote: | I still think it's pretty likely we'll see a work around, | but if that work around is a custom made firmware patch | (like it was for the driver update they deployed IIRC) | then that will probably mean the chips you purchased have | a less rosy long term cost as future driver updates won't | be applicable to your altered firmware. If it requires | any physical tinkering with the chip then it definitely | increases the effective cost by forcing a labour/card | cost and opening up the possibility of expected chip | defect as you break some proportion of the hardware you | purchase in the process of fixing it. | | That all said - yea some people are totally going to hack | that or my name isn't 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 | E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2. | hsbauauvhabzb wrote: | 100% this in the short term, but in the long term | workarounds will become harder to find. Have a look at | iOS jailbreak history. | | I just hope they don't kill functionality which matters | for other meaningful purposes, like deep learning. | mrb wrote: | c) is nonsense. There are no downsides to a temporary boost | in Nvidia's profits, even if it means profits eventually | falling back to normal levels when ETH drops in value. | Also, LHR (gaming) GPUs and CMP (mining) GPUs share the | exact same supply chain and components. When/if crypto | demand suddenly drops, Nvidia will still have to deal with | the oversupply of components. Having segmented the market | between LHR and CMP GPUs does not in any way make it easier | for Nvidia to forecast overall production capacity. | lazide wrote: | It is a real risk when gamers (the every day bread and | butter) or ML model folks (emerging bread and butter) | markets will stop using them because they can't get | reliable supply. Both of those groups do quite a lot of | driver validation, workload tuning, and other platform | specific stuff. If another competitor gets those markets, | that will hurt for a long time. | jvol83 wrote: | According to Tom's hardware analysis the CMP gpus are | leftover Turing architecture that would otherwise have | gone to the now less desirable GTX 1660 Ti, or 2080 Ti. | | And when they are finally using the new Ampere silicon, | it's likely those chips that did not pass QA for being | made into a RTX 3080. | | So they are getting rid of overstock/dead stock already. | orangecat wrote: | _Scalpers hurt literally everyone._ | | They help people who are willing to pay the higher prices, | and they provide a market signal encouraging producers to | increase output. | ajmurmann wrote: | Aren't scalpers only there because the product is clearly | underpriced? Why not increase prices till the scalpers are | gone or simply auction the GPUs off? That's clearly what | the market is pointing at. | slownews45 wrote: | Absolutely - if they wanted they could make a killing | (short term) and auction to Eth farms. | | That said, they are trying to preserve market / mind | share in the longer term with existing customers (gamers, | AI/ML) and partners (OEMs etc). And those folks aren't | ready to pay the crypto price point. | | So they are giving up short term money (from auctions | etc) for ideally long term market share. | shados wrote: | Normally I'd agree (eg: I think limited concert tickets | should simply be auctioned off). | | This is a little trickier. You have a consumer grade | product aimed at a mass market segment (gamers) being | used as a glorified financial market device (crypto). | | You could just sell it at whatever price people are | willing to pay for (crypto) and make a big buck. You'd | likely wreck the gaming industry in the process. If you | feel the crypto market is there to stay forever and that | it's your best bet as a manufacturer going forward, it | could possibly be a good move. | | If you think its a temporary fad though, that the gaming | market has a larger long term return (if it's allowed to | thrive), and that this setback, even if temporary, is | harmful to your long term plan, then it's an issue. If | you think that the gaming industry beyond the GPU market | (eg: streaming grids) have value, and you want to foster | those because it will make more money in the long run, | then the current situation isn't looking so good. | | What it looks like is a large public company thinking | more than quarter to quarter for once. It's actually kind | of confusing, but that's what it looks like to my | untrained eyes. | jhauris wrote: | Short term they could make a lot of money that way, but | then they may lose gamers who will likely still want gpus | after miners no longer need them. It's not a one off | transaction. | colejohnson66 wrote: | Because the scalpers _won't_ go away. There will always | be some poor sap willing to pay double market value for a | scalped product. | flyinghamster wrote: | I guess the issue is, let's say you're doing something in | CUDA, and the program uses $FOO, something commonly used by | miners. Never mind that you're not mining any kind of | cryptocurrency, the card or driver will decide that because | you did $FOO, you're mining and gimp your work, or, let's say | that they doubled down further, shut it down completely. | amelius wrote: | Meanwhile, Nvidia doesn't allow you to use your graphics card | in a datacenter/machine learning setup. You need a special | license for that. | | https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates- | ge... | | So let's not pretend that Nvidia is acting in the interest of | their clients at all times. | creato wrote: | One could argue this is the exact same thing: protecting | their long-time customers from a small number of big | customers (datacenters) that can afford to dramatically | out-price their gamer customers temporarily, but might | disappear (if they develop their own hardware?) not too | long from now. | babypuncher wrote: | I think it's more that Nvidia knows datacenter customers | have the money to pay a premium for "datacenter grade" | products. | InvertedRhodium wrote: | Isn't that kind of the point? If consumers and | enterprises were competing for the same product, we would | probably see a similar situation as we are with consumers | and miners. | vladvasiliu wrote: | I suppose the "long term customers" for these GPUs are | gamers, right? Don't they also come and go? I don't | particularly follow this as I'm not really into games, but it | seems to me that AMD has had quite an impressive growth | recently. Does that mainly come from people new to the | market? I'm actually a "new to the market" buyer, and I | bought an AMD mostly because I'm mainly a Linux user and | didn't want to take any chances with nvidia given the horror | stories I've seen floating around these parts. | | The issue with the GPU market is that since it's a duopoly, | customers don't really have anywhere else to go. My | impression is that people mostly bounce between the two. I'm | not sure how many people have that much of a "brand loyalty", | especially since this is the "enthusiast sector", so I guess | people don't just buy whatever they find at the corner store. | | To me, this looks more like market segmentation, the same way | that you can't run virtualization on their consumer products, | and you can't have ECC RAM on consumer intel chips. I really | don't think they're doing this from the goodness of their | hearts towards those poor gamers who are priced out of the | market, but because they figured that miners would be ready | to pay more. Which is pretty obvious, since scalpers are | managing to sell those at outrageous prices, someone has to | be buying them, right? | lacker wrote: | It isn't the "goodness of their hearts", Nvidia just wants | to maintain their position as the market leader in the | markets that will be there for a long time. Gamers is one | such market. Some gamers are loyal to a particular brand of | graphics card, but there are also just network effects to | being the most popular. Game designers spend extra effort | making sure their games work well on the most popular video | cards. Influential people like YouTubers, streamers, or | game reviewers are more likely to buy elite hardware and | talk about what they got. | | Market segmentation would only really make sense if Nvidia | were capable of saturating all the demand from miners, and | wanted to squeeze out some extra margin from them. But | right now it doesn't seem like Nvidia is actually able to | manufacture enough to meet the market demand at $800 like | they initially intended. | chrisan wrote: | > Don't they also come and go? | | Myself and most of my gaming friends have been buying | nvidia cards for (soon to be) decades now. | | Basically since 3dfx went belly up | babypuncher wrote: | Gaming demand is fairly constant, while mining demand ebbs | and flows with the value of cryptos. Last time this peaked | was in early 2018. | | Nvidia knows their loyal, regular customers are PC gamers, | so it's in their best interest to make sure these customers | get the best buying experience to ensure they stay repeat | customers. | josefx wrote: | Gamers need games to play and if gamers buy more AMD cards | because high end NVIDIA is not an option then game | developers will focus their efforts more towards AMD. Going | by steam NVIDIA currently has three quarters of the PC | Gaming market cornered, that is a lot of motivation to | focus development on their hardware and an edge they do not | want to loose. | | https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey | slownews45 wrote: | The ecosystem nvidia has built and maintains is a KEY | differentiator. | | Basically, for machine learning, AMD is nowhere - the | ecosystem is on nvidia (provided you can buy their stuff). | If they can't deliver, then whatever crazy thing AMD is | trying in this space (been a few tries) may take hold more. | Getting developers access to nvidia becomes key then - | games / machine learning tooling etc all then gravitates | that way. | | For gaming you do end up with some options. Nvidia / AMD / | Intel. Wide range here, but been pretty steady need for | graphics including top end and lower end options. The OEM's | are also customers in this space, everyone going to remote | work with virtualized workloads as well if they need a | graphics option there and more. | | Yes, they are segmenting, but in short run they are giving | up $ they would get by selling all stuff with full Eth | enabled and perhaps auctioning cards. They'd make a ton in | short run, but a few user bases would abandon them. It | really is not going to be good for their business if they | have another 6 months of supply issues. | joe_the_user wrote: | I don't think this is "recognizing customers", I think this | is just sectioning markets. I'd dreading Nvidia crippling | deep learning for all those not paying X more dollars (as the | situation already is for server farms). | | Long term, the aim has to be selling cards by usage rather | than by cost of production (obvious with the aim of prices | higher than the cost of production by different amounts). How | many people like Adobe's creative suite? Student software | versus professional software, etc. | slownews45 wrote: | Def doing it for themselves, I see it in this case as | customer base preservation. Most of their other approaches | have tried to move users off their lower end products. This | time they are trying to preserve lower end product | availability (smart). | knz_ wrote: | > I'd dreading Nvidia crippling deep learning for all those | not paying X more dollars (as the situation already is for | server farms). | | This already changed years ago when NVIDIA removed the last | non-crippled double and half precision GPUs from their | product lineup. The cheapest GPU you can buy for ML now is | the titan v, which was $3000 at launch. | joe_the_user wrote: | I'm only planning at this point - so I don't know but am | very interested. I see the RTX 3080 reviewed as the most | cost effective chip you can get for deep learning. I have | the impression a lot of research is moving to lower | precision also. | | https://timdettmers.com/2020/09/07/which-gpu-for-deep- | learni... | m463 wrote: | I thought the miner cards were cheaper. They are set up for | mining and don't have video out. | minsc__and__boo wrote: | Yep, this is designed products for specific markets that are | currently being untapped. | | It's allows for a premium charge on crypto-enabled cards | while still capturing the consumer market. It's a great | solution. | ChicagoDave wrote: | They have separate product lines for mining. I don't understand | the complaint. NVIDIA probably gets a ton of complaints about | miners "stealing" all of the GPU cards. | | I think it's perfectly reasonable for them segregate the | capabilities for their varying consumers. | godelski wrote: | > Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? | | Yes. A lot of what has angered me about the situation is that | there's these claims that these companies are going to help us | as consumers but aren't actually doing anything that helps us. | It is just show. They know it, we know it. So stop saying | you're on our side and stabbing us in the back. As an example, | look at NewEgg's product shuffle. It is a clear scam and | actively helps miners. Microcenter, BestBuy, Amazon, and | everyone else does the same thing but NE is the worst because | the bundling with useless stuff. | | You want to help consumers? I have 2 models for you: | | 1) Create a signup list (like EVGA, but just select the number, | not this list for every variant). Send out cards as they come | in. | | 2) Only sell cards once or twice a month and in large pools | (many cards in stock). This way you have a reasonable quantity | of cards to hand out for the high demand instead of the small | quantity that bots are always going to get to first. It should | take only basic statistics to understand this. If a bot has an | 80% chance of getting a product first and a consumer 20% then | we need a bigger pool to draw from, not more pools (with small | number of cards). More (small) pools helps the bots and harms | the consumers. Larger and less frequent pools results in a | larger set of consumers getting the products. | | With these two models you can better fight bots and stock | doesn't need to be on the shelves for long periods of time. | behringer wrote: | Good luck getting a next gen AMD GPU for any reasonable price | if NVidia successfully segments away the miners and AMD | doesn't. | swiley wrote: | Meh. It's pretty consistent with Nvidia's behavior. If you | don't like being Nvidia's bitch then buy AMD and use open | source drivers. | | Sorry for the strong wording but if people didn't tolerate this | crap from GPU vendors that would solve a _lot_ of problems | everyone has. You mention attacks on personal computing, the | main reason everyone is stuck with vendor provided Android | system software on their phones is because the closed GPU | drivers are heavily coupled with it. Otherwise lots of people | would have dumped it when they crippled the file API and | started creating problems for termux. Because of this there 's | no real competition for iOS so Apple and Google can pretty much | get away with whatever they want. | Bancakes wrote: | Nvidia can't make nvidia laptops run well on Linux but they | sure can cripple all their drivers, huh. That's what they're | good at. | judge2020 wrote: | > Hardware manufactures already segment features between | consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is | capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what | algorithms one can run is a whole new level. | | The silicon might also be capable of running the latest nvidia | self driving ML models, yet you don't get that just because | it's capable- you have to pay them $x so that they have the | money to pay their engineers to develop those features (and pay | the company directors, and shareholders, etc). It's the same | for things like the professional quadro view software - | https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/design-visualization/software/q... | - there's only a compelling business case to make this software | as a result of the higher margins they make on quadro cards. | vikingerik wrote: | The situation fascinates me. It's one heck of an expression of | capitalist market forces. Gamers can't get computational | capacity for their graphics, because the market-clearing price | for computing is the value of the cryptocurrency that that GPU | could be mining instead. Every pixel you calculate has an | opportunity cost of that calculation's worth in cryptocurrency. | | Nvidia wants to serve gamers over miners, presumably to | establish and maintain brand loyalty for future purchases. If | they can't increase supply, the only other way is to reduce | miner demand. That's their goal; this limitation is just a | technical detail of implementing that. Hardware segmenting to | serve different markets has been a thing forever and I don't | see any reason to call this out as any worse. | | That said, I like that Nvidia and AMD are taking different | approaches here. That's free market capitalism, let the | invisible hand guide the outcome. | standardUser wrote: | I find the energy used in crypto mining to be a crime against | humanity and support reasonable efforts to curtail it. Until we | price in the externalities of using fossil fuel energy, no one | should be wasting energy on this scale for such a spectacularly | nonessential purpose. | Keyframe wrote: | I'd be worried a lot if it were for existing products, but this | is a right move in my opinion. Drastic times, drastic measures. | eugeniub wrote: | No I don't care. | optymizer wrote: | I woke up early back on launch day in October 2020 to buy a | 3080 when they said it would be available. Couldn't get one. | Periodically I'd check newegg and other sites to see if the | shortage is gone. Nope, on 05/18 it's still out of stock | everywhere. Throwing $750 on a piece of hardware to play games | shouldn't be this horrendous of an experience. I for one am | glad nVidia is doing something about it. | Siira wrote: | They should just raise the prices. Supply and demand, you | know? | babypuncher wrote: | That is essentially what they are doing, but in a way that | doesn't burn their long-term customers (PC gamers). There | will be crypto ready SKUs of these cards sold at a | considerably higher margin. | michaelmrose wrote: | I don't think PC gaming should require you to be part of | the top 10% in order to fairly price computer hardware | between mostly foreign miners buying scores of chips whose | primary contribution to society is using 129 TW hours | annually and individual users buying a single GPU. | | As a selfish American I would rather we arrange for GPUs to | be useless to a small number of users buying a large number | of GPUS for mining in order for the much larger group of | users to be able to afford one GPU. | | If this strategy is successful and AMD doesn't follow suit | nvidia GPUs will basically be the only ones most people can | afford and if mining collapses years later AMD wont have | any marketshare left to lose in the consumer space. | | The only other way to still get their hardware in front of | people who they want to keep a relationship going with will | be via privileging OEMs over selling individual GPUs but in | fact people are actually buying machines for the GPU and | turning over the remaining GPU less machine in the consumer | market. | | As it stands the whole situation is broken for the only | buyers that are sure to be here in 10 years and I would | rather it move towards sanity sooner rather than later. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | Prices have been raised. | | You can buy an RTX 3080 right now if you want. It's just | going to cost you $2500 or so because vendors and scalpers | are capturing that markup. | ajmurmann wrote: | Sounds like Nvidia hasn't actually raised the price. They | could just auction this off from their website directly | and cut out the middle man. | [deleted] | akersten wrote: | Yep, this enrages me. Deliberately introducing faults into a | product to make it less appealing to one market segment in a | desperate attempt to cover for their supply chain failure. | Stinks to high heaven. | | In addition the detection is not magic (it can't be) so there | are going to be false positives. Can't wait until my games | start dropping frames 30 minutes in because the driver decided | my competitive FPS was actually mining crypto. | | Imagine a headline like "Charmin introduces toilet paper that | cannot be hoarded, to prevent shortages," and it's because the | TP biodegrades after 6 months. | 542458 wrote: | GPUs have been doing this forever. This is exactly the same | as some features being enabled on quadros that don't exist on | RTX/GTX/GT cards. That's (mostly) not silicon, that's just | firmware. | | This isn't covering any supply chain failures (despite what | nvidia says, the number of available GPUs remains | approximately fixed), it's just more market segmentation to | minimize the secondhand mining GPU market and capture more | dollars. | | I was also concerned about detection false positives, but as | far as I can tell they're detecting a very specific algorithm | that only gets used for ETH mining - there have been no false | positives that I can see. Some miners are even working around | the limiter by introducing obfuscation operations, but that | comes with a hashrate cost of course. | akersten wrote: | > GPUs have been doing this forever though. This is exactly | the same as some features being enabled on quadros that | don't exist on RTX/GTX/GT cards. | | No, I think this is the first time a GPU has been | heuristically trying to detect what you're doing and self- | limiting in response. How is that equivalent to features | just being literally off? | | There's no special "mine-crypto" instruction in the CUDA | ISA. | | > there have been no false positives that I can see. | | How can you see that? These aren't released yet and the | GTX-3060 isn't really a popular card among serious gamers | that would notice. | 542458 wrote: | The 3060 has been out for a few months now, and it has | the limiter. Re: your edit about noticing, I strongly | disagree. Tech reviewers would LOVE to run the "limiter | cripples Blender/Tensorflow/whatever" story, but that | hasn't happened. And in this market users are generally | taking what they can get, so I've seen lots of people who | would normally run 70/80/90s running 60s instead. | nybble41 wrote: | The existing limiter doesn't _work_ , though. It was | narrowly focused and consequently easy for miners to work | around. That's why they're making this new version. There | is no precise test for whether a given workload is | "mining", though, so we can expect more false positives | to show up as Nvidia tries to close off the myriad ways | to avoid detection and miners respond by making their | computation look more like traditional gaming workloads. | mrgordon wrote: | The number of GPUs being produced may be constant but it's | lower than desired. The issue is Nvidia worked with Samsung | to fab their chips this time around and Samsung had poor | yields. Nvidia should have used TSMC like AMD and Apple but | they tried to use Samsung and got burned on supply. They | said they will use TSMC going forward but in the meantime | there are shortages. | JamesSwift wrote: | I see no problem with it. I could see the argument that crypto | is an existential threat to Nvidias business. If they lose a | generation of PC gamers they risk that loss compounding years | down the road as they and their children lean toward console. | If they _want_ to serve those PC gamers first over crypto then | they need to find ways to keep them as their customers. | wavefunction wrote: | I don't care. I have a 3080 I paid a pretty penny for so that I | could play some games in high resolution and do personal | machine learning projects. Between the cryto miners and | scalpers I don't care what happens to those folks. | X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: | Given that they are struggling to ramp up production to meet | demand this seems like a perfectly acceptable move when they | are essentially unable to serve their most loyal customers. | | The problem really is that cryptominers will happily scale | their purchases arbitrarily high | m3kw9 wrote: | With Ethereum 2.0 there is no need for these cards. I think in a | few months if it goes well. | SXX wrote: | It's will be funny to see how HN crowd that support Nvidia here | will react when Nvidia going to cripple ML features for the sake | of market segmentation. | 0x_rs wrote: | There's precedent with crippled FP16 performance, so it would | not be surprising to see such things in the future to attain | market segmentation from consumer cards. | ollien wrote: | This is exactly why I'm worried. I took an ML class last | semester and having access to CUDA on my 1080Ti (explicitly | purchased for gaming) was a boon for my project group, since we | could actually tune models efficiently. | | This might be good for the short-term, but it sets a precedent | I'm really not happy with. I know they already do some of this | with Quadro, but my understanding there is that the value add | is in its reliability and certification, not ability to operate | on workloads that have been artificially crippled on the gaming | cards. | jti107 wrote: | interesting philosophical question that intersects with "right to | repair" and "ownership of digital purchases". when you buy a | product does the company get to dictate what you can do with it. | Kranar wrote: | When you buy a product? No. | | When you purchase a license agreement for software that the | product depends on? Yes. | gruez wrote: | So apple restricting iphone repairs (by breaking | camera/fingerprint reader, or nagging you about the | battery/display) is totally fine because it's done in | software? | orky56 wrote: | It's not quite so clear cut. Less and less hardware solutions | can meaningfully exist without some software for it to | provide the functions it was meant for when purchased. This | is a slippery slope that brings together the right to repair | & net neutrality law type arguments. | skytreader wrote: | Total hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a | particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games | can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions | that's signature to ETH? | smiley1437 wrote: | From what I've read, the card detects if it has been | continuously mining for 30 minutes then throttles itself. | levesque wrote: | Going to be fun to see cases of false positives. "Help! My | FPS drops 75% after running game for 30 minutes!" | TwoBit wrote: | Those games are using a lot more of the gpu than just the | compute functionality. | livre wrote: | GP's question was about _how_ it detects it has been mining. | Does it have a list of processes or executable names of | popular mining software? Does it perform some kind of | heuristic and detect if the code it is about to execute | corresponds to a hashing algorithm? I don't know the answer, | I hope someone can explain it to me and GP. | [deleted] | Scoundreller wrote: | Going to be a fun future game of cat-and-mouse as miners figure | out how to disable/bypass nvidia's electronic countermeasures. | dheera wrote: | Couldn't one just not upgrade their drivers? NVIDIA has no | way of crippling an offline system. | gotbeans wrote: | I understand this might come at hw level. Driver could have | little or nothing to do with it. | TameAntelope wrote: | This is for future manufactures, and it'll come out of the | box disabled. | sschueller wrote: | Cards that have already been sold don't matter. New cards | however become worthless to miners so the demand should go | down as well as the prices. | | We will probably see cards with old firmware show up on | eBay for a lot more money than new cards. | mywittyname wrote: | It doesn't need to last forever, just long enough to prevent | shortages from pissing off non-mining customers. | | I wouldn't be surprised if nVidia releases updates to unlock | hardware after a set time period. | canada_dry wrote: | Hacks that re-enable mining likely won't be showing up on tpb | anytime soon! A bypass will be worth quite a bit of money for | large miners that can get hold of the cards. | snuxoll wrote: | Scalpers benefit from it, and they have an extreme | incentive to drive up demand. | edave64 wrote: | Probably not much of a cat-and-mouse game. Once they can | bypass it once, all they have to do is not update. Unless | Nvidia is prepared to release new hardware revisions every | time. | fuzzy2 wrote: | No new hardware revision needed. Just a new on-card BIOS | requiring a newer driver with a more fine-tuned mining | detection. Should be trivial for manufacturers. | ssully wrote: | They previously did this with the 3060 cards, but accidently | released beta drivers that unlocked the countermeasures [1]. | I am sure people just start with using those drivers on the | 3070/80 cards. | | [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331537/nvidia- | rtx-3060-... | Vespasian wrote: | I think I read the new cards will require a higher driver | version | Alekhine wrote: | It'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks, | sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal | with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or | use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it | a hassle. | HappySweeney wrote: | Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their | efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely | patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which | it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this). | balls187 wrote: | Are serious miners buying supply constrained GPUs? | valuearb wrote: | Serious miners are buying Antminers, not video cards. | Franciscouzo wrote: | Antminers are for mining Bitcoin, GPUs are mostly used | for Ethereum. | Scoundreller wrote: | We'll see a cottage industry of modders. Turning a $300 | thing into a $600 thing should be a viable business. | | Though I've seen some really sketchy mods before... can't | find it at the moment, but one involved taking a dremel to | the chip to break an internal pad/link. | yellow_lead wrote: | Miners are already doing hacks like this, i.e ETHlargement | pill (which alters memory timings on 1080/1080Ti cards to | improve ETH mining). | alert0 wrote: | Speculation having thought about this for a few minutes a few | weeks ago. Given that a driver update disabled the feature, my | guess is that they have certain kernels blacklisted. Really | just the anti-virus equivalent of if (e.g.) Nicehash Miner, set | throttle. A good way to test this would be to write a new miner | and see what perf you can get. | | I have the driver with it disabled and would patch diff it | against a new one if I had the time, but I'm very busy with | work. It would be an interesting problem of binary diffing at | scale (dozens of libraries). Very interested if anyone has any | insight. | pdimitar wrote: | I never planned to mine cryptocurrency but such a move sends a | very bad message to me as an end user. | | Fine, NVIDIA. I planned to have a dedicated Win10 gaming PC with | an RTX 3090 and a separate Linux workstation but I guess it's | better if I just get the Threadripper Pro workstation and equip | it with an AMD 6900XT and do both my work and gaming under Linux. | Will spend 40-50% less money, too. | | And Steam is getting better and better at gaming under Linux with | each passing week so the Linux users automatically get in a | better position with time. | | If that's how you want to play, good luck to you, NVIDIA. You | just lost a future customer. | oh_sigh wrote: | Why would them diminishing a certain aspect that you admittedly | never planned on using in the first place affect your decision? | Does your work involve computing millions of hashes, but isn't | cryptocurrency? | pdimitar wrote: | No, my work doesn't involve that at all. It just sends the | signal to me as a customer that they can limit what I do with | something that I bought and is supposedly now mine. It's a | slippery slope kind of situation where you don't know what | else they might figure they'll want to limit in the future. | | I am not okay with that so I'll vote with my wallet. | SXX wrote: | Nvidia never applied those mining limitations | rectoactivelyl they only announced for newer cards. Still | they crippled VFIO capabilities with driver updates in past | so they had bad track of record years ago. | pdimitar wrote: | Yep, that's what worries me. They are cautious for now | but if they don't meet pushback (or a financial hit) they | might get bolder and start applying more and more | restrictions. | | This is likely too paranoid for many but the technical | possibility is there and believing in the good heart of a | huge business is to me not a sound strategy. | Const-me wrote: | I have mixed feelings about that. | | I'd like to replace 1080Ti with 3080, but miners priced me out. | | I wonder how exactly nVidia is doing that? I do little integer | ops on my GPUs, but I do a lot of FP64 ones. Just like these | integer Ethereum hashes, FP64 is not used by videogames much. | | If nVidia does that performance throttling by detecting some | patterns in the code, looking for Ethereum miners, AV-style -- | pretty sure Ethereum miners will find a workaround soon. These | AV-style code detectors are unreliable by design. | | If nVidia does that by crippling specific low-level instructions, | this gonna slow down innovation rate for everyone. Not just for | me with my niche FP64 CAD/CAE workloads, for games too. | CivBase wrote: | > "To help get GeForce GPUs in the hands of gamers, we announced | in February that all GeForce RTX 3060 graphics cards shipped with | a reduced Ethereum hash rate," Wuebbling added. | | Is there any evidence that crypto mining plays a significant role | in the ongoing hardware shortage? Any evidence at all? I see so | many people complain about it, but I haven't seen any reason to | believe crypto is one of the primary factors driving the | shortage. | | I don't mine or trade crypto. I acknowledge the many problems | with current crypto offerings and have no interest in dealing | with the tech until those problems get sorted out (if that ever | even happens). But I inherently don't like the idea of a hardware | company intentionally crippling general computing tech like this. | And it's especially frustrating to see them try to spin it as a | positive move for their customers. | | The RX 6000 series was another huge step forward for AMD graphics | hardware. Hopefully their 7000 series will be even more | competitive. NVIDIA needs the pressure. | Corazoor wrote: | I find the argument for this move unconvincing: Nvidias failure | to meet demand is somehow the fault of... the customers? But | since there are morally aprehensible workloads, it is totally | fine to... throttle them? Not prevent or contractually prohibit, | as one might expect... And of course it is Nvidia who decicdes on | the morals of your workload. | | I mean, seriously, how can anyone be ok with that? | skjoldr wrote: | They can't improve the supply any longer, so they are cutting | demand instead. | | Why would you prevent mining if some gamers do want to utilize | their idle GPU power? Mining is supposed to be for everyone. | jcheng wrote: | I didn't see Nvidia weigh in on the morality of any workload, | just like nerfing FP64 performance in their GeForce cards | wasn't a statement on the morality of double-precision | workloads. They're trying to steer cards towards a particular | segment of the market, there can be a lot of reasons for that. | | For example, they might believe that while selling to gamers is | less lucrative than selling to miners in the short term, the | gaming market will always exist while the mining market dries | up the moment GPU mining is no longer profitable; so | maintaining a good relationship with the gaming community is | important for their long term health. Or maybe they're just | tired of gamers yelling at them. | lacker wrote: | _how can anyone be ok with that?_ | | I don't want to mine cryptocurrency on my graphics card. So | given the choice of buying an unrestricted one off ebay for | $2500, or a restricted one for the originally suggested price | of $800, I would rather buy the restricted one. Nvidia isn't | being dishonest, they aren't throttling the cards they already | sold, they aren't claiming anything is moral or immoral, they | are just offering a new product that does exactly what I want | for cheaper. So I'm certainly okay with it. | lamontcg wrote: | This is how community standards works. | | The government should never mandate that video card | manufacturers do this, or don't do this. | | If you don't like it, set up your own video card business that | caters to crypto mining. | | The vast majority of NVidia customers are applauding this move | though. | | This is the free market working, but if you're into crypto you | may not like it because you're not winning the marketplace of | ideas. | | (And IMO if you support cryptocurrency you should appreciate | this as well, because astronomically high GPU costs for gamers | erodes the standing of cryptocurrencies in that demographic, it | is very bad PR to just let GPU costs inflate -- people start to | vehemently hate cryptocurrencies because of that effect). | wpietri wrote: | You realize you're making a moral argument against moral | arguments, right? | | If you'd like to know how people are ok with this, it's been | explained plenty already, right here in this discussion. | Frost1x wrote: | I think it's just an argument against a unilateral decision | by NVIDIA under the facade of morals. Businesses aren't | people and don't have morals, everything they do is strategic | and profit motivated, even if the people that compose them | have morals. | | My guess is that NVIDIA doesn't want one basket of demand | dominating the majority of their demand while disenfranching | all of their other demands in parallel computing (graphics, | industrial/scientific, etc.). If they allow crypto to take | the lionshare of their cards, consumers for the other demands | will eventually seek out alternatives if they haven't | already. That's all well and fine as long as crypto demand | sustains whatever NVIDIA can supply indefinitely. | | It's not so great if crypto demand for GPUs drops | drastically, then NVIDIA is sitting there looking to drum | demand back up from all their previous customers and markets. | Essentially, they're likely just trying to distribute risk | for a future demand portfolio. | | I can't honestly believe any large investors or top level | executives at NVIDIA are losing a second of sleep by having | so much demand they have to turn people away. If they're | losing any sleep it's all the lost profit they can't make | because they can't meet full demand or because they're in a | potentially risky situation. | wpietri wrote: | Did they do it under a facade of morals? Perhaps you can | point me to where Nvidia makes a moral argument. | | As an aside, businesses don't act on their own. People do | have morals, and they're the ones running things. Whether | or not they use their morals is a different question, but | we needn't preemptively excuse them from doing so just | because money is involved. | ahD5zae7 wrote: | Actually, is there a need to block anything? They're coming up | with a mining-focused product line now. Just make them slightly | cheaper per hash and voila - all miners will be buying the | mining-focused products. They lack the video outputs so it makes | sense, you can skip some of the BOM on the card, save a few | bucks. As it has already been mentioned in the thread miners are | super sensitive to squeezing every cent out of their setup. If | they can save some bucks on cards, they will surely go for it. | | So either the mining cards will be cheaper than regular, which | makes this block a moot point in near future, or they will be | more expensive per hash than normal graphic cards. In which case | the block makes sense but in my opinion is a bad move by Nvidia. | Making the mining cards more expensive than regular cards is | throwing a gauntlet to the whole world to break the drivers or | workaround the hardware. It will be fascinating to watch the cat- | and-mouse game of hackers and Nvidia developers, but it will not | fix the horrible GPU market situation we're in now and that is a | shame. | | Disclaimer: I want to buy a new GPU soon but for the MSRP and not | the price equivalent of a small car. So I may be biased... | banana_giraffe wrote: | My understanding is there is a concern that cryptocurrency | miners are buying GPUs, using them for a few weeks to determine | which ones they can overclock, and selling the ones they can't | (and have probably limited the life of in the process) since | you can probably sell a 30 series GPU for more than you got it | for, even if you're upfront about it being used. | | All of that isn't possible with the mining-focused line, so | Nvidia feels they need other tools to help convince the | cryptocurrency miners to move over, hence the block. | xur17 wrote: | I hadn't heard of this before - do you have a link or | something with more details? | mrgordon wrote: | The issue is the resale value for actual working GPUs is higher | so the miners will often buy the normal cards anyway | burnethtards wrote: | You can customize mining algorithms to work on any hardware.... | | Either way gpu mining was always a terrible idea since they have | resale value and thus cost of attack was small vs ASICs that are | rendered worthless when they attack their own chain effectively | unable to break even on sunk costs. | inetsee wrote: | Didn't Nvidia try this on some different cards recently? And | wasn't it only about a week before there was a patch that undid | what Nvidia had done? | ihuman wrote: | They only tried it on a version of the 3060, and they | accidentally released a driver without LHR. | plttn wrote: | My unfounded speculation is that the 3060Ti limiter (which was | mostly bypassed due to an accidental leak of dev drivers) acted | as a bit of a test balloon to see how it would be attacked | before implementing it on the 3070/3080 silicon. | Scoundreller wrote: | I wonder if the << accidental >> release was to avoid the | motivation for a massive lawsuit. | | If apple can get sued for << excessive >> throttling when | batteries lose peak cranking amps, nvidia would fare much | worse. | simion314 wrote: | >If apple can get sued for << excessive >> throttling when | batteries lose peak cranking amps | | You are missing the main part, "Apple downgraded your CPU | behind your back" which is very different then "The iPhone | box clearly mentions that when the battery is low the CPU | will throttle and a notification is shown". | | It seems the fanboys managed to trick you in believing that | Apple is the victim here. | moogly wrote: | Why only reduce them to half the performance? How about 0%. | | I predict this will do absolutely nothing for general | availability of these cards. | kevingadd wrote: | Denting the performance that way makes them no longer cost | effective for eth, but doesn't make them completely useless for | any workloads (in games, or adobe premiere, etc) that happen to | look like crypto mining - so they can avoid selling a | completely broken card. | kevincox wrote: | Because halving the performance makes them unprofitable to run. | If you buy one you can still try mining, and if it falsely | detects mining your desktop won't crash, but professional | miners won't be interested. | moogly wrote: | Considering they sell the cards afterwards, I remain | unconvinced that they will (to miners appear to) be | unprofitable at half the hashing performance. | | I fear these guys will just want the double amount of cards | now :/ | | So sorry, but I'll believe it when I see it. | mrkramer wrote: | "GeForce Is Made for Gaming" Yea just like Microsoft Windows is | made only for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. Piss off. | rhema wrote: | Why not the 3090? What's the logic? | Kirby64 wrote: | Cost is roughly 2x (at MSRP/inflated MSRP) over a 3080, so if | you can buy a 3080 there's no reason to buy a 3090 for hashing. | Hashrate is something like 20-30% more than a 3080. | zokier wrote: | 3090 availability is relatively good at the moment. | gradys wrote: | This has very much not been my experience in the US. | irq wrote: | Is it? I haven't seen one in stock in a long time. People are | setting up sniping programs to auto-buy them. | 1-6 wrote: | Relative is a broad statement depending on where you live. In | the US, Newegg has been going in-and-out of stock but mostly | out. | ipsum2 wrote: | I'd love to see a few links. I haven't been able to purchase | them, checked Amazon, Best Buy, and newegg. | belltaco wrote: | The extra cost over the 3080 is probably not worth the minor | increase in the hash rate for mining. | mywittyname wrote: | Drive miners to the high priced cards while leaving the | price/performance market for gamers. | [deleted] | Zenst wrote: | I find the prospect of being able to add more overhead and | potential bugs into a product to remove a niche functionality in | a move that reeks of PR marketing driven solution, too be of bad | taste. Whilst the overhead will be so small I doubt it will be | measurable, it still is not zero and only adds the possibility | that some workloads of non crypto currency origins fall foul of | this in ways that may not be easy to discern. | oh_sigh wrote: | "Niche functionality" that is ballooning the price of their | graphics cards for end users? | | > adds the possibility that some workloads of non crypto | currency origins fall foul of this in ways that may not be easy | to discern. | | So what? The proof is in the pudding. You buy things as they | are sold, not with some kind of expectation that you can | achieve 100% of the theoretical performance of some ideal | version of the product. If I buy a car with a limiter that | doesn't let me go over 100mph, I shouldn't be surprised or | upset that I can't hit 105 mph. | Quick2822 wrote: | I'm not sure its niche. | | ETH is the 2nd most popular crypto with a $394,657,267,540 | market cap at $3,403.15 per as of the timestamp. | Vespasian wrote: | It's a niche for GPU usage when compared to gaming, | rendering, video editing, machine learning. | | And it's most likely a really short lived niche | saiya-jin wrote: | > a niche functionality | | That's kind of a bullcrap, since this 'niche' functionality | completely crippled graphic card sales, and negative effects | will ripple through PC gaming markets for quite some time. | Every gamer that didn't manage to snatch one before is pissed | beyond funny. | | Imagine a gaming studio that is deciding to develop a next-gen | game - why would they try hard to go for / optimize for PC | version if there are very few actual owners of good cards? | Produce either generic all-platform-compatible stuff or abandon | PC market altogether. | tristanj wrote: | Context: Back in February, Nvidia also restricted cryptocurrency | mining on their RTX 3060 cards. The restrictions were bypassed a | month later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26475596 | | Related HN Discussions: | | _Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in | half_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26180260 (461 points, | 746 comments) | | _Nvidia Limits RTX 3060 Hash Rate_ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192201 (280 points, 509 | comments) | | _AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be | blocking any workload_ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26524387 (68 points, 53 | comments) | DrNuke wrote: | Folks, the GTX 1070s 8GB coming with 2017 laptops are still good | enough for literally any semi-professional, non-mining | application out there, from machine learning to gaming. With a | few hacks and the right hardware setup, they can still do not-so- | clever professionals happy. Therefore, this is a full supply- | demand problem, with Nvidia facing its first, real catch-22 | maturity problem: how do they sell new GPUs to happy-with-1070 | regulars like me? | fooey wrote: | Nvidia is betting DLSS and Ray Tracing will be the killer | features to get you to upgrade | Dah00n wrote: | This falls apart when you move to a 4k display. A 1070, a 4k | display, hdr, and a new-ish game and you are lightyears from | the 60fps that is a minimum for many gamers. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-18 23:00 UTC)