Question Jen Sung makes questionable decision? [RUMOR] NVidia tries to disable GPU mining?

[VirtualLarry]

So now, not only is Nvidia's chairman selling GPUs that can be used for Compute (*formerly called GPGPU - "General Purpose"), he's rum0ored to be attempting to effectively regulate WHAT PROGRAMS are ALLOWED to be run on the GPUs that they mfg?

Imaging if Intel decided to decree, that their CPUs, could no longer be used for searching for prime numbers.

This whole idea is a slippery slope that I am NOT willing to go down.

And to think, this is all just an (alleged) stupid band-aid, over their mfg and supply-chain issues.

If Nvidia could effectively supply all of their GPU markets with product, this wouldn't even be an issue.

Edit: If this rumor turns out to be true, expect class-action lawsuits against NVidia, much like what happened to Sony with the PS3 losing functionality (running Linux) after people purchased them.

Now, ALL NVIDIA RETAILERS will be forced to post a prominent disclaimer of the software that is NOT ALLOWED to be run on these GPUs, or they will get sued as well.

Update:
NVidia to phase out all existing Ampere PCI device-ids, phase in EtH mining "block" across ALL new Ampere line-up!

 

[NTMBK]

That sound... is the sound of a million CUDA ecosystem developers crying out, and then being silenced, all at once.

BOOM! NVidia death-star drivers activated! CUDA for the masses, NO MORE!

Edit: "The market" will be NVidia's judge. If no-one buys them, expect them to "roll this back", and act like it never happened. ("CMP" web pages disappearing, etc.)

I expect quite a few lawsuits over this driver limitation as well.

Err, okay. I don't think a single non-Ethereum CUDA developer is hurt by this.

 

[coercitiv]

@VirtualLarry I think you're getting a bit carried away here: what Nvidia is attempting to do right now is not morally wrong (if they're able to limit the scope), nor is it bad for the market as a whole. Problem is it won't work, the incentives to break this "blockade" are huge.

It may help a bit with immediate availability for the 3060 though.

 

[BFG10K]

LOL @ entitled miners. As if its never been the case that DP performance is artifically restricted on consumer cards compared to Quadro/Tesla. No siree, we've never seen anything like it.

Here is another idea, just produce 4GB 3060.

Why should we cripple performance for gamers using gaming SKUs on account of whining miners? If miners wanna mine, they now have mining SKUs.

 

[BFG10K]

These mining skus are a joke.

Why should gamers care?

What is worse to you? a 4Gb 3060, or reviving the GTX1050TI? a 4GB 3060 will be worthless for mining while still providing excellent 1080p gaming, but to be fair, the "4GB 3060" is probably the 3050...

Again, why should gamers be compromising gaming SKUs when miners are the problem here?

You're asking the wrong question. It needs to be flipped back on miners, because miners are the problem, not gamers.

The question to ask is: "would you rather have nVidia's mining SKUs, or have nVidia completely block mining"? Because nVidia could well do that.

I'm actually surprised they only did 2x; they should've done 10x. Make it so gaming SKUs can technically mine for education or research purposes, but there's no hope for it to be profitable.

 

[beginner99]

Why doesnt NV do what they normally do? Update their "policy/contracts" with OEMs. If they catch OEM selling in Bulk to miners, they get a hefty fine. If OEM doesn't want to sign contract, OEM doesn't get any chips anymore. The problem are clearly the OEMs. That pic from Zotac that was taken down?

 

[ultimatebob]

Miners are also customers.
Let the market regulate itself, the cards are only going to where the demand is.

That's not really working, though. Gamers only want 1 or 2 of the latest generation video cards, while the miners want dozens of them.

What sucks is that this is holding back development for next generation PC games, because most people do not have the hardware to run them. Instead, they're getting piled up in the basements of crypto miners.

 

[ultimatebob]

I have a current "No LTT videos" policy, so I wouldn't know.

Did he say anything substantive?

Not really, it was a typical "Linus rant". You know, like the ones he makes about Intel until they cut him another check to promote their latest processors.

 

[ozzy702]

For the CMP cards, Nvidia could have a case for them going forward if they provide proper driver support. Gamers might not be able to buy them used, but if you can use them to run general purpose GPGPU code and accelerate rendering, do ML training, etc there could be a potential resell market that would make them more attractive to miners. Outside that, the CMP cards will need to be significantly cheaper than an equivalent GeForce card to make sense and I would be shocked if Nvidia priced them that way.

I doubt there are next to any CMP cards in existence and there probably never will be. It's just marketing so that NVIDIA can appease gamers and not poison the well. Even if they did exist, like you said, they won't be priced appropriately so they wouldn't sell well.

NVIDIA knows that AMD is serious competition now, and they can't afford to turn gamers against them. AMD doesn't have to do a thing because RDNA2 cards are priced high enough, and have such low production rates they don't really factor into in the mining discussion.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Sounds a lot like ... Backblaze! They bought external HDDs en-mass and "shucked" them, and when the HDD companies refused to sell them any more in bulk (so I read), they paid individual purchasers a "bounty" to buy them and ship them to Backblaze.

Yet, in most online discussions, Backblaze is seen as the challenger, and the old, stodgy HDD mfgs as the "bad guys". I wonder why mining is different?

"En-masse" was around 2,000 HDDs, with a lot of manual effort, lasting roughly 4 months, and they definitely got flak from a number of communities, even if on their own site they are non-apologetic about it. Mostly because they see the problem as getting around a natural disaster (Thailand flooding). In my opinion, they deserve flak for it, but that happening isn't even close to hundreds of thousands of GPUs being bought out, completely crippling the market for months on end to consume electricity at the rate of a small country, and all driven not by a natural disaster, but simply the sake of money-hunting.

Like I mentioned, I definitely think Backblaze deserved flak for what they pulled early in their life. But there is magnitudes of difference here. If anyone thinks what Backblaze did was selfish and made them the bad guys, then they should be absolutely livid at miners. If they don't think this mining situation is bad, then there's not much to be said for Backblaze.

 

[Mopetar]

Unless they ban it in other regions, the miners will just move out of Inner Mongolia and into other provinces or countries. It isn't as though BitCoin mining requires any kind of specific geography, etc. in order to perform. As long as you have somewhere to put the hardware and electricity to run it, it will work. Unlike manufacturing plants, it's not particularly hard to load up all of the GPUs, ASICs, and other equipment in a van and move it. Hell, you could probably build a massive mining operation into a shipping container, which I just Googled and found people are already doing.

Also, BitCoin mining is all done with ASICs now, so unless there was a considerable amount of ETH mining going on in Inner Mongolia as well, I don't see it changing much with respect to shortages of GPUs being caused by miners. The real problem seems to be that the government there was offering heavily subsidized electricity to the usual predictable results.

 

[Mopetar]

Well, cheap first batch cards inventory ended a long time ago. demand is through the roof, There is not that much inventory for both GPU or ASIC miners in Shenzhen. Even Chinese suppliers' prices with in-stock inventory are the same as eBay resellers!

Maybe AMD and Nvidia have been increasing their prices, but it doesn't seem like they are if it's by much. AIBs have been charging more than normal, but some of that's probably just a fact of their own costs increasing. Plenty of retailers are certainly marking up the prices on any cards they get, but ultimately any failure to do so on the part of anyone in the chain up to that point just leaves money on the table for the scalpers that will buy and flip cards for the actual market value.

Most of the price increases seem as though they are happening downstream from Nvidia and AMD.

 

[Dribble]

...and the mining limiter has been cracked. Took about as long as expected:

Cryptominers have already cracked Nvidia's RTX 3060 hash rate limiter

That certainly didn't take long

www.techradar.com

This has been all over the web for days, and it turns out nothing was cracked/bypassed or anything else. The original picture was not of a card mining Ethereum which is the thing that the driver slows down. Most reputable news sites have now retracted their "it's been cracked" statement in the small print at the bottom (although many leaving the headline unchanged to maximise the clicks).

The whole thing was taken off a tiny partial screenshot by someone no one had ever heard of, was always super dodgy, but was that enough for sites like techradar to take it as fact and post an article confirming it's been hacked. Says more about techradar then anything, even wccf which is a site that exists for rumours like this were more careful (sticking "allegedly" in the title) and then and updating the article and posting a retraction.

 

[MrTeal]

So Nvidia made an unhackable driver that no one could crack, and then released a cracked version themselves. That's a self own for the history books.

"Here at Nvidia, we have a 0 blame culture and strive to learn from every mistake. Except in this case. Tim, you're fired."

 

[Mopetar]

Yeah, that's pretty idiotic. If they were really worried about making sure gamers who wanted their cards had a good chance at getting one there are far better ways of accomplishing that over something like this.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I still think that this is a stupid move, as CUDA cores are supposed to be "general purpose" and "turing complete", essentially, as I understand it.

BUT... considering that NVidia is a MASTER at marketing...

maybe this is really just the opening salvo in a two-pronged attack on miners...

NEXT step is to release unrestricted compute ("mining") cards based on Ampere GPU consumer silicon, without video outputs.

That may be what the rumor-monger shown in the video was alluding to.

 

[Justinus]

Pretty sure it's Jen Sen or Jen-Hsun. Never heard of this Jen Sung character....

It would be an interesting strategy if they locked out specific applications at the driver level unless authenticated with a Geforce account. No idea if the rumor is anywhere near this as I haven't watched the video.

If they allowed customer authentication to unlock specific app/workload access I can see a case made against some kind of class action. (Not that I support or endorse the idea).

 

[aigomorla]

You know nvidia already does something similar with NVEC.
The gamer class cards are all locked at how many simultaneous NVEC threads they can decode, while if you get the expensive quadro's you are unlocked at unlimited.

So if you want a good plex/emby box with lots of simultaneous hardware transcoding, you need a quadro and not a GTX.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

That would be awesome, ETH mining is cancer on PC gaming.

 

[Shmee]

I kinda doubt they would go that far, but we will see. I certainly wouldn't want to be told what apps I can and cannot run on my GPU.

 

[Dribble]

I'm quite happy for my gpu to only be able to run the apps I need if it allows me to actually buy one at a reasonable price. I am sure they can also sell gpu's that miners can use too and those who want one of them can go fight with the miners to try and buy one.

 

[psolord]

Good riddance redacted miners!

Nvidia for once is doing the right thing. If they proceed to doing so that is.

They are selling you a graphics card. Not a mining card. Go get a mining asic if you want to mine or GTFO! Useless power virus idiots, want to make money out of thin air, lazy bastards!




No profanity allowed in the tech forums.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[Shmee]

You guys do realize you can do both on a single card right? I understand the frustration when users buy dozens or hundreds of cards, but there is nothing wrong with mining on your GPU when not gaming.

 

[zir_blazer]

Yeah nVidia, go ahead and do it. I want to see the shareholders faces when they hear that the CEO wants to cut the flow of products to customers that purchases GPUs in bulk amounts and dramatically increase the ASP due to unprecedent demand just to appease the gamers hate for miners. Nor you can force miners to go to professional cards that are more expensive, more so if AMD keeps things the way they are. Sounds like a way to alienate an important customer base and lose A LOT of sales, and gamers aren't going to compensate for that due to volume.
I could actually bet that what keep AMD afloat during most of the last decade when it was far from competitive on CPUs and average on GPU was precisely miners, since Radeons were historically way better for raw compute than nVidia, so miners used to not touch GeForces until the recent generations.


Also, nVidia already does something similar with virtualization. You aren't intended to use standard GeForces for gaming inside a VM via PCI Passthrough, only Quadros that are 3-4 times more expensive for similar specifications. The GPU Driver refuses to work inside a VM. Luckily, that can be workarounded, so you can manage to get GeForces working anyways. So I will assume that this will also be workarounded, because it will be some check that will eventually be bypasses with modded Drivers or whatever.
Stupid draconic EULAs be damned, go and shove it where the sun doesn't brights.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sounds like a way to alienate an important customer base and lose A LOT of sales, and gamers aren't going to compensate for that due to volume.

This. Once sales drop by a SIGNIFICANT amount, then NVidia will be left trying to explain why SO MUCH of their revenue was coming from mining, something that they've (*allegedly) understated in the past, and were sued by their shareholders for. This will just throw fuel on the fire there. Go for it NVidia, see how long you can make the lawsuit fires around you burn~! LOL.