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!

 

[BarkingGhostar]

At this point Nvidia should just stop wasting their time marketing retail products since their true focus is miners and they'll just venture to the retail manufacturer's website to find out what's new and just order from there. PC gamers are just SOL due to corporate greed.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I read something yesterday about intels pending graphics cards.
They seem promising in a middle of the road sense, like excellent 1080P ability. Hopefully the current events in gaming cards encourages intel to speed up development of the cards.

 

[PingSpike]

I read something yesterday about intels pending graphics cards.
They seem promising in a middle of the road sense, like excellent 1080P ability. Hopefully the current events in gaming cards encourages intel to speed up development of the cards.

Didn't Intel decide to use TSMC or some combination of chips though? I've heard to many things on this so I'm not even sure anymore. That isn't really going to help anyone unless these things are coming from non-Intel fabs.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Didn't Intel decide to use TSMC or some combination of chips though? I've heard to many things on this so I'm not even sure anymore. That isn't really going to help anyone unless these things are coming from non-Intel fabs.

I can’t remember where I saw it but this link mentions a larger “pipe” card and release looking like 2nd half of the year.

Intel Xe-HPG DG2 Flagship Gaming GPU Spotted With 512 EUs, 4096 Cores & 12 GB GDDR6 VRAM, Up To 1800 MHz Clocks

Intel's flagship Xe-HPG DG2 Gaming GPU has made an appearance within the Geekbench database along with its specifications.

wccftech.com

Regardless more cards on the market would be a good thing.

 

[VirtualLarry]

AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: 'we will not be blocking any workload'

AMD says you can do what you want with RDNA 2, but it's going to be best set on gaming.

www.pcgamer.com

AMD explicitly stating to the press, that "they will not be limiting any workloads".

 

[Mopetar]

Frankly that's a good decision. Their driver team has far better things to be working on then something that might work as a block for all of two weeks until a non-gimped driver gets accidentally released or someone figures out a way around it.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: 'we will not be blocking any workload'

AMD says you can do what you want with RDNA 2, but it's going to be best set on gaming.

www.pcgamer.com

AMD explicitly stating to the press, that "they will not be limiting any workloads".

- Yeah, it clearly didn't matter with the 3060 even when the limiter was in place.

Demand is too high, supply is too low, and if I'm not mistaken AMD actually naturally lags NV in mining performance without any limiters or other stuff in place to begin with due to RDNA2's narrow bus width.

As much as I personally wished to upgrade this gen, I don't think its happening mining craze or not. in fact, the one silver lining in this whole thing might actually be cheap used cards once mining implodes, in which case bring on the miners.

 

[Mopetar]

Yeah, the opposite end of a mining boom is the mining bust and everyone trying to get out at the same time drives prices down to an insane degree. The longer it lasts the more GPUs that will hit the market in a short window.

 

[VirtualLarry]

https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/m9ipyc

Grumblings among the rank-and-file miners, are that the HUGE influx of new "Weekend miners" that came onboard with Nicehash, due to Linus's new video about mining with NH, is causing revenue to tank up to 20%. This is BEFORE the expected loss of 20-50% of revenue due to EIP-1559 starting in July.

Two things:
1) This serves as kind of a warning, if ETH goes away, then any other currency that is even able to absorb that kind of hashpower, is going to drop in profitability even worse, and

2) Maybe Linus isn't actually "for" mining. Maybe, he wants to trigger a "Tragedy of the Commons"-type scenario, and make it so popular, that it becomes unprofitable and thus unpopular to mine ETH. Is Linus really that META?

 

[VirtualLarry]

- Yeah, it clearly didn't matter with the 3060 even when the limiter was in place.

Demand is too high, supply is too low, and if I'm not mistaken AMD actually naturally lags NV in mining performance without any limiters or other stuff in place to begin with due to RDNA2's narrow bus width.

As much as I personally wished to upgrade this gen, I don't think its happening mining craze or not. in fact, the one silver lining in this whole thing might actually be cheap used cards once mining implodes, in which case bring on the miners.

Yeah, the opposite end of a mining boom is the mining bust and everyone trying to get out at the same time drives prices down to an insane degree. The longer it lasts the more GPUs that will hit the market in a short window.

Maybe, my allegory in my other thread about "Raining GPUs" - for Gamers, might be more accurate than I first realized.

Maybe this is the start of a "precipitation cycle", in which GPUs get absorbed by miners ("the atmosphere"), as temps (demand) rises, and then, once it gets "saturated" (mining no longer profitable), those "absorbed" GPUs, "Rain out" onto the market. And then slowly, the cycle begins again.

Maybe this is in part how the atmosphere on our planet started?

 

[MrTeal]

https://www.reddit.com/r/NiceHash/comments/m9ipyc

Grumblings among the rank-and-file miners, are that the HUGE influx of new "Weekend miners" that came onboard with Nicehash, due to Linus's new video about mining with NH, is causing revenue to tank up to 20%. This is BEFORE the expected loss of 20-50% of revenue due to EIP-1559 starting in July.

Two things:
1) This serves as kind of a warning, if ETH goes away, then any other currency that is even able to absorb that kind of hashpower, is going to drop in profitability even worse, and

2) Maybe Linus isn't actually "for" mining. Maybe, he wants to trigger a "Tragedy of the Commons"-type scenario, and make it so popular, that it becomes unprofitable and thus unpopular to mine ETH. Is Linus really that META?

Is that strictly a Nicehash thing, where they don't have sufficient cliental willing to purchase the new hashpower? The network as a whole hasn't deviated much from it's preexisting hashrate and difficulty trend.

 

[PingSpike]

AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: 'we will not be blocking any workload'

AMD says you can do what you want with RDNA 2, but it's going to be best set on gaming.

www.pcgamer.com

AMD explicitly stating to the press, that "they will not be limiting any workloads".

I'm not sure AMD has any choice, so I wouldn't give them to much credit one way or another on this decision. AMD GPU drivers on linux are open source, you wouldn't have to be a top level hacker to just comment out the mining block from those and recompile.

 

[VirtualLarry]

1 bitcoin mining facility per 400 citizens...

 

[beginner99]

latest rumor is NV will launch a mining card based on A100.

 

[Mopetar]

latest rumor is NV will launch a mining card based on A100.

I don't think they would because if they were actually valuable for mining, miners would already buy them. Of course the current customer base is even more willing to pay even more money for the product so the miners don't bother. Also, the algorithm used by the most popular GPU-focused cryptocurrency is essentially bound by the memory bandwidth of the card more than the compute, which means that an A100 would only be about 50% more effective than a 3090. As soon as the mining becomes compute bound it's a target for using an ASIC instead because that will always be far more efficient than a GPU which allows much more generalized compute by comparison.

 

[beginner99]

GPU-focused cryptocurrency is essentially bound by the memory bandwidth of the card more than the compute,

Well the A100 40GB at 1.5GB/s has 50% more bandwidth than a 3090 and the 80GB version at 2GB/s has double the bandwidth of a 3090. Plus it beign HBM probably also lower latency but not sure if that matters for mining.
A100 wasn't used so far because the mining software AFAIK doesn't really work well with it and it simply costs so much more.

 

[MrTeal]

Well the A100 40GB at 1.5GB/s has 50% more bandwidth than a 3090 and the 80GB version at 2GB/s has double the bandwidth of a 3090. Plus it beign HBM probably also lower latency but not sure if that matters for mining.
A100 wasn't used so far because the mining software AFAIK doesn't really work well with it and it simply costs so much more.

Even if mining software was optimized and it hashed twice as fast as a 3090, the payback on a $10,000 GPU doesn't make any sense. They could sell a mining focused A100 card for half what they sell a PCIe A100 compute card for and it'd still be a pretty terrible investment.

 

[Dribble]

Apparently Nvidia is going to try another way of limiting mining which is mentioned here: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-h100-ho...-dies-43008-cuda-cores-and-48-gb-hbm4-memory/

They will have a system where you can buy gpu's from steam or epic, but the catch is only from accounts that are 2 years old, and I guess you can only buy 1 gpu per account or something. Obviously there will be selling of accounts to miners but it will complicate the life of bots/scaplers/industrial miners trying to get their hands on these gpus.

 

[Hitman928]

Apparently Nvidia is going to try another way of limiting mining which is mentioned here: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-h100-ho...-dies-43008-cuda-cores-and-48-gb-hbm4-memory/

They will have a system where you can buy gpu's from steam or epic, but the catch is only from accounts that are 2 years old, and I guess you can only buy 1 gpu per account or something. Obviously there will be selling of accounts to miners but it will complicate the life of bots/scaplers/industrial miners trying to get their hands on these gpus.

Cue steam accounts being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

 

[CP5670]

I wonder what people will play on this. The article says RT at 1080p, which a 3090 already does well enough (and is not always worth it over 4K without RT). Does that mean it can't do RT at 4K yet? They should use this Steam system to get the existing cards in gamers' hands before coming out with new ones.

I see VR and not flatscreen games as the best use case for faster video cards at this point, but it needs Nvidia or some company to push it aggressively and incentivize developers to make AAA games for it.

 

[jpiniero]

Apparently Nvidia is going to try another way of limiting mining which is mentioned here: https://wccftech.com/nvidia-h100-ho...-dies-43008-cuda-cores-and-48-gb-hbm4-memory/

They will have a system where you can buy gpu's from steam or epic, but the catch is only from accounts that are 2 years old, and I guess you can only buy 1 gpu per account or something. Obviously there will be selling of accounts to miners but it will complicate the life of bots/scaplers/industrial miners trying to get their hands on these gpus.

Definately an AFD Joke.

 

[_Rick_]

Hmm, I guess it works though: 3060s tend to be in stock reasonably well...at least at the ususal 2x RSP....

 

[Heartbreaker]

They are going to try again with the 3060. It gets a new device ID so it requires different drivers, and can't run with the leaked ones:

NVIDIA to launch a new GA106-302 GPU for GeForce RTX 3060 to reintroduce Ethereum mining limiter - VideoCardz.com

NVIDIA preparing GA106-302 GPU to tackle mining But seriously, this time for real. NVIDIA GA106-302 GPU (concept), Source: HKEPC According to HKEPC, NVIDIA is set to launch a new Ampere GPU variant with a better cryptomining limiter. The new GPU codenamed GA106-302 would replace the GA106-300 in...

videocardz.com

 

[zir_blazer]

They are going to try again with the 3060. It gets a new device ID so it requires different drivers, and can't run with the leaked ones:

NVIDIA to launch a new GA106-302 GPU for GeForce RTX 3060 to reintroduce Ethereum mining limiter - VideoCardz.com

NVIDIA preparing GA106-302 GPU to tackle mining But seriously, this time for real. NVIDIA GA106-302 GPU (concept), Source: HKEPC According to HKEPC, NVIDIA is set to launch a new Ampere GPU variant with a better cryptomining limiter. The new GPU codenamed GA106-302 would replace the GA106-300 in...

videocardz.com

What a joke. This can be currently fully workarounded with virtualization since you can spoof the PCI Vendor ID and Device ID.

 

[fleshconsumed]

ETH just crossed $2500. Your only hope is ETH 2.0.