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Comment by jperry | Hacker News Reader

They crippled their Geforce cards in terms of mining while simultaneously launching different, more expensive, dedicated mining cards[0].

[0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

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If they could actually enforce this then I would be all for it. Crypto mining is the biggest and most pointless waste of energy since nuclear weapons testing. All these crypto miners are just making the planet hotter, while pissing off people who have more legitimate uses for these cards but cannot realistically obtain one because they are being hogged by the miners.

Nuclear weapons testing kept us from using nuclear weapons, worth it.

Who is "us"? Surely you don't mean the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...

The event you are linking to was the real world "test" of nuclear weapons. And quite a lot of people attribute the lack of real world "testing" of nuclear weapons since then to that specific event.

Eh, the vast majority of these cards are used by people who are rendering fantasy worlds so they can run around pretending to be an elf, or a soldier, or some other stupid thing. Lots of them are full grown adults too, just wasting time that they could be doing something meaningful with.

That's way WAY dumber than powering a next generation global financial infrastructure.

Wow, that's new. A cryptocurrency proponent who hates video games.

While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the other meaningless stuff, like fiction novels, watching sporting events, poetry, visual arts, theater, and being a tired technocrat with shallow self-righteous ideas about what is and isn’t meaningful.

Of course, most gamers don’t game 24x7 while their multi-GPU rack is pegged at 100% either.

Heck, while we're at it both sex and reproduction can be put on the chopping block as well - nothing has meaning except the acquisition of wealth, right?

This is the third comment on this thread I've seen that *really* needed an /s

I would argue that entertainment is of greater societal value than polynomial solutions you can trade for crack.

That isn't to say that I think crypto is worthless, I think it has the same worth as any fiat currency. We don't spend an entire 1% of the world's energy printing and handling a tiny fraction of the world's banknotes. Crypto is orders of magnitude less energy efficient than every other form of currency on the planet. It's like if everyone started commuting to work in 18-wheeler semis.

Tell me about it. The company I work for uses tons of video cards to run ML models for online advertising/customer profiling/etc..., and it's gotten noticibly more expensive thanks to crypto miners.

And I would far rather those video cards be used by crypto miners than online profiling and advertising assholes like your company.

You and GP don't get to decide what is a "legitimate" use for a GPU. All the outrage that other people want GPUs for purposes you disagree with and entitlement that only some users really deserve to have access to them is just ridiculous.

I was actually being sarcastic. I own crypto and agree that it's hypocritical to rate some unnecessary uses of power/video cards as better than others.

I do work for a Big-N, so the first part of the comment is true.

I'm putting together a workstation for my research group and the only thing I'm missing is the GPU. Apparently supply is the worst it's ever been and I can't find anything even 1-2 generations old that isn't marked up 2x.

It's possible those cards are being made with chips that are too defective to output video. Unfortunately only Nvidia knows for sure and they're not going to say anything truthful about it.

If the cards were cheaper, or even the same price but available, then I doubt there'd be an outcry. But they charge more, for a surely defective part.

It'd be like buying a car and finding a clause that says if you manage to make money off of it they'll take a percentage or "brick" the hatch or something, to prevent your profitable usage. Nvidia should back the fuck off and just sell a product.

Even if they were cheaper miners wouldn't like them: one thing which substantially reduces miners' operating costs is the resale value of the GPUs they are using. They can buy a GPU, mine on it for a year or two, and then sell it for ~50% of its original value (or even higher in today's markets). The mining cards with zero resale value (which will much more quickly become landfill) would need to be substantially cheaper to make this worthwhile.

Right. But if they openly sold defective half-finished cards for mining they'd still be less popular products but people wouldn't feel insulted.

All of the mining card SKUs except one were confirmed to be using older Turing-based architecture on a completely different fab and node (and one that's not currently bottlenecked to the same extent as TSMC 7nm/Samsung 8nm are).

So they are not harvested silicon, but they also don't compete for fab time either.

I haven't seen any pricing on the CMP cards yet. Are you sure they're more expensive?

I would assume they would be. Miners price hardware based on the hashrate, resale value is nice as a safety but serious miners aren't figuring on dumping all their hardware the first time price drops a little bit.

Take a look at the data compiled by Tom's Hardware and you'll see the 3060 Ti has a 51% price premium over the 3060 on ebay. That is the "mining premium" in action. The 3060 is a bit slower on paper but it mines pretty much as well.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index

As such, if the mining cards mine twice as fast, they're twice as valuable to miners, and they'll pay twice as much for them. Pricing them less than gaming cards is leaving money on the table and completely unnecessary when they'll sell anyway.

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