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Comment by ttt0 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so there are people who are expecting hardware manufacturers to dictate to users what their products can or cannot be used for? Is this the war on general purpose computing I've been hearing about?

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My understanding is that Nvidia's move was universally condemned.

AMD's just taking advantage of Nvidia's blunder.

Until today I was convinced that not breaking your products was just an industry standard.

nope, hardware vendors have been introducing artificial restrictions in some products for market segmentation for decades

e.g. ECC support in CPUs, mods to turn radeon into firegl / geforce into quadro, fused off cores

486 DX versus SX, wasn't it? That was my childhood intro.

Why did Nvidia work to block crypto mining on their video cards? (I don't buy "because gamers couldn't buy them")

Can someone explain why they think nvidia really did this?

The cards that have access to mining lack a video output. Once they become unprofitable to mine with they won’t impact the gaming market on resale.

Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards

This is the first I've ever heard of this, wow. I have an nvidia card and certainly do "business-like activities" with it, not at any particular scale but for my own income and whatnot. Is this something I should be considering moving to AMD over?

Yeah I was surprised by this as well, but apparently you cannot use NVIDIA cards to run enterprise deep learning workloads ("in a data center")... was super super shocked to hear this.. like isn't this one of the primary use cases...?

Bizarre

IIRC you have to use their more expensive Tesla cards for these use cases. These cards are basically the same as consumer GPUs with more permissive driver licensing

Nice thanks, never followed up, I just assembled my contraband server and never thought about it again. Do you know if you can just buy them for personal (i.e. startup) use as well?

Can you please provide any (semi-)official source for this statement? So if nVidia graphic card makes me money in any way, I'm breaching some license? Of the driver?

They try to restrict you from using consumer cards for HPC computing and have it in their EULA. You can circumvent it a bit, but if you want to buy a hardware compute cluster you _can_ have problems if you want to use consumer grade cards (many hardware vendors that sell clusters kind of ignore this though)

Also nvidia just released (and did something like this before) GPUs specifically for miners. This was seen critical for many reasons for instance the fact that it was done while a "silicon shortage" was/is happening and the inability for users to later use these cards for gaming (note: nvidia fucked up royally and released a driver that can circumvent those restrictions)

Those are just a few examples.

https://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/lice...

> No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/latest/grid-licensing-user-guid...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/nvidia-limits-data-center-us...

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/06/11/what-is-a-virtual-g...

If it means people who only want to play games can actually but one for less than the price of a car, sure.

Hardware manufacturers have imposed weird arbitrary feature limits on things forever. It's how they segment out valuable markets. Even in graphics you get output limits to protect workstation cards. Nothing new.

I kinda get the segmentation part, at least in theory, but I don't buy that it's to "protect the poor gamers". Maybe I'm missing something, but the production cost is the same and it costs virtually nothing to not put on those limits. If anything, it almost certainly costs more to do this. So as far as I understand it, it's just charging more money for what essentially is the same thing. Especially when you consider the fact that they simultaneously changed the license of one of their cheaper GPU cards to prevent using it in data centers, so you'd have to switch to something more expensive. What's important to note is that they specifically didn't prevent the blockchain stuff.

I don't know, I just find producing something and then breaking it to be wasteful and borderline immoral.

The primary supply is limited by covid affecting the component supply chain. The demand is sky high because of miners happy still making s profit at twice the price. The cards are often going straight from primary retailers to eBay.

Lots of factors colluding to make PC gaming unaffordable.

Broadly speaking, the issue is that cryptocurrencies drive up demand for GPUs, and that makes them less available/affordable for gamers. If there was a crypto-crippled GPU then it would be exempt from that particular demand.

And since the amount of GPUs won't go up magically by inventing another product there will be too few anyway or the price will go up. There's nothing to win by doing so which is why people condemned Nvidia for doing it.

The intent was to cut demand, presumably. If a GPU can't mine ethereum, then ethereum miners won't be competing with gamers to buy that GPU.

Many people believe the intent was to prevent a glut of gaming gpus when crypto crashes. If you get miners to instead by crypto only ASICS or "mining gpus" then can't be resold.

It's been a pretty standard procedure for chip companies to sell CPUs locked from doing specific tasks, whether that's binning, burning fuses to disable functionality etc. It's much cheaper to make 1 design that does everything and segment your market using arbitrary restrictions than to design lots of chips. It's only the totally bone-headed way Nvidia decided to target this that is new.

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