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.
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.
That makes me angry, it should make you angry too.
This doesn't make me angry, and I don't think it should make you angry either.
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/bitcoin-m...
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.
This is highly inaccurate, particularly on the used market. People want cards that can handle whatever games they play within their budget. A lot of older cards run tons of games quite well still, especially if you accept lower framerates / resolutions.
RTX in particular isn't actually that coveted by gamers from what I've seen. It's seen as a nice-to-have at best.
Or to run higher resolutions, or to play flight simulator at reasonable refresh rates, etc etc.
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.
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.
Cryptocurrencies are not inherently good or valuable and cryptocurrency people aren't special and their world-burning habits and desires need not be privileged.
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.
The excusemaking is pernicious.
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.
I've been idly mining on an RTX3080 for 6 months now, and the hashrate has slowly gone down about 20% since new. I suspect the thermal pads on the memory chips are slowly cooking. I replaced them once already and restored a bit of hashrate.
Did it pay for the electricity and the card itself at the current BTC price?
Actually, miners optimise for computation/kWh of electricity (versus computation/16ms of time for gamers), which leads to running mining GPUs at significantly lower wear and tear level (lower voltage scaling, lower clock rate, etc) than gaming GPUs.
> having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market.
Having used GPUs in general burn out is somewhat common, but it's less common for ex-miner cards than for ex-gamer cards.
what you are looking at is a future that is very, very bright for BOINC and folding@home scores.
the cards will never be worthless, if nothing else someone will buy them up for 25 bucks and store them until the (inevitable) next mining crisis, and any reasonable miner is going to chose 25 bucks versus having to pay to dispose of them properly (ahahah, sorry, we all know if it comes to that they're going in the nearest creek).
anyway you get the point though, the value is never going to actual zero, people will buy them for development work, for grid compute, or just as a bet on the next mining crisis. A hundred bucks for a card is better than nothing.
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?
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.
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.
Myself and most of my gaming friends have been buying nvidia cards for (soon to be) decades now.
Basically since 3dfx went belly up
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.
In contrast, gamers tend to stick with brands, and if they're forced to switch due to lack of supply, their loyalty (and therefore future bias toward you company) might switch with it.
So while miners may be willing to pay more money per card today, they're not worth the future loss of revenue.
Like you said, you don't buy Nvidia because you're concerned about Nvidia support. If Nvidia was the only option, you would likely decide "fuck it", deal with any Nvidia problems (and become more familiar with running Nvidia) and become less concerned about Nvidia problems in the future because you have more experience dealing with them. And that means AMD may have lost future sales to you.
Probably because I'm not much of a gamer and hardly have brand loyalty in general. I always tend to compare products and buy what seems to be the better value.
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.
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.
https://timdettmers.com/2020/09/07/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...
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.
Crypto is very very frothy, so preserving some supply to bread and butter / ecosystem supporting sales makes a lot of sense to me.
But miners will find another software hack (just like they did for the RTX 3060 earlier) to bypass the restriction.
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.
I just hope they don’t kill functionality which matters for other meaningful purposes, like deep learning.
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.
Also, reasonably priced services now exist - I used pandora when I was in college and enjoyed it even with how hamstrung and limited it was - now I use spotify and like... why even bother pirating music now?
Sure occasionally pirating a big title from Ubisoft out of spite alone is pretty attractive but I mostly just nab things off Steam and leave it at that.
Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying. Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire. Most of this anti-piracy stuff is just lowering the value to the end consumer anyways.
> Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying.
Because they don't make money on the Switch. In fact, in the first few months of selling it, they were losing about $30 on every unit sold because of how expensive shipping was. Even today, the Switch runs a pretty thin profit margin, if any. Same goes for the PS5 and Xbox Series X, which gives you a pretty good idea of why these companies are so keen to keep an iron grip on software distribution.
because the console makers make little (or more often lose) profit from each system, so the draw is to make up or it by selling software. first party software or 3rd party software they get 30% of sales from.
>Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire
Tell that to the poor PSP. The reality is that 1% use it to run emulators or make homebrew and 99% use it to run free games. To the ordinary consumers, these aren't general purpose computers to tinker around with, they are toys to entertain themselves with. They have computers and phones for the former.
Because miners do.
IIRC it's used (among other things) to set a minimum firmware revision - after upgrading to a new (signed) firmware it blows a fuse so you can no longer run an older signed firmware, which stops you rolling back to when a vulnerability still existed.
So 4 years?
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.
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.
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.
I also don't really see how keeping all of the consumer groups (miners and regular folks) using precisely the same model of card instead of two incredibly unbelieveably similar cards would actually increase demand. If anything there being a card optimized for hashing (i.e. with unnecessary bits stripped off) might lower the cost to produce such a card and allow miners to actually purchase more of the card compared to paying for a nearly top of the line consumer video card.
I don't actually know how much we'll see Nvidia try and scale up (since that extra purchased capacity will be a liability if Eth suddenly tanks) but I think their decision to increase scale will only be minorly impacted by this effort. I will admit there will be some impact since they could refuse to increase the 3070 supply (please correct me if I've got model numbers turned around) without having as dramatic an effect on their customer base - however, that'd honestly just return them to square one where the miners are going to pick up consumer grade 3080s to keep up with mining projections.
I think the important thing here is that nothing is being made impossible - it's being made difficult which should have a corresponding effect on the value of these cards to miners unless they screw it up again in a major way. People trying to absolutely prevent video game piracy have either
1. Screwed it up and allowed a sharpie to defeat their system
2. Bricked a whole bunch of legitimate users' computes and ended up in class actions
The successful approach to prevent piracy is to price things fairly and while making it less convenient to pirate things - honestly a huge driver here in the modern world is content that's enriched by being online, not stupid "You must have an internet connection to play this single player game" but "If you're online you can tap in a friend for help" - that sort of online integration significantly lowers the value for pirates while allowing legitimate users to only see upsides.
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.
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.
They help people who are willing to pay the higher prices, and they provide a market signal encouraging producers to increase output.
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxGtMHXWpMw&t=300s
This is one of the reasons that Newegg is doing the Shuffle with those terrible deals - they are passing some of the junk they've been forced to buy along. So now you get a 3 year old watercooling-only mobo and a grenade-tier PSU with your GPU.
This applies to brick and mortar stores too, it's not just about keeping PC builders happy, but if they let one guy walk in and buy every GPU they've got, then they don't get the person coming in to build a PC and buying a motherboard, memory, etc, and they need to move those products because distributors are making them buy them to get GPUs.
The behavior of the AIB partners and distributors is really, really predatory here, they are definitely taking advantage of being the ones in control of a highly desirable commodity.
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.
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.
If Nvidia becomes "GPUs are cryptominers", then once demand dries up, their marketshare is zilch, and no one's writing games optimized for Nvidia cards anymore, and there's a big pile of bugs they've not fixed with new games trying to use Nvidia cards.
Inventory levels for consoles aren't quite normalized and available but with a stock tracking discord you can have a decent shot at getting a notice, going to a website, and successfully checking out if you hurry. In contrast you have zero shot at GPUs as a human, there are "cook groups" (the same groups that buy up fancy sneakers and scalp them) using backdoor exploits and botnets or networks of proxies embedded in browser addons, and the hardware is literally are gone the second it's up, or even before.
Rather notoriously, one of the cook groups got ahold of the DigitalRiver item IDs for the 3080 before the launch, and they used API requests to poke orders into the backend. So the items sold out before the listing even went up on the website. That is emblematic of the problem, every mechanism is being probed and any backdoor is being used to punch in orders before humans can get them. There are exploits and botnets and proxies being used and everything, hugely organized and sophisticated operations.
Every major retailer and every AIB partner (Zotac, Asus, etc) is heavily botted to the point where you stand no chance unless you pay for a $600/mo sneakerbot.
Have you tried buying a PS5 lately?
What manufacturers and consumers both want is price stability. They want prices to change in regular intervals and in predictable amounts. Both producers and consumers, but much more producers than consumers, need to make long range plans which require stable pricing. So when the iPhone first came out there was huge demand. Why didn't Apple auction the phones off? Because Apple wanted to anchor expectations for what the phone would cost over the long term. They certainly did not want consumers thinking that if they waited the phone would become cheaper. Thus they did not want consumers to think the phone's price was subject to a daily auction. Instead, it's better for Apple to have occasional shortages than to let people think that iPhone pricing will be moving up and down a lot. That allows consumers to make long term plans as well.
So manufacturers want stable pricing, they want happy consumers, and they don't want surprises. Consumers want the same thing. That's why people hate scalpers. You can draw all the supply demand curves you want, but that doesn't change the fact that people need to make long range plans, and this requires stable pricing.
Increasing supply is the way to get rid of scalpers.
Not entirely true, and also not accepting that one person's "scalper" is another person's "bought this but decided I would rather have the money it seems to be worth now that I see how much this is".
Secondary markets provide liquidity, allow for original sellers to trade money for time, provide reputational protection based on societal perceptions (this one is a bit weird, and maybe the less defensible of the reasons. Selling your own inventory on a secondary market to avoid negative press for high prices is thwarting normal market information principles, IMO), etc.
People love to get mad at a scapegoat rather than a root cause. So you blame the scalper rather than realizing that the concert you bought the ticket for set their prices way too low - perhaps because selling at the "true" price (somewhere between the sticker value and the scalped value) - would generate negative goodwill, or it would give the perception that an event (say Coachella as the classic example) is only "for rich people". The irony is of course that selling at an artificially low price doesn't suddenly make it not for rich people, it just adds a small random chance that you'll be able to convert your own time sitting there refreshing the website across many browsers into a cheaper-than-it-should-be ticket. But functionally the vast majority of people end up buying from scalpers or at least at a slightly above sticker price.
There's a related discussion about so-called "price gouging". IMO it's the classic scalper argument but just in a different form. Price gouging laws are not just immoral but are actively ineffective at their stated purpose; they just lead to the hypothetical price-gouge transaction never occurring. If you drive across state lines to bring HAM radios or water filters or what-have-you during hurricane katrina, and try to sell at above market rate, you'll be tossed in jail and your goods will be seized by the police, rather than making it out to the people who actually need them and are willing to pay 2x or 3x the usual price.
TL;DR: We've all got these twisted beliefs about how pricing works or the law of supply and demand, an illusion supported by the fact that our respective societies are so technologically/economically advanced that we can have massive supermarkets where you buy commoditized items that you can get at reasonably similar prices anywhere. Whereas if you go back in history to a pre-industrial time, a form of pseudo-bartering was the default and there was not this idea of a commodity, but rather every transaction, every buyer:seller relationship etc was a unique and non-commoditized interaction and thus it wouldn't seem weird to have different prices for different people or different prices at different points in time, etc.
The reason is they don't want private individuals entering danger zones just to make a buck - a profiteer could easily end up a victim from the dangerous situation.
"emergency workers" are not "private individuals".
And by the way, many workers during emergencies are just private citizens.
One reason for anti price gouging laws is that it is not uncommon for people to buy out all supply, then turn around and charge more/sit on a stockpile to solve the artificially created shortage they themselves created - a term for that being ‘cornering the market’.
I haven’t generally seen too much anger at someone legitimately opening up supply by importing more or opening up more supply lines (especially if they say that’s what they’re doing). People have been pretty open to paying more in that case (albeit maybe not 10x more, though that is more because it’s hard to plausibly have such an increase in cost without literally airdropping supplies - which is a different beast).
That depends on the level of demand and how low the price is.
It's pretty easy to have a situation where the number of tickets available is higher than the number of people that would have bought tickets for themselves on day one, but you hit immediate shortages when scalpers are also buying.
In a situation like that, scalpers are doing almost all harm. They add liquidity to a situation that already had enough liquidity, and extract tons of money in exchange.
> If you drive across state lines to bring HAM radios or water filters or what-have-you during hurricane katrina
That's the positive case. The negative case is someone buying it and putting it in their garage, or a store vastly increasing the price on something people need and they already had.
If you're trying to get paid for your labor, like driving essential supplies around, I would not call that gouging in the first place.
But the total number of people buying tickets is the same, all that's happen is it's being temporally shifted for the gain of the people that can afford to do so. This only works because the actual offered price of the tickets if far below that real cost people are willing to pay. If tickets were initially offered at an accurate price, there would be no money to be made buying them for resale (well, almost. There's still the option for artist demand to change over time with popularity).
There's only a few solutions to a supply and demand market problem where demand far outstrips supply that actually seem to work. Increase supply, or decrease demand. This has actually been done by some artists and solved the problem. Kid Rock, for example is known to play a large number of dates at a location, inundating with supply to the point only the best tickets can be sold for appreciable markup. Like, in his home town of Detroit, I think he played between 7 and 11 consecutive days in a stadium. Other artists will add dates after the initial sale depending on demand (which often destroys broker profits unless all those dates sell out too).
> In a situation like that, scalpers are doing almost all harm. They add liquidity to a situation that already had enough liquidity, and extract tons of money in exchange.
How good the liquidity there was and how much harm the brokers caused depends on how accurately demand matched supply. If there were 1000 ticket and 1000 people would ahve eventually bought them, then the brokers didn't really help. At the same time, they probably aren't going to make much money, since 1000 people willing to pay $40 doesn't necessarily mean those 1000 people are willing to pay $60, and given that reseller exchanges charge about 10% of the sale cost, they need to charge a lot more to make a profit. Brokers don't tend to want to buy for events where they can't really make money, so they try to avoid these events.
Alternatively, if the event has more tickets than consumers to buy them, brokers don't want to buy those either. Sometimes they do, and they sell at below market, sometimes well below market, just to recoup some of their money (having 20 tickets of 1000 at the event you bought for $40 when there's still 200 for sale on the primary market when the event is in a week means lots of tickets for sale for $20 or way less).
Finally, there's events where there's a lot more consumers than there are tickets. Perhaps there weren't enough tickets at the sale day to sell out immediately. It would have sold out well before the event date though, because there are way more consumers than tickets. In this case, at that point liquidity would have dried up. Brokers provide liquidity over the lifetime of the event. That's what they provide, and for that they extract money. There's a debate to be had as to whether they provide enough value for that service, but it's false to say the event had "enough liquidity", as if there was enough liquidity there would be no margin for brokers to make money, especially not the 10% cost on sale price needed to make a profit on the exchanges.
"all" that's happening, no. Causing people to pay more, even if they're willing to pay more, means they get less benefit out of the transaction.
> Finally, there's events where there's a lot more consumers than there are tickets. Perhaps there weren't enough tickets at the sale day to sell out immediately. It would have sold out well before the event date though, because there are way more consumers than tickets. In this case, at that point liquidity would have dried up. Brokers provide liquidity over the lifetime of the event. That's what they provide, and for that they extract money. There's a debate to be had as to whether they provide enough value for that service, but it's false to say the event had "enough liquidity", as if there was enough liquidity there would be no margin for brokers to make money, especially not the 10% cost on sale price needed to make a profit on the exchanges.
There would have been enough liquidity for the people that cared about the event to be able to purchase. That's enough liquidity. There is more liquidity now, and the benefit is that some of the people who didn't care very much get tickets too. This is a benefit, but it's not worth the downsides that the average amount paid goes up so much and that a bunch of people that were ready to buy a ticket on day one are now excluded.
The same thing happened with the colonial pipeline hack.
Even just dropping resales to one GPU per person per year would make an enormous difference, let alone if it was limited to people that genuinely bought the one GPU for themselves.
Rules constraining how a market functions often don't work or have unintended consequences. The only real solution is to attack supply and/or demand. A rule limiting how many a person can buy doesn't actually affect demand, it just affects that market's ability to respond to demand. You get people that circumvent that, and if it's onerous enough you'll get a secondary market where they cost more but there's no limit on the amount you can buy, if there wasn't one already.
That is, it's restrictions on a free market which create secondary markets. If the price was constantly in flux base don demand, there would be no secondary market because it would provide nothing over the primary one.
People don't want that though, because we've been conditioned over the last century to expect prices to be stable because we've had large companies that decided to innovate and compete in other areas that decided pricing things accurately based on real world local conditions. I mean, I understand, I'm the same way. I don't want to walk into a store and find the thing I went to buy is twice as expensive as it was yesterday.
I do think that's a more natural and sustainable state though, as long as market principles are actually prioritized though, instead of just being paid lip service (having one entity control a large chunk of a market is bad, and so is making it hard to reason about items and features in a market, as competition and information are the life-blood of free-markets).
Okay, but when I said "dropping" I wasn't talking about a rule, I was using that to demonstrate the problem.
> A rule limiting how many a person can buy doesn't actually affect demand, it just affects that market's ability to respond to demand.
There's a nearly fixed supply, because no amount of demand can affect the shortages.
There's a nearly fixed demand, because enough of the cards are going to be sold at MSRP to keep stoking it.
In a situation like that, someone arbitraging the prices is not helping supply and demand meet, they're just making a profit.
You want some amount of secondary market so that the people that very badly need a card can pay extra to get one now. But a tiny percent of cards going onto ebay is enough to fulfill that role. If half the cards end up massively marked up on ebay, it doesn't help allocate them more efficiently in any significant way, it just takes more money from people.
How is restricting activity not a rule? I don't think it would demonstrate the problem at all because I don't think it would actually do much (most people would ignore it). Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you meant originally or mean here?
> There's a nearly fixed supply, because no amount of demand can affect the shortages.
If demand dropped to the point below supply it wouldn't be a shortage.
> There's a nearly fixed demand, because enough of the cards are going to be sold at MSRP to keep stoking it.
> In a situation like that, someone arbitraging the prices is not helping supply and demand meet, they're just making a profit.
Sure they are. Without a secondary market and with a primary market that is fixed-price and a limited supply, after demand meets supply, nobody gets any more of that product, which means there's zero liquidity. With a secondary market, people re-sell for a profit, and the market has liquidity again. The people that want it are able to get it as long as they are willing to pay the extra amount. It's possible to buy the item where it would not be previously.
> You want some amount of secondary market so that the people that very badly need a card can pay extra to get one now. But a tiny percent of cards going onto ebay is enough to fulfill that role. If half the cards end up massively marked up on ebay, it doesn't help allocate them more efficiently in any significant way, it just takes more money from people.
I agree. I just don't think you can do anything about it usefully except to try to increase supply or reduce demand through various means. Everything else I've seen fails or has unintended consequences (which are hard to reason about ahead of time because they are by nature unintended).
I'm not arguing free markets always produce a good outcome, but I do think they generally provide the best outcome you can expect given the environment without relinquishing all control (and I think central planning only works for limited scopes and limited time frames).
The simple solution is to just increase the price of these cards to what the market deems they are worth, and the resale market problem goes away. The problem is that nobody (even me) really wants that, I'm just willing to say that while I don't want it for various reasons, it does solve the problem. It does that by reducing demand by increasing the price.
It seems to be working pretty well here in the UK actually, for nvidia's Founders Edition cards. They have a relationship with a single retailer, and you can buy one card.
Yes, people can circumvent it to a small extent, but not that easily.
You're just parroting your free-market religion here.
That’s a bit of a straw man, literally no one considers that scalping. It’s generally understood to mean buying more of scarce product than you could ever possibly need with the intent to sell it at a massive markup.
Scalpers are parasitic rent seekers in the digital age. They do nothing to improve the logistics or liquidity of markets. They merely seek to monopolise supply to extract profit from consumers for a product they did not produce.
That is by no means the accepted definition, nor an apt description. I know people that bought two PS3's when they came out in 2006, one to play, one to sell. That is generally accepted as "scalping", but they were not buying more than they could ever possibly need.
Many, many people that participate in the resale market are people acting like this. They buy tickets for themselves and some extra ones while they're at it because they were lucky enough to by available at the right time and/or get lucky. Sometimes they also do it for the occassional event or good they don't plan to use.
These are "scalpers" in every single single sense of the word, and the only difference between them and someone that makes a business out of it is scale.
> Scalpers are parasitic rent seekers in the digital age. They do nothing to improve the logistics or liquidity of markets. They merely seek to monopolise supply to extract profit from consumers for a product they did not produce.
Scalpers are just brokers that work in a different product. They make money by arbitrage, where the primary sales market is underselling a good compared to the secondary sales market. Additionally, they provide accurate market pricing because people responsible in the primary market don't want to for whatever reason (common ones includes upsetting ones fans, it being more work, harder to work out contract payments, etc).
And lest you think it's easy to just point at scalpers/brokers and at all the money they make because they're selling a $50 ticket for $200, consider that those are the extreme cases, and relatively few tickets go for that. There's also many tickets that go under cost. In the same event. By significant amounts. It's not uncommon to get tickets for 20% cheaper on stubhub. In some cases, when brokers have bought tickets and the event didn't sell out, you can find tickets for single digit dollars that went for $40+ originally.
I've talked about this before here.[1] In that example, I pointed to the market conditions for a specific event at that exact moment, where the primary market (TicketMaster) wasn't sold out and charging $39.50, TicketMaster's own secondary market was charging $36.50 for the same tickets, and Stubhub was charging $27. Who reaps the benefit of getting tickets for more than a 25% discount? Who do you think ended up paying for that? Where do you think the funds came from to pay for that? (here's a hint, you need to make an occasional 200%-300% profit in that business to break even over the long run in a lot of cases)
Here's another question, why and how is this different than the stock market, and in the ways it's different, how does it matter to the perspective you're expressing?
You're right they are scalpers; they are buying more than needed with the hope of making a quick buck.
However, like most things it's a matter of degree. Your friends were acting in the wrong and in the aggregate they did harm the market, but the people doing it professionally cause the most harm individually and hence tend to raise the most ire.
> Scalpers are just brokers that work in a different product. They make money by arbitrage, where the primary sales market is underselling a good compared to the secondary sales market.
They create scarcity in the primary market, which forces people into the secondary market. If scalpers did not exist, then the same number of people would get tickets, but there would be a greater welfare gain for consumers.
> And lest you think it's easy to just point at scalpers/brokers and at all the money they make because they're selling a $50 ticket for $200, consider that those are the extreme cases, and relatively few tickets go for that. There's also many tickets that go under cost.
They may be taking some risk in their venture, but they're still not providing any value. They are needless middlemen in a market that already sells direct to consumers. Also the cases are not that 'extreme', ask anyone trying to buy a graphics card right now, gasoline a week ago, or toilet paper when Covid-19 was starting up.
> Who do you think ended up paying for that? Where do you think the funds came from to pay for that? (here's a hint, you need to make an occasional 200%-300% profit in that business to break even over the long run in a lot of cases)
Presumably they are claiming a bigger share of the welfare pie than they are giving, else they wouldn't be participating in the market.
> Here's another question, why and how is this different than the stock market, and in the ways it's different, how does it matter to the perspective you're expressing?
The stock market has a social purpose. It provides a means for companies to raise capital to undertake investment. The market system is theorised to be the most efficient means to allocate this capital.
The scalpers don't serve a social purpose, they merely extract welfare from transactions that would have otherwise favoured consumers.
Please explain this harm to the market. I don't see how the market was harmed in any way.
> They create scarcity in the primary market, which forces people into the secondary market.
There exists scarcity in the primary market, because otherwise there would be no benefit to buying the tickets. That's a fundamental misunderstanding you have. Resellers do not generally create demand, they capitalize on existing or future demand.
> the same number of people would get tickets, but there would be a greater welfare gain for consumers.
Define "welfare gain". I contend there is also welfare gain for consumers with a secondary market, but not necessarily the same consumers. The primary market prioritized people that are available at certain times and have money available at the initial sale time. The secondary market prioritizes people that may not have been available at the initial sale time at the cost of a more variable cost.
You can contend that your group of consumer is better or more worth than the group I've defined, but if that's your goal, please do so. Otherwise, a secondary market provides access for at least the same number of people, and sometimes more, as it's possible (and likely) that while some tickets might go at a premium, some others might go at a discount because of poorly executed strategies by brokers.
> They may be taking some risk in their venture, but they're still not providing any value.
They are. That are providing access. Without a secondary market, after the last primary market ticket was sold, it would be impossible to buy tickets to that event. Even if you allowed a secondary market but somehow restricted it to only those that intended to go but could not, you would shut out all those that wanted to go but could not be available to buy tickets during the period it was initially on sale on the primary market. For some events that's as short as a few seconds (and yes, even without brokers).
> They are needless middlemen in a market that already sells direct to consumers.
So is Amazon. So is your local Supermarket. So is any fresh fruit or produce market for that matter. I mean you can just drive to the farm, right? I hope you only like your produce and fruit in season, because people that warehouse it to sell at times when the market isn't flush with that product are just needless middlemen in a market that sells direct, right?
> Presumably they are claiming a bigger share of the welfare pie than they are giving, else they wouldn't be participating in the market.
If all you prioritize is cost, then you're not serving people very well. The very nature of a market is that the many diverse needs of the buyers will be served by different sellers that offer slightly different incentives for different costs. If we only prioritized for cost in food, we'd all be eating rice and beans every night and that's all that would be grown. Instead people prioritize taste, and nutrition, and health, and we have an actual market. If we only prioritized for cost in vehicles, we'd all be driving either a bicycle or a stripped down motorcycle, because who cares about comfort or safety?
> The market system is theorised to be the most efficient means to allocate this capital.
The market system is theorized to be the most efficient means to alloow buyers with diverse needs find a seller that can provide those needs. Sometimes that's cost, sometimes it's something else.
> The scalpers don't serve a social purpose
I've outlined some already above. To repeat, they provide liquidity, meaning there is availability of tickets at a cost people are willing to pay more often than without them. They provide the ability to find the true value of a ticket at any time, rather than the fiat price that was offered initially. This can mean that tickets are available for cheaper than originally offered for (see my real life example noted earlier).
You lost your entire argument right there. Amazon doesn't price gouge, and buys with the express intent to sell with reasonable margins to customers. They provider valuable services, like customer service and fast delivery. Scalpers provide jack shit value other than trying to rip off customers because they got something first, while offering no other value to customers.
> they provide liquidity
No, they don't. They steal liquidity, and sell items at markups while offering no other value to customers. None. Zero.
I didn't say they did. But by the argument of the GP, they are often (depending on the product) "needless middlemen in a market that already sells direct to consumers", which is what I was responding to.
> They steal liquidity
They offer stuff for sale in markets which would have nothing for sale at other times (because if supply didn't outstrip demand, there would be no profit to be made). That is liquidity where it might not have existed previously.
I understand not liking scalping. I don't necessarily like it (I would prefer there was enough supply to satisfy demand). But there's a difference between not liking something and not understanding it and denying the reality of it. You can't stop it without understanding what makes people buy things to resell at a profit, why others are willing to pay that extra amount, and why there aren't enough of that thing to go around in the first place which allows it to happen.
HBO was a perfect example of this. Cable companies acted as the middlemen, because HBO didn't have the staff or inhouse expertise to operate a direct-to-consumer facing product. Now they do, but cable companies can still offer services that make their participation as middlemen sustainable and desirable for some consumers.
> That is liquidity where it might not have existed previously.
It did exist, only it was stolen by scalpers. They're not creating value out of thin air. They're not redistributing assets geographically to make them more accessible, or offering secondary insurance or warranties that make choosing them a smart option. They're stealing opportunities from actual customers looking to purchase a service or good, but instead are forced to secondary markets because of rent-seeking parasites.
Without scalpers, the product is distributed by sheer luck like a lottery, or being well-connected and knowing somebody who has early access to the product.
You can argue that a lottery mechanism or being well-connected is more fair that having the necessary money. There are a lot of people in planned economies where everything from food to housing to transportation works that way, and they would probably disagree.
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.
It's allows for a premium charge on crypto-enabled cards while still capturing the consumer market. It's a great solution.
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.
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.
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.
As a tangent: while the parallel to scientific theories is good on the surface, it does lump in this idea that there’s a universal set of correct principles. Isn’t that just philosophy, then? Logical arguments about which principles are sound & universal. Maybe the lesson is to pick principles from the battle-tested ones rather than trying to develop your own.
Also, if your principles are likely to change quickly, it's probable that they haven't been thought through very thoroughly to begin with. It's not like you have to wait for situations to actually arise to consider them.
But usually people use “principle” to refer to a relatively concise statement that can be applied to a large variety of situations.
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.
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_.
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.
What is the principle you are defending and at what point does it become less important than other principles?
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).
Of course, it's not really the big value-producing activities getting hit here, it's gaming.
The argument in this subthread has been over whether we should be mad at Nvidia on principle. For example, as capableweb puts it:
> 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.
You seemingly agreed with a "principled" reading of the situation: "That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do."
istorical is arguing, by giving an extreme case, that we don't have a consistent principle against limiting the capabilities of a product when it will benefit a customer who matters more.
After all, if we've agreed that it's morally wrong to "cripple" a product, then what worth is that principle if we abandon it during a crisis? Let the people starve! You're rightly repulsed by that idea, and so you're retreating to the position that we're just going with a cost/benefit analysis. Preventing food from being burned has a cost and a benefit. Preventing GPUs from being used for crypto has a cost and a benefit.
The thing is, this gives up the supposed moral high ground that many in this thread have tried to promote as a reason to be mad at Nvidia. From the perspective you present, it's perfectly reasonable to look at the situation and say that preventing GPUs from being used for crypto will have more benefit than cost. (I certainly think so!) There's no inconsistency you can draw out of someone weighing the various benefits and costs differently than you do.
This is not abandoning a principle but rather picking a higher principle to follow when two or more principles conflict. The point I was making is that we are not currently in this situation. We aren't starving people by denying them access to the latest and greatest graphics cards for cheap.
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.
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.
I don't support companies making the choice to limit their compute. I think companies should sell general purpose computers.
No, this doesn't solve the problem.
Because what they want to do is ensure that the cards are not resold to miners, and instead stay in the hands of long term customers.
> You don't need to cripple the devices
First of all, they aren't crippled for the existing customers. They are only limited, for this other use case that the company doesn't care about.
And they do need to limit that functionality, if they want to prevent those cards from being resold to crypto miners.
> I don't support companies
Then don't purchase their product, if you don't like it. That is kind of the point of all of this. They don't want you as a customer. And it is their company, that they can do what they want with.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why doesn't nVidia just make the best cards they can, and sell them for the highest price they can? What does nVidia care if their customers are using their cards for gaming or mining?
Because it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize the long time gamer customer base, as opposed to the crypto market, which could disappear very quickly.
Prioritizing certain customers, that will be around in the future, makes a lot of sense.
It also helps build a gaming ecosystem. If gamers don't have graphics cards, then the gaming ecosystem as a whole suffers, and could hurt their future business.
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.
How would you feel towards Intel if they didn’t allow you to run Microsoft Office on an i3 chip because it’s a “consumer grade processor” - you have to upgrade to an i5 or higher to run “business programs”.
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).
I agree with you, you should for sure listen to criticism against your principles, and challenge them yourself too. But if they change because "if we didn’t have such a dire X", I wouldn't call it a "principle" anymore. A principle (for me) would mean that you don't compromise on it "in emergency" but rather that it's something fundamental you believe in, without much reason in many cases.
> because the intent displayed by Nvidia does matter
Yeah, agree again that it matters, but as a gamer myself, I'm afraid it doesn't solve the problem for me. I want to be able to buy graphic cards myself too, and these "fixes" from NVIDIA looks (to me) like posturing without actually try to address the core problem (low supply). I'd love for them to come up with a real solution, that doesn't try to decide how people use their computers, even though I don't want to mine anything myself.
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.
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.
I have not yet met someone who rigidly adheres to theirs. Perhaps if I had met the Dalai Lama but nearly everyone else will find that the moral space is so fraught that they cannot adequately compress it into immutable laws.
Usually, should one demand such adherence one would find one met with accusations of “looking at the world in black and white” and “lacking nuance”.
Of course I don’t really intend to change your mind, but I do intend to transmit what I have observed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And they certainly haven't disappointed since back then.
Petty.
Previously had 1060 in Intel Linux desktop.
Zero issues.
Which support?
They have an official closed-source driver. That's what they support.
Parent is complaining that when they run an unsupported third-party driver, it doesn't work as well as the actually supported driver.
I think these distinctions are important, becaues NVIDIA is not telling anyone that they have (1) an open source driver, and (2) that this driver is well supported.
Their supported driver works great.
OTOH AMD does have an open-source driver that they support. In my experience, this driver works much worse than NVIDIA's proprietary driver. You can't use AMD GPUs for compute, etc.
At the end what this means is that users currently have to make a choice. Do you want a GPU driver that works well, or a GPU driver that's open source?
I don't like to have to make this choice, and every individual weight these values differently.
this is not correct. this is an extract from an nvidia presentation:
> We'll report up-to-the-minute developments on NVIDIA's status and activities, and possibly (depending on last-minute developments) a few future plans and directions, regarding our contributions to Linux kernel; supporting Nouveau (the open source kernel driver for NVIDIA GPUs, that is in the Linux kernel), including signed firmware behavior, documentation, and patches; and NVIDIA kernel drivers.
Now, even putting this aside, the situation is not so black-and-white.
I wasn't able to boot Ubuntu with my latest Nvidia card. The closed-source driver can work perfectly, but it doesn't boot a Ubuntu image. I don't remember the details, but I think rebuilding the image with closed-source drivers didn't produce a functioning system, and if memory serves me well, I had to go as far as booting with another card.
Therefore, a closed-source only approach does actively damage the open source world in a concrete way.
Second, the nv driver story (obfuscating the code) is really deplorable, and there's no excuse for being explicitly antagonistic.
All in all, I think that being fiercely closed-source (they'd be good friends with the GNOME devs...) in a open source world, can't avoid doing concrete damage.
Where do they say that they provide official support for Nouveau ?
They contribute patches to it. They contribute patches to a lot of open source projects. There is a big difference between contributing a patch, and "officially supporting" a project.
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.
Here's a community maintained compatibility list: https://www.protondb.com/
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.
This whole situation, and especially the anger at other market participants from people like you, is totally ridiculous. We know how markets work. NVidia is pricing their units at far below market value. What did you expect? Next you'll complain that water is wet and that the wind blows.
NVidia could solve this problem immediately by correctly pricing their units. If they want to, they can even have a conditional rebate--or make special individualized offers--to subsidize targeted buyers who they believe are "legitimate" gamers.
But instead they insist on continuing to mis-price their products. Shortages are the inevitable result.
Badly. They work badly.
> But instead they insist on continuing to mis-price their products
They are not mis-priced, they are already a pretty hefty buy. If the prices were to increase even further, _then_ it would be mis-priced, as no-one needs to spend this much on a videocard to play videogames. The fact that gamers have to compete with miners (for whom it's an investment) and AI researchers (for whom it's a job tool) does nothing to justify the purchase for the higher price
> They are not mis-priced
They are mis-priced. The market value is much higher than MSRP, which you can see on e.g. eBay. There is nothing to justify here, it is simply an objective fact they are mis-priced.
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?
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.
Anyhow, that's my theory. Anyone have actual recent price lists for NVidia GPUs? Otherwise we're all just guessing.
Between the high demand with gamers, scalpers with bots, and crypto farms gobbling up _graphics_ cards, the prices went up by an insane amount, and some people did pay double to get their hands on it.
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.
It's likely that PC gaming will spend the next 40 years the same way it spent the last 40 years. It's also immaterial anyway. We need to not kill the PC gaming industry this decade not try to bring it back from the dead like lazarus with tech that may never come through. The same thing is true of using tax payer money to incentivize production of silicon. It may make sense for a number of reasons but its not a solution to I can't buy a GPU now. Making it uneconomical for miners to use gamer cards solves the issue this year. Meanwhile we can subsidize production of silicon in the states and work going "to the cloud" with the gaming industry if it makes sense. It's not an either or.
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.
> 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.
This is a wildly short-sighted take.
First they came for mobile users, and I did not speak out-- Because I like Daddy Cook telling me what math I can do.
Then they came for the cryptocurrency miners, and I did not speak out-- Because I deserve a subsidy for my video gaming habit.
Then they came for unlicensed cryptographers, and I did not speak out-- Because I have nothing to hide and if this has an effect on anybody besides them it's just going to be to make their skills more valuable.
Then they came for the debuggers-- But I still didn't speak out, because we're already surrounded by egregious erosions of our right to buy and use general-purpose computers, so what's the point, amirite?
Are you suggesting that anyone who buys something and then doesn't use it to generate the maximum profit possible for themselves is being subsidized by someone else?
That doesn't even remotely make sense.
What's your stake in cryptocurrency?
Why do you (apparently) imagine these things are mutually exclusive?
> maybe NVidia should start pricing their products correctly so that they capture the value
I do happen to agree with this in principle, up to a point, and I've said as much in the past. It's easier said than done, though, especially when the scarcity is expected to be temporary and there are OEMs and retailers between you and the buyer.
Ultimately, Nvidia may feel that it makes more sense to (attempt to) cater to the steady, predictable consumer market for their products, rather than alienating those buyers in favor of crypto miners during a period when they aren't able to satisfy both. On the face of it, not having intimate insider knowledge of their business, I can't say I think it's a bad judgment call.
> This is a wildly short-sighted take.
You obviously think you're very smart and everyone around you is not nearly as smart, but you're just going to have to live with the fact that I and many others disagree with you here. And you've shown with everything after this line that continuing to discuss this tricky (and very interesting) moral question with you would be a total waste of time, so I'm not going to bother.
(But I guess there isn't much point in you trying, either, because ... well, you know.)
An economic parasite extracts rent. Arbitrageurs add value by reducing spreads, adding liquidity, and improving allocative efficiency.
> Ultimately, Nvidia may feel that it makes more sense to (attempt to) cater to the steady, predictable consumer market for their products, rather than alienating those buyers in favor of crypto miners during a period when they aren't able to satisfy both. On the face of it, not having intimate insider knowledge of their business, I can't say I think it's a bad judgment call.
That's fine; it's their prerogative. But people should understand that it's NVidia's policies, not crypto miners, that are responsible for supply shortages in traditional retail channels and making arbitrageurs rich. The blame is entirely misplaced.
> You obviously think you're very smart and everyone around you is not nearly as smart, but you're just going to have to live with the fact that I and many others disagree with you here. And you've shown with everything after this line that continuing to discuss this tricky (and very interesting) moral question with you would be a total waste of time, so I'm not going to bother.
You're wrong about that, but you're right that I'm going to have to live with the fact that people disagree with me. Same thing goes for you.
I think it's a real stretch to call this a moral issue. But you're right that this conversation is unlikely to have a productive end. Way too many jimmies have been rustled.
After your little tribute to Niemöller there, I'm surprised you'd claim otherwise—but maybe you just find it a useful rhetorical device to use as a bludgeon in your quest for reduced spreads, added liquidity, and improved allocative efficiency. I suppose it wouldn't be the first time somebody's invoked the specter of Hitler and the Nazis in an argument with little or no regard for the awful human weight of the events they're alluding to.
Maybe I misunderstood what you were calling a moral issue. If you were referring to the restrictions on computation, then I agree.
Miners are parasites.
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".
At least, it makes you re-evaluate your principles.
Ethereum is going proof of stake soon for a few years now.
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.
They frankly contribute to society in a way that speculators never will.
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.
So, basically, like REITs? It's funny that graphics card feature sets are what generate moral outrage when a feudal regression happening in real time before our very eyes in regards to the basic necessities of life.
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?
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 :)
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.
GDPR is an actual improvement. Silicon Valley overstepped their boundaries and got punished accordingly. Perhaps insufficiently punished, even.
Sounds like free speech. People were all for unrestricted free speech... until the right wing started using it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But to be fair to them, maybe they are not stating the reasons because they worry that voicing their fears would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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?)
EDIT: Ok, I bothered to read the article. This is a hardware measure for new cards, not existing cards.
So just FYI this largely comes down to your vendor making a decision that they'd rather sell a card to a miner than service your warranty request. They have cards, just not for you.
https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-gpu-miners-are-now-bulk-...
> We have heard many stories where miners in China are queuing up to NVIDIA board partner factories in hopes to buy graphics cards in bulk. Some AIBs agree to sell cards directly to them because those clients pay more (usually 1/3 more than any distributor) and they get limited or no warranty at all.
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.
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").
How is consuming energy a problem? There is a blob of infinite energy on the sky and practically all of it is wasted.
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.
They are increasing this tax as well shortly... so it will get better.
The gpus are good exactly because they are efficient but if you didn’t care about power consumption, ASICS are more profitable (in terms of cost of setup vs return from mining).
The primary reason I went with gpus, is because I can shut them off based on solar excess in 100w increments. So if I’m 200w in excess, turn 2 cards on. 300w - 3 cards etc.
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.
I don’t see anything I’m doing as a wrong. Literally just wasted energy... why not convert it to $?
> In the old days, when power companies were the only generators in town, control devices like regulators, capacitors or relays were designed to assume that power flowed in only one direction. “If they saw power flowing in the other direction, they typically tripped or misbehaved, causing customer outages or power quality issues,” Kuloor says. This tendency has prompted many utilities to update such equipment with reverse-power-flow logic or, in the case of mechanical devices that have no software, replace devices altogether.
Not all local grids are prepared for that.
Additionally, there's the signaling of power supply that generators do between each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_frequency#Frequency_an...
https://solarbuildermag.com/policy/grid-saturation-lessons-f...
The different parts of the grid will use fluctuations in the frequency of the grid to indicate if they've got too much power, or can't supply enough.
This can get more complicated with single house putting power back in that they're matching the frequency, but not controlling it as such. If there is too much supply from single house sources, it can cause the frequency of the grid to vary too much and potentially damage the power plant generators.
When this becomes exaggerated - all the houses start producing more power because the sun came out (or the opposite that it clouds over), this can increase the costs for power.
You've also got the Hawaii problem. The Hawaii grid doesn't have the luxury of shipping its power to the next state over.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/02/05/how-to-solve-hawaiis-...
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-hot-mess-of-hawai...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Hawaii
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/3-reasons-ha...
There are times when the rooftop solar in Hawaii exceeded the total demand for power. This meant there was too much power in the wires and that generators needed to shut down (or get into problems with pollution and inefficient combustion).
> The grid can only accept as much power as the island is consuming. Juario must mix and match different sized generators to balance what solar rooftops are producing while ensuring that the generators have enough “spinning reserve”—room to throttle up and down to handle those grid surprises. The Maui Electric chief operator must also keep the generators running hot to prevent inefficient combustion from sending dirtier exhaust up the stacks and violating the air quality rules that protect residents’ health.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/can-smarter-sola... has a neat map. There were sections of Hawaii where solar was supplying 250% of the demand in that area.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/178686... is another useful bit to read. "electrical grid oversupply" is the term to search.
(Also no idea all the gadgets in-between house and generators, but assuming all the gadgets can handle load going in and out)
And there are other approaches to power storage. Thermal power storage is popular / useful with large solar installations. Hydro dams associated with a reservoir often have pumped storage where they can pump water back into the reservoir and then use it when its needed.
The signaling and frequency matching is still an issue.
I recall a company I worked at in California had two sets of generators. They had a diesel emergency generator for the data center and also a set of natural gas generators to cut down on power costs (when the price went high). The issue with the natural gas ones is that they needed something else to provide the utility frequency, something about them not being stable/consistent on their own.
Rooftop systems have the possibility / likelihood of also destabilizing the frequency in the grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooftop_photovoltaic_power_sta...
> An electrical power system containing a 10% contribution from PV stations would require a 2.5% increase in load frequency control (LFC) capacity over a conventional system an issue which may be countered by using synchronverters in the DC/AC-circuit of the PV system. The break-even cost for PV power generation was in 1996 found to be relatively high for contribution levels of less than 10%. While higher proportions of PV power generation give lower break-even costs, economic and LFC considerations impose an upper limit of about 10% on PV contributions to the overall power systems.
There's a reference to that at https://www.worldcat.org/title/ieee-transactions-on-energy-c... - which I don't have access to to quote from.
The key point to this is that if solar power is increased, then the grid as a whole needs to also increase its power to get back in control of the load frequency. That is likely what you're seeing. By itself, this storage isn't sufficient for answering that issue. Ideally, the solar systems would have their own local batteries and respond as part of a smart grid to contribute according to the load frequency. ... But that costs more money for the installation and consumers are hesitant to do that.
https://www.energy-storage.news/news/tesla-powerwalls-hooked...
https://www.provisionsolar.com/general/grid-outages-and-the-...
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Twenty, thirty years ago the amount of power from rooftop installations being pushed out onto the grid was minimal compared to the size of the grid and it wasn't an issue.
If you had an energy producer that was producing 10% of the power and doing significant swings in its production without participating on the wholesale energy market (and not signaling those swings)... the regulators would have shut them down.
But when you've got 10,000 people each contributing 0.001% of the grid power (and all having the same swings)... and not participating on the wholesale market and not signaling their swings, that can be disruptive (and damaging).
https://learn.pjm.com/electricity-basics/market-for-electric... is also a good read and https://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations.aspx is the live market for that part of the grid.
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.
If one wants to mine crypto, then do it as cheaply as possible instead. It really doesn't matter what the source of energy is. The entire system of crypto mining is inherently about who can use the energy the cheapest. Whats more, if someone gets energy cheaper it forces others to consume more power too.
If crypto is mined, it really doesn't matter what it uses power it - mining crypto is still increased consumption of power. Someone else is going to have to use non-green energy to do whatever they're going to do.
Energy production is not zero-sum with some fixed amount of non-renewables.
If I install solar on my house, I'm not forcing anyone else to use non-renewables. If I then use that solar to mine crypto, I'm... still not forcing anyone to use more non-renewables.
Mining and gaming aren't even close to comparable in power usage.
Because if you think the above behavior isn't "earning income" clearly better than "play video games", then your argument falls completely flat.
https://www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/geh_newslett...
It's a very accurate comparison.
Profitability doesn't go down considerably with other cryptos that are efficient on 30 series cards: https://whattomine.com/coins?aq_380=0&aq_fury=0&aq_470=0&aq_... (see the 'Rev. $ Profit' column)
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.
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.
Miners can whine, all they want, but something needs to happen to hamper their greed for virtual money.
I just don't think they're 'infringing on my freedoms' or whatever.
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.
if NVIDIA wants to segment you out of the gaming market, that is their right as well. Free market cuts both ways - you are free to start up your own company and do it your way.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This makes sense to Nvidia because it creates a segment differentiation and will allow them to charge more for the higher hash rate parts.
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.
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.
That's a weird hill to die on, since they're explicitly marketing and selling these cards with "LHR" branding and NOT discontinuing other non-LHR product lines. These are cards specifically for folks who don't use the features which are throttled.
If they were doing this across the board, that's one thing. But they're not. If it means lower costs or increased availability for consumers who want them, that's a win.
Moreover, they're not disabling anything, they're throttling. One or two GPUs are hardly going to mint you a fortune in ETH in the first place. The difference in hash rates is not affecting anyone who meaningfully cares about general purpose computing. Nobody is switching their industrial mining rig over to play Dota. They've throttled an extremely niche use case which makes the cards more broadly available to the public instead of a very specific single-purpose industry: that hardly seems like an attack on general purpose computing.
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.
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.
"usually" is not correct here. They are sometimes chips that didn't perform as well, but usually they are actually higher-tier chips that are artificially locked down to perform at lower levels.
AMD had over 80% of their Zen1 chips and over 70% of their Zen2 chiplets coming off the line with 8 fully functional cores. Yet they probably have 60% of their demand being 6-core or 12-core parts (2x 6-core chiplets). What do they do? Lock off 2 cores and sell 8-core parts as 6-core parts and 12-core parts.
It is nice that they have something to do with the chips that actually are broken, but most of them are just gimped for price discrimination and market segmentation.
https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-yields-80-all-8-cores-functiona...
https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-zen-2-production-yield...
Same for the Phenom II X3 - almost all of those really had 4 functional cores and you could usually turn them back on. Why were they being sold as 3-cores? Price discrimination and market segmentation.
Or for a more recent example - the rumors of an impending 3080 Ti launch in January turned out to be true! Someone got a picture of the actual chips, with a big line through the 3080 Ti part number, re-marked with the part number for a 3090. NVIDIA decided to cancel the 3080 Ti launch, and sell the parts as 3090 - and those parts were actually 3090 tier parts that were being marked down and sold as 3080 Tis.
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-quietly-remarking-geforce...
It is a reality in this industry that you are constantly being sold artificially gimped parts, because price discrimination is the financially optimal strategy. It's better to charge a price-insensitive customer way more, and to still have high-volume parts for price-sensitive customers, than to have insufficient inventory to supply price-sensitive customers, or to price everything "fairly" and lose the price-sensitive customers due to prices being too high. But due to the way yields and binning work (you don't want to have high-volume SKUs that are difficult to produce - you want high yields even in your top SKUs) you have the most parts available in the bins that have the lowest volume, and the lowest amount of (broken) parts available in the lower bins that you sell the most of.
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.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-c....
So if they follow through on their "no mining limiters on gaming cards" you can expect miners are going to get both the gaming and the mining cards from AMD, and that the number of wafers going to gaming cards is going to shrink.
(AMD cards already have the best value in terms of hashrate-per-dollar btw, 6700XT and 6800 are good mining cards, comparable to 3060 Ti mining performance for less money)
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.
I think you got that, but just to be super clear that is the case.
No need to be angry as far as I understand that's how chips are made nowadays. You can have wildly different consumer offerings on the same die.
You buy 3 inflated balloons, seller takes five of them and while you are watching pops 2. "Did you really have to do that"? In chip manufacturing this makes a lot of sense. Your anger is basically towards a manufacturing process and naming not the end product. And the process is just highly optimized while naming keeps thing pretty transparent - it wouldn't look good if they tried to sell it as a completely new card.
The problem really is that cryptominers will happily scale their purchases arbitrarily high
Since you're asking about feelings: Nope. I'm not a miner, and I believe the whole crypto thing is a pyramid scheme that is basically gambling in another form, so I'm not angered. In fact, I'm glad: I hope it keeps uninformed people from spending huge sums on bogus "get rich quick" schemes, just like the 2008 housing market was enabled by people who didn't understand balloon mortgages, and slimy lenders that exploited them. Now if I could only convince my friends that are losing their shirts in DOGE + Robinhood to cut their losses and put that money into actual investments.
An attack on general purpose computing that only affects the people who've completely fucked up the GPU market in service of one narrow, non-graphics use case?
Cool story, bro.
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.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for them segregate the capabilities for their varying consumers.
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.
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.
coincidentally they just announced official support for GPU passthrough on consumer gaming cards, very likely as an olive branch to prosumers to calm the outrage over this issue.
Nah. I shed no tears for the miners. They're in it for profit and their profit is not my problem. Nothing about their business is "general purpose computing."
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.
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.
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.
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.
nah, remember when NVIDIA decided that Titans were now prosumer cards and would get Quadro series drivers, and then performance tripled in CAD applications once the limiters were removed?
https://wccftech.com/nvidia-titan-xp-titan-x-385-12-driver-u...
The distinction between a Quadro and a GeForce has literally always been drivers and firmware. NVIDIA would have the card look at the specific API calls being made and if it decided you were a CAD application then it'd slow itself down on GeForce cards, while running normally on Quadro.
AMD does the same thing with Radeon Pro, and Frontier Edition cards, and so on.
You literally don't understand that this has been the norm for a decade now. Miners are just crying because they're finally being asked to purchase a business segmented product for their business venture.
Better than nothing.
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.
Cryptocurrencies don't do that, the system isn't lying to you about how many whatevercoins you own.
Pyramid-scheme? Maybe. Pump-and-dump? Happens sometimes. Hugely speculative asset? Definitely.
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.