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Comment by skytreader | Hacker News Reader

Total hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions that's signature to ETH?

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Going to be a fun future game of cat-and-mouse as miners figure out how to disable/bypass nvidia’s electronic countermeasures.

It'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks, sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it a hassle.

Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).

Serious miners are buying Antminers, not video cards.

Antminers are for mining Bitcoin, GPUs are mostly used for Ethereum.

https://www.coindesk.com/bitmain-antminer-e9-asic-ethereum-m...

ethereum is asic-resistant, not asic-proof. It doesn't mean you can't make ASICs, just that ASICs are <10x as efficient as an equivalent-node GPU, vs millions of times more efficient for bitcoin/etc.

Are serious miners buying supply constrained GPUs?

The reason they are supply constrained is because miners are buying most (near all?) of the available stock.

We’ll see a cottage industry of modders. Turning a $300 thing into a $600 thing should be a viable business.

Though I’ve seen some really sketchy mods before… can’t find it at the moment, but one involved taking a dremel to the chip to break an internal pad/link.

Miners are already doing hacks like this, i.e ETHlargement pill (which alters memory timings on 1080/1080Ti cards to improve ETH mining).

Couldn't one just not upgrade their drivers? NVIDIA has no way of crippling an offline system.

This is for future manufactures, and it'll come out of the box disabled.

I understand this might come at hw level. Driver could have little or nothing to do with it.

Cards that have already been sold don't matter. New cards however become worthless to miners so the demand should go down as well as the prices.

We will probably see cards with old firmware show up on eBay for a lot more money than new cards.

It doesn't need to last forever, just long enough to prevent shortages from pissing off non-mining customers.

I wouldn't be surprised if nVidia releases updates to unlock hardware after a set time period.

Hacks that re-enable mining likely won't be showing up on tpb anytime soon! A bypass will be worth quite a bit of money for large miners that can get hold of the cards.

Scalpers benefit from it, and they have an extreme incentive to drive up demand.

They previously did this with the 3060 cards, but accidently released beta drivers that unlocked the countermeasures [1]. I am sure people just start with using those drivers on the 3070/80 cards.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/15/22331537/nvidia-rtx-3060-...

I think I read the new cards will require a higher driver version

the new cards (and the new revisions of the old cards) won't work on the old drivers

Probably not much of a cat-and-mouse game. Once they can bypass it once, all they have to do is not update. Unless Nvidia is prepared to release new hardware revisions every time.

No new hardware revision needed. Just a new on-card BIOS requiring a newer driver with a more fine-tuned mining detection. Should be trivial for manufacturers.

Speculation having thought about this for a few minutes a few weeks ago. Given that a driver update disabled the feature, my guess is that they have certain kernels blacklisted. Really just the anti-virus equivalent of if (e.g.) Nicehash Miner, set throttle. A good way to test this would be to write a new miner and see what perf you can get.

I have the driver with it disabled and would patch diff it against a new one if I had the time, but I'm very busy with work. It would be an interesting problem of binary diffing at scale (dozens of libraries). Very interested if anyone has any insight.

From what I've read, the card detects if it has been continuously mining for 30 minutes then throttles itself.

GP's question was about _how_ it detects it has been mining. Does it have a list of processes or executable names of popular mining software? Does it perform some kind of heuristic and detect if the code it is about to execute corresponds to a hashing algorithm? I don't know the answer, I hope someone can explain it to me and GP.

nVidia has been deliberately vague about exactly what they are detecting because it would make it easy for miners to develop a workaround.

That said, Anandtech wrote about it briefly recently:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16648/nvidia-updates-geforce-...

They surmise that there is hardware-enforcement of BIOS\Drivers via some blown eFuses.

Also they imply that nVidia does multiple checks such as whether it's running on a PCIe x1 bus (gamers would typically use x4 or more) and whether it's hooked up to a monitor. It's likely they check for other things too but they would keep it on the down-low.

I've seen HDMI plugs listed on eBay which supposedly "double the hash rate" on 3060. I figured it was some kind of scam but didn't know they were throttled.

I'm curious about how this is implemented.

I'm also somewhat skeptical about GPU makers doing this for compute in general.

Going to be fun to see cases of false positives. "Help! My FPS drops 75% after running game for 30 minutes!"

Those games are using a lot more of the gpu than just the compute functionality.

Has anyone found out if Hashcat is impacted on the cards that have this already (3060)?

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