Modern Nvidia cards detect you're trying to mine for cryptos, and artificially limit the performance of the silicon.
It's the opposite of being capable - it's silicon that refuses to play to it's full capacity lest you buy an additional license.
It's the opposite of being capable - it's silicon that refuses to play to it's full capacity lest you buy an additional license.
It's like we are going backward in progress.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3...
It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate tomorrow. And in the mean time pisses their core users off (through volume availability issues) and makes an already difficult production -> retail supply chain even more bursty.
So how do you deal with that? Well, a not-terrible way is artificially segmenting your market. Crypto folks, over here in this pool with huge waves. Everyone else, back to business as usual.
Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too.
I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
It's not a coincidence the software lockout landed right as Nvidia released an unlocked mining card without a display output ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ ). And since it doesn't have a display output, all those used mining cards become ewaste instead of something that cuts into nvidia's revenue.
No, they are trying to piss off the miners so that their actual customers (gamers) have a chance of getting GPUs again.
It's like the first Bitcoin craze many years ago when the first CUDA miners came out - you could not find any GPU anywhere because people bought them for mining. Gamers were pissed as the miners outbid them everywhere. Once ASICs came out, the complete GPU market crashed - suddenly there was a massive supply of second-hand GPUs from miners... the gamers snatched these up, and NVIDIA suddenly had the problem that their new GPU sales crashed.
The only difference is that this time it isn't Bitcoin anymore but a whole bunch of random shitcoins.
Somehow nobody shed a tear for the poor enterprise customers until miners came along. But that's what it is, miners are enterprise customers, they use them to make a profit.
Similarly, almost all R5 consumer processors are made by artificially disabling fully functional cores on R7 chiplets. AMD already had nearly 80% of the chips coming off the line with 8 functional cores at Zen2 launch, and numbers have only gotten better since there. Yeah, maybe a few fail clock bins or other things, but those bins are chosen very loosely such that they're not throwing away any significant amount of chips anyway. The overwhelming majority of R5s are perfectly good chips being gimped and sold as lower chips, because the availability and demand are exactly opposite of each other - they have the highest availability of 8-core chiplets and the highest demand for 4- and 6-core chiplets. How do you square the two? Not by lowering prices of your high-margin products - you keep those high to extract the maximum price from price-insensitive consumers, and you artificially gimp a bunch of them for the rest of the market to protect your profits in the higher segment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
The thing to remember is that home users are almost always the beneficiary of market segmentation, because we are the most price sensitive. The alternative to Core-vs-Xeon-E segmentation isn't that everyone gets Xeons at i5 pricing, it's that the i5 now costs almost as much as a Xeon. The R&D has to be paid back one way or another, or else R&D will be significantly reduced (most likely meaning much longer product generations and slower moves to new nodes, etc). Price discrimination means enterprise customers pay more than their share and home customers pay less than their share, so if market segmentation goes away and those equalize then home customers will have to bear more of their fair share of the product cost.
Again, who wants to race to pay more for their gaming graphics card so that Boeing and cryptominers can pay less? It would be great if everything were free, or priced at its true cost, but in the real world R&D needs to be paid for somehow.
Oh, and the other thing is Enterprise customers actually love this, it's called Capacity on Demand and I'm sure the reason Intel is doing this is because their customers keep asking for it. Sun, Oracle, Fujitsu, IBM - all the big enteprise vendors will sell you a machine with a bunch of cpu and memory that you're not allowed to use or touch! But if your workload scales up, instead of having to shut down your mainframe to upgrade it, you can just pay money and turn the cores on! And sure, it would be nice if all software were just microservices that you could re-instantiate onto another machine, but some stuff (like databases) can't be trivially scaled and partitioning (read: stale data reads) can't be tolerated. The only surefire answer to CAP theorem is One Big Machine such that you never have to deal with splits in the first plac, and that's what some situations need, and they love this.
Someone cracked it and enabled them with custom driver. (And of course nvidia patched it out in the latest vbios to make the bypass impossible).
There is the story of this on HN few month a go.