Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuntkite | Hacker News Reader

There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto. I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand. There is A LOT that can be made of that and I intend to get mine. I think the crypto boom really covered up what we can really, really do with GPU compute and possibly stifled adoption and innovation but now we've got so many just sitting around. Which is super useful as we move more into a world after being able to get things manufactured and shipped world wide in what feels like an instant.

View on HN

> There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto.

For sure, but there were many crypto operations with data centers that had hundreds or thousands of GPUs. For example, a report from JPR estimates that crypto miners bought 25% of all GPUs produced in 1H'2021.¹

¹ https://www.jonpeddie.com/blog/crypto-minings-half-a-billion...

Or over 100k...

25% seems like a very low estimate. All sections of the supply chain were being looted. Barely anything made it to stores.

It seemed low to me too, but it was the most credible reference I could find. Surely it's an estimate, and I'd guess a conservative one.

Even a small increase in demand can result in a large price change if it pushes into a different part of the demand curve (e.g., if the "cheap" demand has been supplanted with customers willing to pay more then the market price can change drastically).

Data centers don't buy from stores.

A ton of not-data-center-people took mining as a hobby...

And what exactly is the difference between a data centre and a hobbyist running at a similar scale?

The mass of hobby miners NOT running at a datacenter-scale was probably enough to empty stores, which was the point of the original comment.

Exactly. Everything worth buying was being snatched and resold before it even saw a store.

Miners were only buying high end cards.

If nearly all the 60-series cards sold for several months are considered high end cards, what are the low end ones? 710 gt's?

Thats not quite true, unless the 3060 Ti counts as a high end card I guess. It was easily the most popular mining card of the 3000 generation, due its excellent MH/Watt compared to the others? And previous to that, the mid-range 5700 from AMD was the best, to the point where you could sell your 5700 to a miner and buy a new 6700 and have cash left over at some points.

I saw the 5700/6700 claim at the time, but I was never able to find someone willing to buy my 5700 for what a good 6700 was selling for.

I'd like to see some PoW scheme for public good projects like SETI or Folding@Home or even CGI for a fan fiction, where there's perhaps something more than just bragging rights for contributing. I'm not sure what that would look like exactly.

Since the new GPU offerings from nvidia have secure multi-tenancy, I think you're going to start seeing things like that. Especially when you look at what's happening with compute being more universally adapted via Vulkan. I haven't seen the framework for such a thing yet but you make a good point. I think I've got half a model in my head that could be retooled for something like that in a flexible fashion. It could work both ways too. Either you are giving away GPU cycles for research or you are paying for people to be paid for their cycles, or you post up your own job to be computed for pay or donation of cycles or money. As an example, wanna render predictions for erosion on a property you wanna buy? Put up the job and people that wanna contribute can and you get the result. Any user could set their hierarchy of things they contribute to. Like patreon sort of. So bucks or compute cycles can be chunked out to them by order of need and weighted priority.

Humm. Someone beat me to this idea so I don't have to do it.

GPUslice.com

Tasteful plug: https://youtu.be/Hjt5Mnrb__w

Been expecting this since working on edge computing software ecosystem at NVIDIA.

Vulkan isn't suitable for this, with most GPGPU compute stacks not accommodating Vulkan's SPIR-V dialect, including Khronos's own SYCL.

Note that this wave of datacenter GPUs doesn't support OpenGL or Vulkan, because they either don't have rasterizers at all (AMD MI250X) or have them only on two TPCs for basic SW compat and don't expose OGL/Vk via virtual functions (NVIDIA).

As such, better OpenCL drivers are what you should ask for. But then AMD's OpenCL drivers are not exactly that great, and NVIDIA's have their own quirks.

Gridcoin rewarded seti@home when seti@home was operating and still rewards a number of other BOINC projects. It is proof of stake based and the rewards are layered on top.

There is a similar cryptocurrency called curecoin for folding@home although I think they do use SHA-256 mining (i.e not useful computations) for part of the rewards

It doesn't really work that way.

For PoW you dont just need work, you need work that can be easily verified, easily scaled difficulty levels, and difficult to cheat with - all with no centralized trusted authority.

Even when SETI/F@H was worth only fake internet points they already had problems with people cheating. What happens when its worth real money?

there should be ways to achieve this.

examples would be: Multiple PoWers independently producing solutions and then verifying each other (although this is wasteful as work is being duplicated)

PoWers achieving increasing status levels when not cheating over time, incentivising long-term honest behaviour

This is how BOINC and similar distributed computing projects work: a unit of work is distributed to multiple workers to confirm the work and discourage malicious actors.

The other very important part of BOINC and the like is that they offer no monetary gains for your contribution. That's how you eliminate 99,9% of malicious actors and the rest can be eliminated the way you described

It won't work in the PoW scheme because there is presumably some cryptocurrency involved as a reward

And how do you make sure that a single person doesnt create multiple accounts in order to also be the verifier of their own work? Since that is the entire problem PoW is trying to solve, if you have a solution to that, why not just use it directly?

> PoWers achieving increasing status levels when not cheating over time, incentivising long-term honest behaviour

We're talking millions of dollars here (if not more). In the real world people would easily spend years doing a long-con with that type of pay out. Why wouldn't they do so on the internet?

We could find new primes at least. Really any NP complete problems would be easy to verify by definition.

You dont just need easy to verify, you need easy to fairly distribute the problem instances.

Take primes. How do you know the person generated new primes and didnt just have a bunch saved up? With hashes you have to hash the current block which is unpredictable, and also means as time goes on it gets harder and harder to have a competing chain, because you dont just have to solve the current block but also be better for all the preceeding chains.

Additionally NP-complete problems are hard because the average complexity tends not to be super hard, which is a major sticking point in this application. So you have to somehow verify the person is solving a hard instance of the problem and not an easy instance.

Can’t you have the chain do multiple random verifications before accepting it?

Finding prime numbers, even very large ones, is neither difficult nor useful; there are simple algorithms for determining the primality of a number which don't require extraordinary amounts of computing power to execute.

Even factoring large semiprimes isn't inherently useful -- it's an interesting mathematical exercise, but isn't a goal unto itself.

In addition, you need something that deliberately has no other value besides doing PoW.

Otherwise, all of that cryptocurrency's mining power could instantly abandon that cryptocurrency for the other thing if market flucations give it a higher ROI than PoW.

>In addition, you need something that deliberately has no other value besides doing PoW.

This doesn't really exist though, since you can heat a house with a mining rig. It's no less efficient than resistive heating.

Technically it IS resistive heating

You want to mine BANANO: https://banano.fandom.com/wiki/Banano_Miner

Your question was asked at least 11 years ago, https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/331/is-there-a-w...

Aren’t they immediately going to start mining other PoW coins with those GPUs?

I saw that argument on twitter when talking about the energy reduction for ETH mining. Someone commented that it won't change because they will just focus their GPUs on some other coin.

TFA is pointing out that other GPU-based POW chains have become unprofitable. Partly because of the massive influx of GPUs increasing the difficulty of those chains, and partly because those coins are just not worth as much as ETH. If that's true, then lots of miners are going to be shutting down their GPUs and selling them.

Power companies are incentivized to sell power.

They will just find other buyers.

Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to sell more power (although it seems like that is not the case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers).

But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.

I'm getting downvoted on my original comment, sigh HN.

> Perhaps you are right about power companies wanting to sell more power (although it seems like that is not the case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers).

It is literally called a power company. They offer special rates for large customers. That alone creates a marketplace.

> But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.

Did you have a choice in where that power went to begin with? No.

"No one has the moral authority to tell you what is a good or bad use of energy (ex: watching the Kardashians)" -- https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1479135584685854729?lang=...

The parent to your post never asserted “moral authority” around how power is used, only that they think this shift is a good thing in their view.

> at least that power would go to something useful

I consider that a moral opinion.

Ultimately it wasn’t the grandparent that asserted that proof-of-work Etherium mining wasn’t useful, it was the Etherium blockchain community themselves — which is why they have stopped doing it.

It’s not a “moral opinion” to accept someone else’s assessment of the utility of their own actions.

Is it a “moral opinion” to state a preference that crude oil is more useful when refined and injected into an ICE vehicle than if it’s burned on site in an oil well fire?

My point is that it is not your (or my) right to tell anyone what a good use of power is or is not. Simply because we all consume power one way or another. Expressing an opinion is fine... we can all have one of those, but we should be considerate of pot/kettle there.

You have this backward actually, the fact that Ethereum went to great lengths to design a more power-efficient replacement for PoW (rather than, say, doing something else with their lives) shows that PoW was useful to begin with.

The fact that Ethereum went to great lengths to design a more power-efficient replacement for PoW shows that the developers of Etherium derive personal value from an engagement with a technical challenge. It does suggest but doesn't prove that any permutation of the project was/is actually useful.

Your definition of useful sucks, and you should feel really bad about that. I don't get too concerned about how you waste my oxygen, but you're making me rethink that decision.

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve become stuck in a semantic bog-hole, but amused to learn that my words are so powerful that they overwhelm your conscious agency.

That tweet thread is 100% wrong. I absolutely do have the moral authority to tell everyone that burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally wrong. It's not even a tough question. It is clearly a malicious (hypothetical) act being done only to hurt others.

So if there's an unambiguous case of morally abhorrent energy use, everything else is up for debate. That tweet thread goes off the rails early, as it's clear the author is financially incentivized to not understand the position he is arguing against. So it's no surprise the argument is nonsense.

It opens a can of worms. If you start telling people how they should or should not use any form of energy, then you have to ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at yourself first.

https://www.lynalden.com/wp-content/uploads/bitcoin-energy-c...

https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/

> then you have to ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° at yourself first

Yes, and?

It is absurd as: your website makes money from Google Adsense and therefore is a waste of power because google is profiting off people advertising crap to others.

I'd posit that your argument is ridiculous, but that doesn't make anyone else's silly by default.

Nothing wrong with having an opinion.

Nothing wrong with pointing out when that opinion is ridiculous either.

I pledge to not spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the gulf of mexico.

So you don't ever take advantage of an ICE? Fly a plane? Drive a car? Nor do you ever get a delivery to your house.

In other words, those things work because you directly or even indirectly support the system which causes those sorts of catastrophes to happen.

Isn't this just the "yet you participate in society" meme? We all can and should attempt to reduce our impact, that might mean we don't own a car, or we fly less frequently and take trains instead, perhaps even just working from home... If I need to fly from North America to Europe, I really don't have a choice. You could do it by boat, but ships are largely powered by fossil fuels too. That doesn't mean I actively support fossil fuel companies.

> burning billions of joules per day in a bank of resistive elements and then dumping the heat directly into the atmosphere is morally wrong.

Does this include mean computer gaming? How about watching movies? Is it morally wrong if done using computer "burning joules..."?

In most ethical frameworks, making many people happy vastly outweighs making a few people rich. In some ethical frameworks, making people happy is the most moral thing it is possible to do.

Just imagine the amount of compute, mechanical and human, that's spent trying to force people to watch ads that they don't want to see to convince them to buy things that they don't need.

Alternatively consider planned obsolescence. Devices are designed to break and be replaced rather than last today, as a rule. Consider just phones alone on this front. The amount of resources that consumes is unimaginable, and that goes well beyond just electricity or manpower.

Ultimately our entire society is built around the largely arbitrary expenditure of absolutely massive amounts of energy and resources to accomplish tasks that, in most cases, are not especially useful or necessary. Optimizing GDP, a goal of most all developed nations now a day, is often just a proxy for increasing waste. Buying the same phone 20 times gives a 20x boost to GDP relative to buying it once. And yet this is the metric we've chosen as a measure for progress.

The history of moral rectitude justifying forcing such rectitude on others is very bad.

It's not possible to perform any action without using energy, so why not just say "No one has the moral authority to tell [me] what is a good or bad."?

There’s a big difference between doing something that’s maybe not the best use of resources, but still serves a purposes, even if it’s just pleasure (ex: watching the Kardashians) and doing something for no reason that makes any sense at all.

We should all be judicious with how we use our limited resources. The market often serves to incentivize that good judgement. When the market starts incentivizing waste (e.g. “cryptocurrencies”) that’s when you need to start banning things.

The only way for them to find other buyers is to lower prices, which benefits everyone.

I don't think that's the only way. There are other factors that go into choosing a power source. For example, they could offer cleaner power or the quantity of power available can also be factors.

Copper companies are incentivized to sell as well, but they don’t get to pick the price. Once the price falls enough some copper mines go out of business.

The same thing happens with power companies and we get a net reduction in generation.

At a commercial level (megawatts), power companies absolutely get to pick the price.

They can’t pick a price below their marginal cost, though—that’s the problem with copper mines, and it’s a problem with power, too

Not really. https://whattomine.com/gpus

Ouch, looks like for most cards even if energy was free a miner would be looking at ~1000 days to break even. Hopefully this really does more or less end GPU mining.

Those numbers are based on $0.1/kwh electricity costs. Here in the UK the cost is around $0.4/kwh, so I don't believe any of those cards would generate any sort of profit. Basically the electricity cost is the main driver, and you'd need to check what your local cost is to evaluate this.

Of course if you are running from home generated power (e.g solar) then the equation changes, but so does the capital cost.

If home power generation was cheaper (considering all costs) than grid generation, everybody would have a home setup.

If you have excess capacity and no way to sell it to a grid, then it might make sense to do some mining, but then you are really just recouping some of what you over spent on solar panels.

In winter if one uses resistive electrical heating and where heat pumps are not allowed like in some apartment blocks mining can be free as the consumed electricity just heats the home.

Wouldn’t an electric space heater provide more heat per watt? This isn’t a rhetorical question because I don’t know the answer. It’s just my intuition that something designed to produce heat would do that more efficiently than something designed to do computations that produces heat as a side effect.

Of course, but what he's saying is that you don't generate currency as a side effect of running your dedicated heater. Whereas the inverse is true with mining - you generate heat as a side effect of running your mining setup. When that's desirable, it can be factored into the net cost.

No it's same thing. All energy eventually becomes heat and there can be no lost energy in a system. In the case of a GPU we're converting electrical energy into thermal energy, and some mechanical and sound energy due to the fans. So a GPU should just as efficient at producing heat as a space heater, it's just that the electricity goes through a few more steps first.

Basically, heat is waste. A space heater is a resistor causing 0% efficient usage.

If 500 watts of electricity go into a heater or a computer, 500 watts of heat will come out, minus some light from leds and screen, some electricity on the ethernet cable, and other of these ignorable things.

If it does some usefull computation on the side, that's nice, but energy wise a 500 watt game computer is just as efficient as a 500 watt heater, if used for heating purposes.

You would be better off spending your money on an air or ground source heat pump though...

I live in an apartment in Norway where an air heat pump is not allowed by regulations and the ground source is way too expensive even with the current electricity prices and will take years to get approval as the area is considered a historic part of the town and must be preserved.

So couple of years ago I permitted for my son to mine coins on GPU when it was cold allowing to him to earn like 2-4 Euros per day.

But then I stopped as I realized that this just promoted insanity of using proof of work in other places.

More/bigger miners ==> higher competition ==> miners will require higher transaction fee's to finance their operation? Or do I misunderstand it?

Mining is only profitable when the block reward and transaction fees are worth more than the costs of mining (electricity, capital costs). ETH was the only coin big enough to support all those GPU mining rigs. With ETH gone, there are too many miners and not enough valuable stuff to mine.

I'm sure this is a stupid question, but I'm going to go for it anyway: isn't Bitcoin also proof-of-work? Why isn't that where ETH miners are going?

> Why isn't that where ETH miners are going?

Mining BTC on a GPU isn't profitable.

You need a dedicated ASIC chip that is far more efficient at the task than a GPU if you want to hope turning a profit mining Bitcoin.

Something like this:

https://www.bitmain.com/

Bitcoin mining all switched over to custom ASICs long ago, and is barely profitable even on that hardware. The GPUs that were used for Ethereum mining can't compete.

For some more background: bitcoin's POW is basically just sha256, which was trivial to port first to GPUs and then to custom hardware. That makes mining a bigger up-front investment and thus more centralized, which is why almost all later coins chose POWs that aren't easy to speed up with ASICs

I'm fairly sure that Bitcoin mining just isn't as profitable to mine with a GPU -- it's more cost-effective to use an ASIC designed for that purpose.

Bitcoin is using a different hash function. Bitcoin uses sha, which is easy to implement more efficiently in fgpa and asic, which blows gpus out of the world.

Eth thought that was a bad thing, so chose an algorithm that was intentionally difficult to implement in asic. They thought having gpus be the most efficient platform would be more decentralized and be more one person one vote compared to asics. As a result people use gpus for eth.

Thanks. I'm curious, is there a certain class of algorithms that is generally difficult to implement in ASIC but easy to implement in a GPU?

Usually its about how much RAM it needs access to.

Password hashing algorithms (scrypt, argon2, etc) are generally designed to minimize the advantage custom hatdware gives.

Presumably those other coins are close to an equilibrium point where more people mining them would be unprofitable. Aka if the total block rewards from other coins are 1 million dollars per month, there is no way spending 2 million per month on electricity is a good idea.

The article gives an answer to this.

> "The only coins showing profit have no market cap or liquidity. The profit is not real."

That is, the remaining PoW derived coins are not as profitable for miners, presumably not enough to cover their margins.

Why is the assumption that crypto has held back innovation? If anything normally pumping a ton of money into something causes more innovation to happen.

Innovation on GPU fabrication, yeah, mining might have turbocharged it.

Innovation on other use cases for GPUs were probably held back by excessive costs.

now that there's a glut of GPUs from the drop in demand from mining, there's likely to be people looking to use them profitably, and thus new innovation.

The dot-com boom bust caused a lot of dark fibre to be built - and i think the internet has been better for it. Without that dark fibre, the expansion of the internet wouldn't have been as easy and mainstream, as fast as it did.

Dark fiber is useful for a lot more than GPUs built solely for a specific type of processing.

But more importantly, it’s not even clear that buying a miner’s GPU is a good deal because these GPUs tend to be really worn out with short working lives.

Most people will probably be better off simply buying cheaper GPUs new, or buying slightly cheaper used GPUs on eBay that were not popular for mining.

i'm not really talking about second hand GPUs, i'm talking about new GPUs that was made on the assumption that the prices would be high, and demand high, due to mining.

Of course, a 2nd hand GPU might be a bit useless after the abuse of mining for many years (tho i think with proper cooling, and replacement of the fans, those GPUs should've been able to be kept in good working condition for resale).

No one needed crypto to by GPUs.

GPUs were and still are in high demand anyway.

Crypto blocked real innovation for years.

Nvidia was spending money, time and energy to cater to them one way or the other instead of other areas were GPUs are actually good for society.

Your sentence is very generic and not sure why this should be an universal law. Putting money into the right thing might cause innovation not just money

Weren't GPU manufacturers going out of their way to prevent people from using their GPUs to mine?

They did this only for alibi reasons.

Everyone Noncrypto is a long term customer getting the middle finger from them because they used the opportunity.

They did this for some tiny subset of GPUs, and they achieved this largely by making those GPUs worse for even non mining purposes than the ones they replaced.

Pumping money into blockchain scams did cause more innovations in SEC fraud and ponzi schemes, but usually they meant innovation in science/technology.

Until demand was proven, nobody was interested in making GPU compute at scales beyond niche (e.g. for scienctific calculation or for server clusters). As-is, we are about to enter a squeeze that is going to see a few of the big players in retail GPU manufacture drop out, so don't expect this glut of cheap GPUs to last.

What other things can you do with GPUs outside of machine learning, generalized scientific computing and gaming?

Can’t tell if sarcasm…

entirely serious

high end graphics...

would we count protein prediction as machine learning? The learning part is possibly done, now people need to do model execution to invent new proteins.

Learning how to program shaders is actually a pretty cool thing to do. It's the most math heavy programming I've ever delved into and for that I like how it feels like it's getting my knives real sharp.

I'd like to see it used for converting old movies to hi-res and color.

Like what Peter Jackson did for "They Shall Not Grow Old".

Speeding up databases, for one example.

> SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand

The market knew that the PoS merge was coming. I'd have expected the market to therefore have already factored the PoS transition into GPU prices. Why do you think GPU prices are tanking now?

The market for GPUs isn't as efficient as the stock market. Miners might also have wanted to profit right until the end. The price doesn't come down until the used GPUs actually hit the stores.

I have been using a gtx 980 for a long time now and have wanted to upgrade but everything still seems so expensive. Right now on newegg Canada a ASUS ROG Strix NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 OC is $1039.99. Seems like a lot. Will that price go down? Or should I be looking deals with used cards?

My speculative call is that it will go down, haven't hit bottom yet.

Nvidia is sitting on a bunch of ampere stock, the miner liquidation, and new gen cards coming out.

My guess is January-February when the Christmas buying season is past and all these are in full swing.

Flash memory is also experiencing a price crash.

> I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand

Over the course of a GPU's lifetime (in your hypothetical use-case), how much of the cost is the GPU itself and how much electricity?

Last big crypto crash I bought a used Titan XP for like 350$ (still running strong and kicks ass). Got me through this whole GPU debacle. Always buy low!

I'm just finishing up Andrew Ng's course, and would like to pick up a GPU for building models (probably focusing on U-net image models), do you have any references on what I should expect from trying to buy a used one like you did?

I know it's a pretty random question, but i honestly don't know anything about GPU's other than that my life would be a lot easier if I had one (I run an old Macbook Pro, and I have an old Asus laptop that runs a debian distro, and finally my very old gaming pc is a alienware alpha).

Are you concerned about damage from heat during previous use? You're going to be running it for hours or days anyway if you train on large complex datasets, so a GPU that's been used for a few months might not have lost you too much lifetime.

Otherwise it should work exactly as new.

I am no expert, but my off the cuff thought is that buying a gpy and trying to run it as an external for any of those machines will be pretty pointless.

First it probably won't work; certainly for the mac you will face driver issues that were beyond me the last time I tried (about three years ago). I suspect things are worse now... Nvidia have not been helpful. Probably you could get a radeon working as an egpu, but for ML you really need Nvida and Cuda (unless you are seriously into homebrewing code).

But the other issue is that you need to feed the beast - that is you need to pump data in and out of the GPU. For that you need a fairly fast CPU and fast ssd, and fast interconnects to the GPU. You also need power, a good power supply that can keep everything running -- including the fans... which need to be in a good box so that there is good airflow.. or quite quickly you will have no GPU!

Maybe build a box like this with a cheap nvidia GPU, get it working so you know that you have a viable rig, benchmark it to see if you are bottlenecked on the GPU (long time since I did this, so I'm not 100% how - but basically if the GPU is 90% for ages and everything else is sitting looking at it then that's a good sign). Then buy a top notch second hand (about £500 right now on ebay) and resell the cheap one. If you hit a hitch inbetween you know you have a problem to solve and haven't spent all your money. The extra points are for getting multiple GPU's running... again I did that in a corporate with supermicro boxes about 8 years ago and it drove me up the wall at the time... I suspect now it's possible to have 2 GPU's in a consumer box/motherboard but I am not sure what the state of play is.

I predict the opposite will happen. GPU demand will drop, which means GPU manufacturers will have less money to spend on R&D.

GPU prices may go down in the short term, but long term GPU speeds will stagnate.

I wish there was a way to put a 1 year timer on this comment to see who's right me or stuntkite.

There's more than enough demand for GPUs with gaming, video rendering, and machine learning that R&D will continue without crypto mining.

We are already at a stagnating point in GPU speeds, with the most recent generations from NVIDIA simply being pump more juice (watts) instead of big design changes and efficiency optimizations.

I don't believe R&D funds will dry as well, since they will simply be relocated to AI and datacenter workloads which have been on the rise more recently.

Maybe kind of in like clock... but the parallel throughput and the ability to securely slice and provision GPU workloads is what was delivered this go around. As well as optical NV-Link and all the crazy new stuff coupled with their CPUs. Go look at crowdsupply and look at the previous gen cores being strapped to massive software defined radio arrays.

This isn't just about pushing framerate. It's about vector processing being massively more efficient than CPU for almost everything and the tooling to start floating consumer needs that aren't just making pretty bleep bloops go boom boom for fun times is very, very mature.

The rumored 4090 is going to pull 450W and score ~19000 on 3DMark time spy extreme. The 3080 pulls 350W and scores 9000 if we are being optimistic. If these numbers are ballpark correct we are talking about 60% more performance per watt in two years. Your story may eventually come true but it is not yet true.

Shouldn't you compare 4080 with 3080? or 3090 with 4090? xx90 costs like 2x xx80.

4090Ti - 95TFlops, 3090Ti - 40TFlops, Titan RTX - 16TFlops. Still a nice increase from generation to generation.

I think you are both right. Lower prices and lower r&d. If you buy gpu because you care about the objective performance then it's bad. If you buy gpu to keep up with Joneses, then it's good.

I don't think 1 year is long enough to tell - release cycles seem to be ~3 years so you'd need that long to compare the 3xxx->4xxx->5xxx series.

You seem to think GPUs are only currently used for gaming and speculation on ape gifs.

or maybe 'it' created this scenario in which there are going to be a lot of GPUs that are going to be cheaper than sand (as you said).

What are the interesting things?

One I'm interested in is graph databases powered with linear algebra (see GraphBLAS and RedisGraph). Putting the graph structure in a sparse matrix in GPU memory and doing matrix-multiplication to perform queries means you can effectively traverse the entire graph quickly by using the massive parallel nature of the graphics card.

whats your top 5 interesting things aside from crypto?

And 99% of them will be used for games. So sad.

Why is it sad? They'll bring joy into people's lives.

Carbon intensive joy. Is it really worth it with the climate emergency?! /s

> There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto.

There's a lot of stuff that isn't any better than crypto either, deepfakes, producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of the same scene.

Much of this is still a garbage fire of greenhouse gases and e-waste, used GPU prices won't change that. Many ml advances are simply more compute and bigger models in the end.

By that logic you can include gaming in there as well. Thousands of people re-playing the same scenes over and over again, instead of just watching a let's play of the first person that bought the game. I guess the only reasonable uses for GPUs are cancer research etc.

PC gaming alone has bigger carbon footprint than crypto mining so objectively yes they are both anti environmental activities.

Running cards at full pelt 24/7 vs at most a few hours a day? Doubtful.

There have been see scientific prayers on power us usage snd PC gaming (only) and it comes similar to crypto usage. There are not many things that take tons of energy - heating, cooling, crypto, gaming etc.

Lot of gamers, and the displays add a few more watts each to the total.

Fermi estimate: 10 million latest Xboxes, used for 1 hour per day.

Power estimates seem to vary from 120 W to 315 W, let's say 200 W including display. That's 2 GWh/day. Probably similar for Playstation, or at least close enough for a Fermi estimate. I'm going to guess similar for PC gaming also.

Smartphones are what, about 1 W? But a few billion of them? 1 hour per day makes that another GWh/day?

So probably about 7 GWh/day for Xbox + Playstation + PC + mobile, 2.5 TWh/year.

Bitcoin is estimated to use 131 TWh/year according to Wikipedia.

Yeah, you're right, it's not even close.

I'd be surprised if it's actually more than crypto; while there are way more gamers than crypto miners, they don't game 24/7, don't have a dozen GPUs per rig etc.

Anyways my main point was that a lot of things people do for fun are more or less directly bad for the environment, like for example creating dozens of silly images with stable diffusion. But it's still better than crypto mining imo, as doing "fun things" usually benefits you/your mental health.

And we haven't even started talking about dog owners yet.

Pretty sure if I wasn’t gaming these few hours per week, my carbon footprint would be much higher. E.g. 2kWh is only 8 miles on an efficient EV and probably less than 4 miles on ICE. We have to measure avoidable costs in this case, not essential.

I'm upvoting this because, at the end of the day, this is brutally accurate.

Gaming is not an activity that produces something, likewise any form of entertainment for that matter. So in the sense that nothing comes from the electricity and time used, gaming is an "anti-environmental" activity.

I personally don't agree with any of this notion, because life is worthless if we can't accept life is pointless, but if we are striving for a world where consumption must always produce something then gaming is one of many things that must be eliminated.

Please provide a citation to a well researched study for that claim.

If Google banned you it's still possible to use DuckDuckGo, or you could try out a VPN.

> By that logic you can include gaming in there as well.

But I sorta do... excessive gaming is a waste of human potential and GPU's.

I honestly regret spending a lot of my teen years playing games, I know that sounds ultra-boomer but the only thing games ever actually did for me was learning how to mod them and getting programming experience from that, something that simply doesn't exist on consoles and sadly many of the most popular games on Earth.

For a time/experience ratio that's not the best way to go about it. I would have been better off surfing and chasing girls with a bit of coding on the side.

If I could go back in time for ten minutes I would berate younger me for spending too long on an xbox, likely to the mocking amusement of my younger self.

> excessive gaming is a waste of human potential and GPU's.

A lot of things humans do don't produce anything, but are just done for fun and are unfortunately bad for the environment. That would even apply to surfing if you want, it produces plastic waste in the end.

> but the only thing games ever actually did for me was learning how to mod them and getting programming experience from that

Isn't that just a case of "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence"? You're dismissing the fact that it lead you to learn programming, which is a valuable skill for many careers.

Are you sure younger you would have been the surfer dude? I think there is nothing wrong with just not being that extroverted as a teen, not being the cool guy girls flock to. That's not something you just decide to be. Now you can obviously say it would have been better to be the cool dude and be really good at coding at the same time, but that's just hindsight and assuming an ideal outcome, and that's just not how it usually works. there's probably a lot of people in their 40s who have partied way too much, had girls and enjoyed life and now regret not having been more of a nerd instead because being in IT seems the foolproof way of making a lot of money, while they struggle.

And just for fun, let's imagine you'd have gone surfing once a week as a teen and taken the car to the beach, how much would an half hour car ride mean for environmental impact, compared to a gaming rig at 300W?

> producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of the same scene

Why are you twisting reality? People don't generate hundreds of thousands of stable diffusion pics of the same scene. Instead they generate dozens to hundreds of images carefully tweaking the prompt and the starter image.

If you say something's bad, you imply something else is good. So can you identify some contrasting technologies which didn't start out as a "garbage fire of greenhouse gasses and e-waste" or the appropriate equivalent? Are you wanting a world contains only those born perfect technologies?

I don't know why you're being downvoted. At least the last part is totally true; advance in ML is unfortunately just bigger models, more data, and more compute.

But doing ML won't necessarily boost GPU sales because most deep learning work is shifted to the cloud.

You do understand that the computers they use for cloud-based deep learning have GPUs in them, right?

Yes, but more like V100s, not 3080 ti.

Probably used much more efficiently.

You're not going to get very far trying to impose your subjective perspective of usefulness on other people's use of energy. Energy is one of the foundational pillars of modern society, and other people are going to use it for all sorts of things, including activities that you don't like (but that are liked by others).

I'd suggest focusing your irritation on advocating for universally clean generation of energy. Regardless of how much energy each of us uses, and regardless of what we use it for (even if it's something that you consider to be "useless"), most of us seem to agree that we don't want to pollute our air and ruin our planet. However, the moment you start attacking things that make other people happy, you are risking losing support for that fundamental goal.

> universally clean generation of energy

There’s no such thing as completely green energy. Even wind turbines use materials that need mining, refining, transportation etc.

Sure it is. Any polluting process can be unwound with the correct application of energy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com