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AMD GPU Supply Exhausted by Crypto Miners, AIBs Now Directly Advertising to Them
- SinOverCos 9y agoLTC is not the silver of crypto, and Ethereum is not spelled "Etherium"
- kristianp 9y agoI've definitely seen LTC referred to as the "silver" to BTCs "gold". Don't know what an AIB is though.
- kristofferR 9y agoAMD Add-In-Board partners
- zurn 9y agoWhat does the author mean by ASIC resistence here?
- mbilker 9y agoThe algorithm used by the coin is prohibitively expensive or provides little to no increase in performance compared to GPUs.
- NamTaf 9y agoI'm only tangentially familiar with it so someone else please correct me if I'm wrong. Etherium requires a significant memory footprint to compute, whereas BTC and LTC do not. As such, an ASIC was able to have a heap of compute power but very little memory and it'd crunch through as much hashing as a GPU with far less upfront cost. Etherium on the other hand requires lots of memory, so to add on the memory to the ASIC you essentially kill its competitiveness against a mass-produced GPU from a capital investment point of view.
- pawadu 9y agoWasn't LTC also claimed to be GPU and ASIC proof due to its high memory usage?
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoLTC had a high memory use compared to bitcoin, but ASICs caught up to it. Ethereum is designed to have high and increasing memory use, to make it a moving target that is hard to hit with anything more cost-efficient than a GPU.
- itsnotlupus 9y agoMining algorithms that have aspects that are thought to be harder/more expensive to implement as ASIC chips. For example, Ethereum implements a number of tactics to achieve that: - relatively large memory size and bandwidth requirements. - linearly growing memory requirements over time. - announced plans to deprecate mining altogether and switch to proof-of-stake, turning all specialized hardware into pumpkins when it happens. I don't know that it's necessarily enough to make ASIC miners impossible, but it seems to have had some success at keeping the bulk of the mining on GPUs, longer than some of its peers.
- wtallis 9y agoSome hash functions (eg. scrypt) are designed to make ASIC implementations cost-prohibitive, such as by requiring enough memory that off-chip DRAM working memory is needed. When the memory interface is the bottleneck, an ASIC is not going to offer substantial advantages over GPUs.
- idonotknowwhy 9y agoBut in the end, we got scrypt ASIC miners anyway. And then a coin called Vertcoin (VTC) came along and replaced scrypt with X11, to fight ASICs
- pygy_ 9y agoIIRC the litecoin folks choose bad scrypt parameters, susceptible to custom circuits.
- egeozcan 9y agoDoes anyone know why they fight ASICs?
- idonotknowwhy 9y agoYeah. Officially it's to avoid centralization. The idea is that anyone can mine the coins, not just rich people with ASIC mining farms. They also wanted to avoid GPUs originally, and some new altcoins (also known as shitcoins) try to do this as well from time to time. I've been known to either cloud-mine or what I call "Indian-data-center" mine such coins. I personally like it when a new CPU-only or GPU-only coin comes out because I can mine with my own hardware. My ASIC miner never made ROI before the Bitcoin difficulty got to high that it would never pay back the power bill costs.
- zurn 9y agoIt would be cool if such "GPU resistant" coins became popular, because it would encourage people to figure out new ways to program GPUs.
- siberianbear 9y agoBitcoin uses a hashing algorithm called SHA256. This algorithm is easily implemented in hardware and is very parallelizeable. It's a simple pipeline with some adds, rotations, bit shifts, xors, etc. Once people started to build ASICs to mine Bitcoin, GPU mining simply wasn't competetive. There are many other types of hashing algorithms, many of which aren't as easily pipeline-able. For instance, if a hashing algorithm requires a few megabytes of memory, than making a custom ASIC isn't going to have such a slam-dunk advantage over a GPU.
- ac29 9y agoThe article doesn't really touch on it, but this seems to be related to the "altcoin" boom of the past month or so, most of which are GPU mineable. The rise in Bitcoin prices seems to have made altcoins rise in price in lockstep, for reasons I don't quite understand. Many have even increased in value 10-20x in a matter of a couple months. There are even 8 cryptocoin "unicorns" now, according to https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/. If you are thinking about gambling in crypto-speculation, my advice would be: dont do it with any money you cant afford to lose. There are way too many stories of people losing substantial portions of their life savings buying in at the top of these market booms.
- jacquesm 9y ago> The rise in Bitcoin prices seems to have made altcoins rise in price in lockstep, for reasons I don't quite understand. The Dutch Tulip Mania was not limited to Tulips of a single color.
- dmichulke 9y agoNor did tulips represent 0.025% of the global financial market cap already (~ 80bn / 300 tn) ;) [1] http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ [2] https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/global-stock-market-cap-has-doubled-since-qes-start-2015-02-12 https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/global-stock-market-cap...
- pawadu 9y agoThe rise is because you can trade altcoins with bitcoins. I don't why anyone would want to pay bitcoin for an unknown altcoin but I guess some people are gambling on an altcoin to become successful.
- martin_bech 9y agoOr diversifying their cryptoportfolio
- 9y ago
- ComodoHacker 9y agoSo is it possible for Nvidia to covertly launch and promote an altcoin designed so it's more profitable to mine it on Nvidia GPUs?
- floatboth 9y agoOf course it's possible. (In fact, you can mine Ethereum on Nvidia and it's not too bad. GTX 1070 has the same performance as RX 480/580. The 1070 is more expensive but it also consumes less power. So you can achieve the same profit, just with a bit more time.) But that wouldn't make any sense for Nvidia. They're enjoying their dominance over the gaming market. They have a lot of fanboy^Wmindshare and now even gamers who wanted an RX 580 can't even buy it because of miners.
- pawadu 9y agoDoes mining shorten the life of a GPU? If I am in the market for a second hand GPU for gaming, should I avoid those?
- alimbada 9y agoI read a comment on reddit the other day the gist of which was (sorry, I don't remember the specifics and doubt I'll be able to find the comment again): Generally, yes, as miners tend to tweak GPU settings to maximise their hashrate and it can cause issues when they are run like that long term.
- floatboth 9y agoMiners tweak settings to minimize power usage, i.e. undervolt and maybe even underclock the card. That's much better for the GPU than, say, pushing the card to the limit for benchmark scores :D But generally, GPUs become obsolete before they die.
- Samathy 9y agoYes. Running a GPU at 100% continuously will significantly shorten the lifespan of the chip, the chances of picking up something that's not got much life left is high.
- amitprayal 9y agoCriminal waste of energy
- hal9000xp 9y agoI remember the story of Samuel Brannan who made lots of money selling picks, shovels and pans to gold miners during gold rush in 1848. Quote from Wiki: "Brannan moved to New Helvetia, where he opened a store at John Sutter's Fort. When gold was discovered, Brannan owned the only store between San Francisco and the gold fields -- a fact he capitalized on by buying up all the picks, shovels and pans he could find, and then running up and down the streets of San Francisco, shouting "Gold! Gold on the American River!" He paid 20 cents each for the pans, then sold them for $15 apiece. In nine weeks, he made $36,000." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan#California_Gold_Rush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan#California_Gold...
- DeepYogurt 9y agoOh god, not this again.
- sorenjan 9y agoAll these altcoins seems to be speculation, does anybody actually use them as currency?
- idonotknowwhy 9y agoWhat do you guys thing, this will make AMD shares rise after the next profitability report?
- 6d6b73 9y agoOh great. In a time when we struggle with environmental issues on this planet let's create virtual currencies, that require shitload of electricity to run. And let's use all these advanced gpus and cpus that require tremendous amount of time, energy and money to "mine" these currencies so we can make few bucks. Let's advertise them as decentralized and private when they are neither. It's not like we could have people dedicate all these resources to develop better medicines to save lives, or better materials to create greener and healthier society. No, let's just spend money and time to fuel our ponzi scheme.
- ex3ndr 9y agoGTX 1050 ti now is more performant than RX 5xx series.
- daxorid 9y agoWhen did this new trend of referring to cryptocurrencies as "crypto" begin? This is very irritating, as it is a major namespace collision with actual cryptography.
- _rav 9y agoSo what am I supposed to buy instead of rx570? For, like, gaming? nvidia 1060 or what?
- 97s 9y agoHow long is mining actual viable by the masses at the moment? I assume this can't continue to happen unless other altcoins also use GPUs for mining. Won't the difficulty of mining eventually become unprofitable? I assume this is like bitcoin. However I don't know much about all this.