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A lot of people are buying AMD/ATI GPUs to mine ethereum, their GPUs do extremely well against this one specific crypto currency. With ETH moving to PoS this ye

A lot of people are buying AMD/ATI GPUs to mine ethereum, their GPUs do extremely well against this one specific crypto currency. With ETH moving to PoS this year, thus removing the need for GPU mining, I wonder how this will impact the price of AMD stock in the future. Lot of people use Nvidia to mine other GPU compatible atlcoins.

Filligree 9y ago
AMD hasn't scaled up their production to meet that demand, and neither has Nvidia; they're both wary of a crash causing demand to stop as miners sell their burned-out GPUs. Right now that makes things hard for everyone not a miner, but if AMD ends up being the only option for gamers while Nvidia still sells to miners, they might actually gain from the mess.
- philjohn 9y ago
  Memory shortages have also played their part.
- paulmd 9y ago
  The thing to remember about NVIDIA is that their production levels are much higher to begin with due to their overwhelming marketshare. They have a lot more inventory in the channel at any given time, which gives them more of a buffer when GPU mining heats up. I actually think AMD's timing on increasing production is really questionable here. Barring another major runup in Bitcoin prices (altcoin profitability follows Bitcoin prices), which seems unlikely at the moment, network difficulty will continue to increase and mining profits are going to continue to decline. That means miners are going to taper off purchases, and some may even be dumping their rigs. So AMD is essentially increasing production at the exact moment when they may already have a problem with the market being flooded. The time when they needed to increase production was 4 months ago, it's too late now. On top of that, NVIDIA may be pushing out their new GPUs within the next few months, implying another step in efficiency which puts AMD's performance/efficiency even further behind. They are already about a generation behind (roughly competitive with Maxwell), despite being on similar nodes. I'd be prepared for NVIDIA to make a minimum of a half-gen step (30%), if not a full-gen step (60%). AMD's timing seems exquisitely poor here. They didn't want to bet on crypto, and now it's too late. Fortune favors the bold.
- sangnoir 9y ago
  > they're both wary of a crash causing demand to stop as miners sell their burned-out GPUs Offtopic FYI: GPUs that are in use 24/7 would probably in a better shape than those that encounter more thermal (on/off) cycles. There's obviously more wear and tear on the moving part, but fans are easier to replace than mechanically stressed silicon/PCBs.
  - Animats 9y ago
    Do they fail from thermal stress or electromigration?
  - Yizahi 9y ago
    a) it is not at all certain since both processes do damage to board and chips and not a single person in this thread knows what will be more severe for each small part of the board or connections. b) have you actually tried replacing monstrous coolers on moderns cards? Or even buying spares? It is rare, expensive, hard to disassemble and hard to fit back. Some cards even use glue stickers on memory thermo-interface, you can potentially tore chips away.
    - Fnoord 9y ago
      Regarding B I just checked iFixit for Radeon and found 2 (two!!) guides for graphics cards. One for reapplying thermal paste, and one for fixing a noisy fan with I think tape. All the other guides are for laptops specifically. If you know any other good written guides (pref not videos) available to clean and/or replace fans on graphics cards I'd like to learn about them.
paulmd 9y ago
There are significant technical obstacles to overcome with the switchover to PoS. The switchover was supposed to happen more than a year ago (i.e. given the current ETA they are more than 2 years behind schedule) and the release date is being pushed back essentially as we go. In fact the technical problems are so severe that it's questionable if the switchover will happen at all. All current PoS coins use centralized control due to these technical issues. NVIDIA GPUs are actually typically more efficient for mining most coins, AMD cards are only preferred because they have quicker ROI. If mining profits continue to decline, that efficiency comes more into play. And, NVIDIA may be about to introduce a new generation which further improves efficiency. If they do, god only knows what the prices are going to be. They're already nuts on Pascal, let alone if miners are snapping them up for the efficiency. Availability is going to be shit too.
- rapsey 9y ago
  > NVIDIA GPUs are actually typically more efficient for mining most coins, AMD cards are only preferred because they have quicker ROI. In what way are nvidia cards more efficient? Vegas are in some cases much faster and at worst equal to gtx 1080.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    > In what way are nvidia cards more efficient? The usual way, i.e. "efficiency=performance/power"? Here, I did the math for you. Numbers from whattomine.com: https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png https://filebin.net/fr1sqfwtvulkoynu/gpu_efficiency.ods https://filebin.net/fr1sqfwtvulkoynu/gpu_efficiency.ods As you can see, apart from Vega being a very efficient Cryptonight miner, and Polaris being an acceptably efficient Ethash (Ethereum) miner, AMD cards have absolutely garbage efficiency, they use just tons of power for their performance. And they are one-trick ponies: there are only one or two decent algos for AMD cards. The 1080 and 1080 Ti specifically have problems with a few algos due to their GDDR5X (which results in half of the memory bandwidth being wasted) but on the whole NVIDIA cards are extremely efficient miners across a variety of algorithms, and usually keep up with AMD on efficiency even on Ethash. The 1070 Ti, in particular, is the reigning champion of efficiency. It's basically a 1080 with GDDR5 instead of 5X, which makes it the most efficient card in most algos, and its worst-case is "only" being as efficient as a 580 at Ethash. Again: people prefer AMD cards because they ROI quicker during the booms. The half of this that efficiency obscures is power: AMD cards have higher TDPs and are capable of pumping out a lot more watts per dollar (RIP Planet Earth). But when profits are down and efficiency matters (or for those with expensive electricity), NVIDIA is better, and you also have that flexibility to move across algorithms if there is a hot new currency. There is also a pretty substantial cargo-cult with regards to mining: people use AMD because that's what they see other people using, and they don't bother to do the math. But NVIDIA has the same efficiency advantage in compute as they do in gaming: 1.5-2x the performance-per-watt in most situations. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Plus/31.html https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Pl...
Yizahi 9y ago
What is more likely - people saying "oh, I can't mine now, guess I'll have to sell all my hardware at a loss" or just switching to whatever next coin will be GPU oriented? For me it is obvious. Until (if) whole crypto market crashes people will continue to mine on GPU whatever they can, propping its valuation.
drakenot 9y ago
The /r/buildapc/ subreddit is depressing right now. As long as I can remember, it has always been the case that you can build a higher quality and faster computer than you can get for the same money with a pre-built. However, there are tons of threads due to skyrocketing memory and GPU prices stating that it doesn't make sense to build right now and you can get better deals on pre-built machines.

Filligree 9y ago

AMD hasn't scaled up their production to meet that demand, and neither has Nvidia; they're both wary of a crash causing demand to stop as miners sell their burned-out GPUs. Right now that makes things hard for everyone not a miner, but if AMD ends up being the only option for gamers while Nvidia still sells to miners, they might actually gain from the mess.

philjohn 9y ago
Memory shortages have also played their part.
paulmd 9y ago
The thing to remember about NVIDIA is that their production levels are much higher to begin with due to their overwhelming marketshare. They have a lot more inventory in the channel at any given time, which gives them more of a buffer when GPU mining heats up. I actually think AMD's timing on increasing production is really questionable here. Barring another major runup in Bitcoin prices (altcoin profitability follows Bitcoin prices), which seems unlikely at the moment, network difficulty will continue to increase and mining profits are going to continue to decline. That means miners are going to taper off purchases, and some may even be dumping their rigs. So AMD is essentially increasing production at the exact moment when they may already have a problem with the market being flooded. The time when they needed to increase production was 4 months ago, it's too late now. On top of that, NVIDIA may be pushing out their new GPUs within the next few months, implying another step in efficiency which puts AMD's performance/efficiency even further behind. They are already about a generation behind (roughly competitive with Maxwell), despite being on similar nodes. I'd be prepared for NVIDIA to make a minimum of a half-gen step (30%), if not a full-gen step (60%). AMD's timing seems exquisitely poor here. They didn't want to bet on crypto, and now it's too late. Fortune favors the bold.
sangnoir 9y ago
> they're both wary of a crash causing demand to stop as miners sell their burned-out GPUs Offtopic FYI: GPUs that are in use 24/7 would probably in a better shape than those that encounter more thermal (on/off) cycles. There's obviously more wear and tear on the moving part, but fans are easier to replace than mechanically stressed silicon/PCBs.
- Animats 9y ago
  Do they fail from thermal stress or electromigration?
- Yizahi 9y ago
  a) it is not at all certain since both processes do damage to board and chips and not a single person in this thread knows what will be more severe for each small part of the board or connections. b) have you actually tried replacing monstrous coolers on moderns cards? Or even buying spares? It is rare, expensive, hard to disassemble and hard to fit back. Some cards even use glue stickers on memory thermo-interface, you can potentially tore chips away.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    Regarding B I just checked iFixit for Radeon and found 2 (two!!) guides for graphics cards. One for reapplying thermal paste, and one for fixing a noisy fan with I think tape. All the other guides are for laptops specifically. If you know any other good written guides (pref not videos) available to clean and/or replace fans on graphics cards I'd like to learn about them.

paulmd 9y ago

There are significant technical obstacles to overcome with the switchover to PoS. The switchover was supposed to happen more than a year ago (i.e. given the current ETA they are more than 2 years behind schedule) and the release date is being pushed back essentially as we go. In fact the technical problems are so severe that it's questionable if the switchover will happen at all. All current PoS coins use centralized control due to these technical issues. NVIDIA GPUs are actually typically more efficient for mining most coins, AMD cards are only preferred because they have quicker ROI. If mining profits continue to decline, that efficiency comes more into play. And, NVIDIA may be about to introduce a new generation which further improves efficiency. If they do, god only knows what the prices are going to be. They're already nuts on Pascal, let alone if miners are snapping them up for the efficiency. Availability is going to be shit too.

rapsey 9y ago
> NVIDIA GPUs are actually typically more efficient for mining most coins, AMD cards are only preferred because they have quicker ROI. In what way are nvidia cards more efficient? Vegas are in some cases much faster and at worst equal to gtx 1080.
- paulmd 9y ago
  > In what way are nvidia cards more efficient? The usual way, i.e. "efficiency=performance/power"? Here, I did the math for you. Numbers from whattomine.com: https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png https://filebin.net/fr1sqfwtvulkoynu/gpu_efficiency.ods https://filebin.net/fr1sqfwtvulkoynu/gpu_efficiency.ods As you can see, apart from Vega being a very efficient Cryptonight miner, and Polaris being an acceptably efficient Ethash (Ethereum) miner, AMD cards have absolutely garbage efficiency, they use just tons of power for their performance. And they are one-trick ponies: there are only one or two decent algos for AMD cards. The 1080 and 1080 Ti specifically have problems with a few algos due to their GDDR5X (which results in half of the memory bandwidth being wasted) but on the whole NVIDIA cards are extremely efficient miners across a variety of algorithms, and usually keep up with AMD on efficiency even on Ethash. The 1070 Ti, in particular, is the reigning champion of efficiency. It's basically a 1080 with GDDR5 instead of 5X, which makes it the most efficient card in most algos, and its worst-case is "only" being as efficient as a 580 at Ethash. Again: people prefer AMD cards because they ROI quicker during the booms. The half of this that efficiency obscures is power: AMD cards have higher TDPs and are capable of pumping out a lot more watts per dollar (RIP Planet Earth). But when profits are down and efficiency matters (or for those with expensive electricity), NVIDIA is better, and you also have that flexibility to move across algorithms if there is a hot new currency. There is also a pretty substantial cargo-cult with regards to mining: people use AMD because that's what they see other people using, and they don't bother to do the math. But NVIDIA has the same efficiency advantage in compute as they do in gaming: 1.5-2x the performance-per-watt in most situations. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Plus/31.html https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/RX_580_Nitro_Pl...

Yizahi 9y ago

What is more likely - people saying "oh, I can't mine now, guess I'll have to sell all my hardware at a loss" or just switching to whatever next coin will be GPU oriented? For me it is obvious. Until (if) whole crypto market crashes people will continue to mine on GPU whatever they can, propping its valuation.

drakenot 9y ago

The /r/buildapc/ subreddit is depressing right now. As long as I can remember, it has always been the case that you can build a higher quality and faster computer than you can get for the same money with a pre-built. However, there are tons of threads due to skyrocketing memory and GPU prices stating that it doesn't make sense to build right now and you can get better deals on pre-built machines.