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My take on this is that Nvidia knew fine well that their code would be broken. And in short order too. I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers, and pos

My take on this is that Nvidia knew fine well that their code would be broken. And in short order too. I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers, and possibly their investors, that they're "doing something about those bad cryptominers that are making us loads of money". Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!"

Ballas 6y ago
Well, in this case it looks like NVIDIA themselves broke the restrictions - or at least they are not present in the beta drivers.
jperry 6y ago
They crippled their Geforce cards in terms of mining while simultaneously launching different, more expensive, dedicated mining cards[0]. [0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/
- ziml77 6y ago
  It's possible those cards are being made with chips that are too defective to output video. Unfortunately only Nvidia knows for sure and they're not going to say anything truthful about it.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    If the cards were cheaper, or even the same price but available, then I doubt there'd be an outcry. But they charge more, for a surely defective part. It'd be like buying a car and finding a clause that says if you manage to make money off of it they'll take a percentage or "brick" the hatch or something, to prevent your profitable usage. Nvidia should back the fuck off and just sell a product.
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      Even if they were cheaper miners wouldn't like them: one thing which substantially reduces miners' operating costs is the resale value of the GPUs they are using. They can buy a GPU, mine on it for a year or two, and then sell it for ~50% of its original value (or even higher in today's markets). The mining cards with zero resale value (which will much more quickly become landfill) would need to be substantially cheaper to make this worthwhile.
      - Rule35 6y ago
        Right. But if they openly sold defective half-finished cards for mining they'd still be less popular products but people wouldn't feel insulted.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - paulmd 6y ago
    All of the mining card SKUs except one were confirmed to be using older Turing-based architecture on a completely different fab and node (and one that's not currently bottlenecked to the same extent as TSMC 7nm/Samsung 8nm are). So they are not harvested silicon, but they also don't compete for fab time either.
- SloopJon 6y ago
  I haven't seen any pricing on the CMP cards yet. Are you sure they're more expensive?
  - paulmd 6y ago
    I would assume they would be. Miners price hardware based on the hashrate, resale value is nice as a safety but serious miners aren't figuring on dumping all their hardware the first time price drops a little bit. Take a look at the data compiled by Tom's Hardware and you'll see the 3060 Ti has a 51% price premium over the 3060 on ebay. That is the "mining premium" in action. The 3060 is a bit slower on paper but it mines pretty much as well. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index As such, if the mining cards mine twice as fast, they're twice as valuable to miners, and they'll pay twice as much for them. Pricing them less than gaming cards is leaving money on the table and completely unnecessary when they'll sell anyway.
- babypuncher 6y ago
  If they could actually enforce this then I would be all for it. Crypto mining is the biggest and most pointless waste of energy since nuclear weapons testing. All these crypto miners are just making the planet hotter, while pissing off people who have more legitimate uses for these cards but cannot realistically obtain one because they are being hogged by the miners.
  - panzagl 6y ago
    Nuclear weapons testing kept us from using nuclear weapons, worth it.
    - px43 6y ago
      Who is "us"? Surely you don't mean the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
      - filoleg 6y ago
        The event you are linking to was the real world "test" of nuclear weapons. And quite a lot of people attribute the lack of real world "testing" of nuclear weapons since then to that specific event.
  - px43 6y ago
    Eh, the vast majority of these cards are used by people who are rendering fantasy worlds so they can run around pretending to be an elf, or a soldier, or some other stupid thing. Lots of them are full grown adults too, just wasting time that they could be doing something meaningful with. That's way WAY dumber than powering a next generation global financial infrastructure.
    - madamelic 6y ago
      Wow, that's new. A cryptocurrency proponent who hates video games.
    - 6y ago
cinntaile 6y ago
Perhaps this segmentation has some contractual clauses that effectively bans companies from buying gaming cards to mine with? They're not enforceable everywhere in the world, but if it covers a big chunk of the cryptomining world then that's probably good enough. That way they can charge a premium for mining cards.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Nvidia already did this once before: their driver license specifically prohibits you from using GeForce cards in datacenters. Only Tesla-branded cards (no, not the car maker) are licensed for use in a datacenter. The license is pretty much unavoidable, even if you're using Nouveau, because the cards won't work at all unless you give it's power-management processor an Nvidia-signed binary to run, and Nvidia won't sign Free replacements for that binary.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    Mining operations are pretty fucking sketch for the most part (in china they just straight-up steal electricity) and miners won't care about terms of service in the same way that a billion-dollar corporation would. You're not going to get ratted out by the secretary and have all your assets siezed, short of requiring an always-on internet connection and ratting the user out for mining (which would be incredibly unpopular) there's not a whole lot you can do, it's all possible to do stealthily.
libertine 6y ago
At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else. They shifted part of their production capacity to release dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle, because they can't be used by anyone else. They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  > At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else. It's for a long time. This is just the latest layer.
  - libertine 6y ago
    You're right!
- xwdv 6y ago
  What’s wrong with that? Being an NVDA shareholder isn’t some select privilege for an elite few. Just buy the stock. I’m currently holding an NVDA position worth over $300k off a modest investment I made 5 years ago. To attack companies for delivering value to shareholders is just jealousy, and speaks ignorance of the market.
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    >modest investment >$300k You live in a reality that is much different than most Americans, Europeans or Asians. Reasonably, the average person can maybe get a single share, and being willing or able to blow $500 on a single share is rare. Get back down to earth, you're part of an extremely privileged group of people that fully benefits from your shares, while actual customers do not get to see returns. Putting money in a company is not work. You are not owed anything.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6y ago
maxden 6y ago
I thought they were trying to stop used up cryptominer cards from flooding the graphics card market. So this doesn't help Nvidia in that respect.
ziml77 6y ago
I don't know why they thought that would work for their marketing though. Every tech news source I follow saw right through that. And it was reasonable to be upset at the restriction because someone buying the card for their gaming machine would be the most affected if they wanted to try to make back some of the cost of the card by mining when their computer is idle.
- simias 6y ago
  It was my understanding that you need very cheap electricity for cryptomining to be worth it, am I mistaken? If not I suspect that most people don't really have a good incentive to mine coins, unless the use it to heat up their flat or something (and assuming that they don't have more efficient heating available).
  - etrautmann 6y ago
    As a technical point.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    Every penny spent on electric heat would be more efficiently spent mining.
    - simias 6y ago
      Not necessarily, if you have access to a heat pump for instance you could get much more efficient and cheap heating than a mining rig would offer you. You could also be heating your home using natural gas or some other resources costing a lot less than electricity in some markets. Being able to reuse the heat from mining does make it easier to break even of course, but given how competitive the sector is I doubt that it's enough to offset the costs in most places.
      - Rule35 6y ago
        Yes, a heat pump would be better. I was thinking of what most renters have available - baseboards and portable heaters. Cover the costs, maybe not. Offset, certainly.
simias 6y ago
I was also wondering why nvidia felt the need to step in. Selling cards is selling cards, having too much demand doesn't seem like a problem they should want solved. Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition. If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?
- etrautmann 6y ago
  There is the issue that miners tend to dump the used cards on the market much sooner than a gamer would.
  - kevingadd 6y ago
    Also quite toxic for your brand, since those used cards may have been run under high power loads and at high temperatures for a long time - the card may wear out sooner and make the gamer unhappy that it was "unreliable" and they wasted their money
    - lmohseni 6y ago
      Miners undervolt their cards so as to run cooler and under a lower load.
- elorant 6y ago
  You forget the other part of the equation. Gaming companies. If gamers can't get their hands on decent hardware they'll stop buying games altogether. Thus the pressure doesn't come from consumers alone.
- Rule35 6y ago
  They anticipated selling stripped down cards to miners for a higher price. If they wanted gamers to have these cards they would just give out purchase invites via gaming hardware sites like Gamer's Nexus. They already make deals to supply OEMs before general retail, so all the gaming hardware being build is getting a supply either way.
IshKebab 6y ago
> I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers Nope, this is price discrimination so that Bitcoin miners buy their more expensive mining card. They don't want this to be broken. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
zokier 6y ago
Even if they knew that it will be broken quickly (which I also assume they did), it wasn't still necessarily lip service; even slight deterrence against miners during launch probably helped to get more cards in the hands of gamers, which was the intention. Of course it is impossible to know how big of an impact it really had, but I'd like to think it had at least some for the so important launch day orders.
- capableweb 6y ago
  > which was the intention Neither me, _Understated_ or you know exactly why nvidia did what they did. What we do know, is that ultimately they answer to their shareholders and they have to show profit. Their motivations for why they do the things they do, can usually be boiled down to: "because it makes us more money". Nvidia probably doesn't care where the graphic cards go, miners or gamers, as they still make the same amount of money.
  - __s 6y ago
    You can want brand loyalty. If Nvidia cards are soaked up in mining & game devs start optimizing more heavily for AMD gpus, suddenly Nvidia loses market capture of gaming gpus & end up at the whim of crypto. Miners are also much less brand loyal, someone comes out with a better hashrate/$ card & you've lost your customers So there's arguments for miners not being a diverse customer base that would encourage wanting to keep gamers in line. But I'm saying this without knowing any details, so I don't know
    - zokier 6y ago
      There is also the thing that nvidia wants to get people on board the RTX train as quickly as possible, that is fairly long term strategic initiative. And miners absolutely do not help there.
  - albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    Gamers will be around in 10 years, miners might not be
amelius 6y ago
> Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!" https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/ https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/ > Oculus Founder to Match $5,000 Reward for Anyone Who Can Jailbreak Quest 2
vmception 6y ago
I came here to write this comment Nvidia gets to blame the "super tech savvy crypto hackers" while printing revenue through the roof
- paulmd 6y ago
  No they don't. They acknowledged they released the beta driver themselves that didn't have the mining brake.

Ballas 6y ago

Well, in this case it looks like NVIDIA themselves broke the restrictions - or at least they are not present in the beta drivers.

jperry 6y ago

They crippled their Geforce cards in terms of mining while simultaneously launching different, more expensive, dedicated mining cards[0]. [0] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

ziml77 6y ago
It's possible those cards are being made with chips that are too defective to output video. Unfortunately only Nvidia knows for sure and they're not going to say anything truthful about it.
- Rule35 6y ago
  If the cards were cheaper, or even the same price but available, then I doubt there'd be an outcry. But they charge more, for a surely defective part. It'd be like buying a car and finding a clause that says if you manage to make money off of it they'll take a percentage or "brick" the hatch or something, to prevent your profitable usage. Nvidia should back the fuck off and just sell a product.
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    Even if they were cheaper miners wouldn't like them: one thing which substantially reduces miners' operating costs is the resale value of the GPUs they are using. They can buy a GPU, mine on it for a year or two, and then sell it for ~50% of its original value (or even higher in today's markets). The mining cards with zero resale value (which will much more quickly become landfill) would need to be substantially cheaper to make this worthwhile.
    - Rule35 6y ago
      Right. But if they openly sold defective half-finished cards for mining they'd still be less popular products but people wouldn't feel insulted.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- paulmd 6y ago
  All of the mining card SKUs except one were confirmed to be using older Turing-based architecture on a completely different fab and node (and one that's not currently bottlenecked to the same extent as TSMC 7nm/Samsung 8nm are). So they are not harvested silicon, but they also don't compete for fab time either.
SloopJon 6y ago
I haven't seen any pricing on the CMP cards yet. Are you sure they're more expensive?
- paulmd 6y ago
  I would assume they would be. Miners price hardware based on the hashrate, resale value is nice as a safety but serious miners aren't figuring on dumping all their hardware the first time price drops a little bit. Take a look at the data compiled by Tom's Hardware and you'll see the 3060 Ti has a 51% price premium over the 3060 on ebay. That is the "mining premium" in action. The 3060 is a bit slower on paper but it mines pretty much as well. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index As such, if the mining cards mine twice as fast, they're twice as valuable to miners, and they'll pay twice as much for them. Pricing them less than gaming cards is leaving money on the table and completely unnecessary when they'll sell anyway.
babypuncher 6y ago
If they could actually enforce this then I would be all for it. Crypto mining is the biggest and most pointless waste of energy since nuclear weapons testing. All these crypto miners are just making the planet hotter, while pissing off people who have more legitimate uses for these cards but cannot realistically obtain one because they are being hogged by the miners.
- panzagl 6y ago
  Nuclear weapons testing kept us from using nuclear weapons, worth it.
  - px43 6y ago
    Who is "us"? Surely you don't mean the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
    - filoleg 6y ago
      The event you are linking to was the real world "test" of nuclear weapons. And quite a lot of people attribute the lack of real world "testing" of nuclear weapons since then to that specific event.
- px43 6y ago
  Eh, the vast majority of these cards are used by people who are rendering fantasy worlds so they can run around pretending to be an elf, or a soldier, or some other stupid thing. Lots of them are full grown adults too, just wasting time that they could be doing something meaningful with. That's way WAY dumber than powering a next generation global financial infrastructure.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    Wow, that's new. A cryptocurrency proponent who hates video games.
  - 6y ago

cinntaile 6y ago

Perhaps this segmentation has some contractual clauses that effectively bans companies from buying gaming cards to mine with? They're not enforceable everywhere in the world, but if it covers a big chunk of the cryptomining world then that's probably good enough. That way they can charge a premium for mining cards.

kmeisthax 6y ago
Nvidia already did this once before: their driver license specifically prohibits you from using GeForce cards in datacenters. Only Tesla-branded cards (no, not the car maker) are licensed for use in a datacenter. The license is pretty much unavoidable, even if you're using Nouveau, because the cards won't work at all unless you give it's power-management processor an Nvidia-signed binary to run, and Nvidia won't sign Free replacements for that binary.
- paulmd 6y ago
  Mining operations are pretty fucking sketch for the most part (in china they just straight-up steal electricity) and miners won't care about terms of service in the same way that a billion-dollar corporation would. You're not going to get ratted out by the secretary and have all your assets siezed, short of requiring an always-on internet connection and ratting the user out for mining (which would be incredibly unpopular) there's not a whole lot you can do, it's all possible to do stealthily.

libertine 6y ago

At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else. They shifted part of their production capacity to release dedicated cards for mining that have way shorter life-cycle, because they can't be used by anyone else. They found a way to sell more cards with a higher price tag.

bayindirh 6y ago
> At this point NVIDIA seems to be motivated by shareholders value, and nothing else. It's for a long time. This is just the latest layer.
- libertine 6y ago
  You're right!
xwdv 6y ago
What’s wrong with that? Being an NVDA shareholder isn’t some select privilege for an elite few. Just buy the stock. I’m currently holding an NVDA position worth over $300k off a modest investment I made 5 years ago. To attack companies for delivering value to shareholders is just jealousy, and speaks ignorance of the market.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  >modest investment >$300k You live in a reality that is much different than most Americans, Europeans or Asians. Reasonably, the average person can maybe get a single share, and being willing or able to blow $500 on a single share is rare. Get back down to earth, you're part of an extremely privileged group of people that fully benefits from your shares, while actual customers do not get to see returns. Putting money in a company is not work. You are not owed anything.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6y ago

maxden 6y ago

I thought they were trying to stop used up cryptominer cards from flooding the graphics card market. So this doesn't help Nvidia in that respect.

ziml77 6y ago

I don't know why they thought that would work for their marketing though. Every tech news source I follow saw right through that. And it was reasonable to be upset at the restriction because someone buying the card for their gaming machine would be the most affected if they wanted to try to make back some of the cost of the card by mining when their computer is idle.

simias 6y ago
It was my understanding that you need very cheap electricity for cryptomining to be worth it, am I mistaken? If not I suspect that most people don't really have a good incentive to mine coins, unless the use it to heat up their flat or something (and assuming that they don't have more efficient heating available).
- etrautmann 6y ago
  As a technical point.
- Rule35 6y ago
  Every penny spent on electric heat would be more efficiently spent mining.
  - simias 6y ago
    Not necessarily, if you have access to a heat pump for instance you could get much more efficient and cheap heating than a mining rig would offer you. You could also be heating your home using natural gas or some other resources costing a lot less than electricity in some markets. Being able to reuse the heat from mining does make it easier to break even of course, but given how competitive the sector is I doubt that it's enough to offset the costs in most places.
    - Rule35 6y ago
      Yes, a heat pump would be better. I was thinking of what most renters have available - baseboards and portable heaters. Cover the costs, maybe not. Offset, certainly.

simias 6y ago

I was also wondering why nvidia felt the need to step in. Selling cards is selling cards, having too much demand doesn't seem like a problem they should want solved. Sure it does incur some PR cost as gamers are frustrated not to be able to purchase the cards, but I doubt it really damages their brand in the long term, and AFAIK AMD also faces similar issues so it's not like it massively benefits the competition. If I were nvidia I'd be cynically very happy that miners are buying my cards in droves. What am I missing?

etrautmann 6y ago
There is the issue that miners tend to dump the used cards on the market much sooner than a gamer would.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Also quite toxic for your brand, since those used cards may have been run under high power loads and at high temperatures for a long time - the card may wear out sooner and make the gamer unhappy that it was "unreliable" and they wasted their money
  - lmohseni 6y ago
    Miners undervolt their cards so as to run cooler and under a lower load.
elorant 6y ago
You forget the other part of the equation. Gaming companies. If gamers can't get their hands on decent hardware they'll stop buying games altogether. Thus the pressure doesn't come from consumers alone.
Rule35 6y ago
They anticipated selling stripped down cards to miners for a higher price. If they wanted gamers to have these cards they would just give out purchase invites via gaming hardware sites like Gamer's Nexus. They already make deals to supply OEMs before general retail, so all the gaming hardware being build is getting a supply either way.

IshKebab 6y ago

> I reckon this was just lip-service to consumers Nope, this is price discrimination so that Bitcoin miners buy their more expensive mining card. They don't want this to be broken. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

zokier 6y ago

Even if they knew that it will be broken quickly (which I also assume they did), it wasn't still necessarily lip service; even slight deterrence against miners during launch probably helped to get more cards in the hands of gamers, which was the intention. Of course it is impossible to know how big of an impact it really had, but I'd like to think it had at least some for the so important launch day orders.

capableweb 6y ago
> which was the intention Neither me, _Understated_ or you know exactly why nvidia did what they did. What we do know, is that ultimately they answer to their shareholders and they have to show profit. Their motivations for why they do the things they do, can usually be boiled down to: "because it makes us more money". Nvidia probably doesn't care where the graphic cards go, miners or gamers, as they still make the same amount of money.
- __s 6y ago
  You can want brand loyalty. If Nvidia cards are soaked up in mining & game devs start optimizing more heavily for AMD gpus, suddenly Nvidia loses market capture of gaming gpus & end up at the whim of crypto. Miners are also much less brand loyal, someone comes out with a better hashrate/$ card & you've lost your customers So there's arguments for miners not being a diverse customer base that would encourage wanting to keep gamers in line. But I'm saying this without knowing any details, so I don't know
  - zokier 6y ago
    There is also the thing that nvidia wants to get people on board the RTX train as quickly as possible, that is fairly long term strategic initiative. And miners absolutely do not help there.
- albertgoeswoof 6y ago
  Gamers will be around in 10 years, miners might not be

amelius 6y ago

> Plus, whenever something is marketed as unbreakable, I picture guys reading it saying "Oh really? Challenge accepted!" https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/ https://www.roadtovr.com/developer-reward-jailbreak-quest-2/ > Oculus Founder to Match $5,000 Reward for Anyone Who Can Jailbreak Quest 2

vmception 6y ago

I came here to write this comment Nvidia gets to blame the "super tech savvy crypto hackers" while printing revenue through the roof

paulmd 6y ago
No they don't. They acknowledged they released the beta driver themselves that didn't have the mining brake.