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AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
- justaguy88 6y agoThat's ok, just make more cards.
- ttt0 6y agoWait, so there are people who are expecting hardware manufacturers to dictate to users what their products can or cannot be used for? Is this the war on general purpose computing I've been hearing about?
- kardos 6y agoBroadly speaking, the issue is that cryptocurrencies drive up demand for GPUs, and that makes them less available/affordable for gamers. If there was a crypto-crippled GPU then it would be exempt from that particular demand.
- Daho0n 6y agoAnd since the amount of GPUs won't go up magically by inventing another product there will be too few anyway or the price will go up. There's nothing to win by doing so which is why people condemned Nvidia for doing it.
- baseballdork 6y agoThe intent was to cut demand, presumably. If a GPU can't mine ethereum, then ethereum miners won't be competing with gamers to buy that GPU.
- pirocks 6y agoMany people believe the intent was to prevent a glut of gaming gpus when crypto crashes. If you get miners to instead by crypto only ASICS or "mining gpus" then can't be resold.
- Shared404 6y agoMy understanding is that Nvidia's move was universally condemned. AMD's just taking advantage of Nvidia's blunder.
- ttt0 6y agoUntil today I was convinced that not breaking your products was just an industry standard.
- rrss 6y agonope, hardware vendors have been introducing artificial restrictions in some products for market segmentation for decades e.g. ECC support in CPUs, mods to turn radeon into firegl / geforce into quadro, fused off cores
- mancerayder 6y ago486 DX versus SX, wasn't it? That was my childhood intro.
- seaourfreed 6y agoWhy did Nvidia work to block crypto mining on their video cards? (I don't buy "because gamers couldn't buy them") Can someone explain why they think nvidia really did this?
- proce55ing 6y agoThe cards that have access to mining lack a video output. Once they become unprofitable to mine with they won’t impact the gaming market on resale.
- ev1 6y agoNvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards
- junon 6y agoThis is the first I've ever heard of this, wow. I have an nvidia card and certainly do "business-like activities" with it, not at any particular scale but for my own income and whatnot. Is this something I should be considering moving to AMD over?
- arthurcolle 6y agoYeah I was surprised by this as well, but apparently you cannot use NVIDIA cards to run enterprise deep learning workloads ("in a data center")... was super super shocked to hear this.. like isn't this one of the primary use cases...? Bizarre
- smitop 6y agoIIRC you have to use their more expensive Tesla cards for these use cases. These cards are basically the same as consumer GPUs with more permissive driver licensing
- arthurcolle 6y agoNice thanks, never followed up, I just assembled my contraband server and never thought about it again. Do you know if you can just buy them for personal (i.e. startup) use as well?
- inshadows 6y agoCan you please provide any (semi-)official source for this statement? So if nVidia graphic card makes me money in any way, I'm breaching some license? Of the driver?
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- Traster 6y agoIt's been a pretty standard procedure for chip companies to sell CPUs locked from doing specific tasks, whether that's binning, burning fuses to disable functionality etc. It's much cheaper to make 1 design that does everything and segment your market using arbitrary restrictions than to design lots of chips. It's only the totally bone-headed way Nvidia decided to target this that is new.
- oliwarner 6y agoIf it means people who only want to play games can actually but one for less than the price of a car, sure. Hardware manufacturers have imposed weird arbitrary feature limits on things forever. It's how they segment out valuable markets. Even in graphics you get output limits to protect workstation cards. Nothing new.
- ttt0 6y agoI kinda get the segmentation part, at least in theory, but I don't buy that it's to "protect the poor gamers". Maybe I'm missing something, but the production cost is the same and it costs virtually nothing to not put on those limits. If anything, it almost certainly costs more to do this. So as far as I understand it, it's just charging more money for what essentially is the same thing. Especially when you consider the fact that they simultaneously changed the license of one of their cheaper GPU cards to prevent using it in data centers, so you'd have to switch to something more expensive. What's important to note is that they specifically didn't prevent the blockchain stuff. I don't know, I just find producing something and then breaking it to be wasteful and borderline immoral.
- oliwarner 6y agoThe primary supply is limited by covid affecting the component supply chain. The demand is sky high because of miners happy still making s profit at twice the price. The cards are often going straight from primary retailers to eBay. Lots of factors colluding to make PC gaming unaffordable.
- nickysielicki 6y agoThis would mean a lot more if ROCM worked on these cards. These cards are capable of a lot but the software stack (OpenCL) leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t know what AMD is doing, to be honest. You would think that they’d want to get this all working ASAP so that they can serve as an alternative to nvidia for ML and gpgpu. I guess there’s so much demand for Nvidia between ML and cryptocurrency and gaming that AMD having feature parity with nvidia in only one subcategory (gaming) is enough to still sell all their production capacity.
- varispeed 6y agoI'd like to see them trying to beat M1 rather than chase the GPU game. Apart from gaming these GPUs have little use in day to day computing. Maybe you encode a video once in a while, but it does not make huge difference whether it will encode in 10 or 5 minutes.
- rrss 6y agolol, this is such a vacuous comment. "device made specifically for gaming is not useful for people uninterested in gaming"
- varispeed 6y agoIt's a smaller market than a CPU and likely requires same or more effort. As a person not interested in gaming I would prefer the resources to be used to develop better computing experience. I understand the pool of people who can do such things is not unlimited. Current CPU market is in dire straits as Intel was bumbling the last few years and only now AMD is catching up, but it seems like Apple is already miles ahead. That wouldn't be too bad, but it means the market may be won by a company that is anti-consumer, anti-competitive and two faced.
- xiphias2 6y agoIf you look at the success of TikTok and YouTube, video editing was never as great market for electronics suppliers as now. I don't care about it either, but that's just because I'm not an influencer.
- axaxs 6y agoHonest question...why are either AMD(or Nvidia) or retailers not raising their prices until stocks build? It seems like econ 101, prices rise when demand outstrips supply. But that isn't happening at the retail level. Instead scalpers are buying them en masse, and doing the price fixing. Something I've always wondered, but wasn't sure who to ask that would know nuances of doing so.
- sombremesa 6y agoI assume you mean "aren't". The reason this happens is because AMD/Nvidia can't sell for $X to person A and $X*10 to person B depending on how much they want something (there are some caveats here, such as being able to price discriminate consumers and enterprises, but some distinction must exist within the product for that). As such, if they price all their items at $X*10, they run the risk of not being able to sell their stock - a risk they are taking for no reason, since they already priced in the profit they wanted at $X. Additionally, the appearance of scarcity actually works in their favor, since it keeps up demand.
- axaxs 6y agoSure, I edited it probably after you started a reply. But what about retailers, like say Best Buy. If they know people are just reselling an item for $1000, why not just price it at that? Do they have contracts preventing that, or would it just be bad PR?
- ev1 6y agoNewegg already upcharges significantly past MSRP (they scalped the shit out of RX580's back during the RX580 days a few years back), and _forces you to purchase items with incompatible, unreturable bundles_. Like imagine being forced to buy a last-gen Intel mobo to be allowed to purchase a Ryzen. No refunds, no returns, no exchanges.
- xiphias2 6y agoIt's the same reason why you can't get a COVID vaccine for $1000: fear of reputation problems. Tesla is doing supply/demand based pricing though, so I think NVIDIA could get away with it as well as long as it gets the communication right.
- jsheard 6y agoAMD doesn't particularly need to limit RDNA2 mining because those cards are inherently less desirable for miners. RDNA2 is designed around relatively slow memory with a big chunk of on-chip cache to compensate, which works quite well for games but the random memory access pattern of crypto mining blows the cache and bottlenecks on the slow underlying memory bus. https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/amd_s_rx_6700_xt_is_slower_at_mining_than_its_predecessor_-_here_s_why/1 https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/amd_s_rx_6700_... It's not like AMD is above artificially limiting the performance of certain workloads when it suits them, they do it with CAD applications unless you pay the workstation tax.
- convery 6y agoThere's a lot of different crypto algorithms. Some will work better on AMD, some on Nvidia, some regardless of memory and some dependant on large cache. A miner will benchmark their card against the popular algos and choose the most profitable one. Which is one of the main complaints when Nvidia limited ETH algos, that miners would just switch to ZHash with a percentage or two less profitability and thus it would do nothing about the shortage while possibly triggering false-positives for gamers.
- nhkcode 6y ago> It's not like AMD is above artificially limiting the performance of certain workloads when it suits them, they do it with CAD applications unless you pay the workstation tax. I'm curious about that, do you have an example? I only know of nvidia consumer drivers giving you abysmal performance if you try to use fixed function pipeline line or wireframe rendering with opengl. Or at least they did a couple of years ago. As soon as you used shaders to render the same lines everything got super fast. I always suspected it's their way to force users of CAD systems to buy their pricey professional cards. No game would use opengl line rendering without shaders or if any game did in the long gone past it's probably so old and the line count so low that it would be still fine with the artificial slowdown.
- jsheard 6y agoYou can see it in action here: https://techgage.com/article/specviewperf-13-viewport-performance/ https://techgage.com/article/specviewperf-13-viewport-perfor... The consumer RX580 and workstation WX7100 are based on the same Polaris silicon, and the consumer card is configured with a higher power limit of 185W vs 130W, but the workstation card usually performs similarly or much better anyway. It's most egregious in the Siemens NX test where the workstation card is about 8 times faster. I think AMD strategically throttles legacy OpenGL paths similar to Nvidia, Autodesk Max/Maya use modern shader-based viewports and in those the consumer card pulls ahead as you'd expect given its higher power limit.
- imtringued 6y agoAren't gamers benefitting from better GPUs? Sure right now the supply is not enough for everyone but at some point the high upfront investments will make it harder and harder to manufacture high end GPUs. Who is going to pay for 7nm,5nm and 3nm GPUs? PC gaming is already quite the niche. NVidia makes more money off of data center cards.
- varispeed 6y agoPeople also realise you don't need a GPU to play the game of your own life, so people chase real life points rather than flipping bits with their imagination.
- hakfoo 6y agoI wonder how much cross-pollination there is between the discrete GPU space and AMD's iGPUs. They're probably selling a dozen Playstation or Xbox APUs for every one 6700XT dGPU. But by building a better dGPU today, they have the technology to make a better APU when it comes to bid out the PS6 and Xbox Series Q, or for the next generation Ryzen "G" APUs.
- aliz64 6y ago"They're probably selling a dozen Playstation or Xbox APUs for every one 6700XT dGPU" This statement does not make sense today because it doesn't really matter what the demand is. They sell every single one that they produce...you can't buy either the PS5/Xbox nor 6000 cards right now because the supply is wayyyyy lower than the demand. Also I am sure they share ideas and optimizations but I think overall it is a fairly different architecture. The APUs on the consoles as well as the ones they sell in laptops (or for OEM desktops) are chiplet based, similar to Ryzen. So they probably have smaller dies for GPU, CPU, and IO connected via something like Ryzen's Infinity Fabric (in contrast Intel and Apple put their GPU and CPU on the same die). Their dGPUs currently do not have this architecture although I have heard they want to move to this in the future since it has worked extremely well for ryzen.
- aliz64 6y agoNvidia makes majority of their money from consumer GPU sales. Yes, their compute datacenter cards have been their marketing focus (they call themselves an AI company now) but it is still about 60/40 revenue split in favor of consumer GPU sales. So your statement "NVidia makes more money off of data center cards." is false. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/how-nvidia-makes-money-4799532 https://www.investopedia.com/how-nvidia-makes-money-4799532 https://s22.q4cdn.com/364334381/files/doc_downloads/2021/03/NVDA-F4Q21-Investor-Presentation-FINAL-Mar-2.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/364334381/files/doc_downloads/2021/03/... It is true that in some quarters, their datcenter revenue is more than 50% but that is because many consumers buy around christmas in Q4, and overall consumer GPUs still make up 60% of revenue. It is not just PC gaming, it is also all the developers of these games, a lot of artists, architects, mechanical engineers who do CAD models etc. etc. They primarily buy the GeForce or Quadro graphics cards. Oh and of course, miners buy these cards too but even when mining declined consumer sales were still >50% of their revenue. Datacenter sales are usually custom solutions, but they have also been focusing on their DGX boxes. I work at a competitor of Nvidia in the datacenter space, so I know this quite well. They do have 100% of the datacenter market right now (this will change - but that is an opinion) but that does not mean majority of their revenue comes from the datacenter. Now as far as growth is concerned, that comes primarily from the datacenter. Thats why I guess their marketing focus on being an AI company. But their product is not an AI chip. It is a large vector unit designed for rendering frames and pushing pixels, no matter how much they try to repurpose it (which they have done quite well evidently).
- haunter 6y agoIf only there was a way to don't sell to miners, botters, scalpers... just to regular people who want to play videogames
- BearOso 6y agoGiven how well Nvidia’s attempt worked (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/nvidia-accidentally-releases-driver-to-un-nerf-cryptocurrency-mining https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/nvidia-accidenta...), I’m glad they didn’t try. It’s an exercise in futility.
- g42gregory 6y agoAMD’s reputation keeps growing for me. Recently, they became TSMC’s second largest customer, after Apple. Hopefully, they will be able to resolve supply problems faster than their competitors.
- seaourfreed 6y agoWho is trying to block cryptocurrency mining on video cards and CPUs? Can anyone explain that? I don't buy the "because then gamers can't buy video cards" montra.
- CynicusRex 6y agoToo bad, I would've converted to AMD if they openly defied crypto pyramid schemes.