10 ms·

To add on: none of it is malicious. its just the market stabalization problem a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price b) let's charge miners 3x, b

• slownews45 5y ago
  nvidia could take advantage of eth craze in short run and auction cards or chips. They would make a ton more in short run. But crypto folks would be only customers (in short run) and rest of market would risk migrating away from them. Crypto is very very frothy, so preserving some supply to bread and butter / ecosystem supporting sales makes a lot of sense to me.
• savant_penguin 5y ago
  Except that miners will simply workaround the downgrade software (as they did in the past) and regular consumers will be the only ones with crippled hardware
  • Deukhoofd 5y ago
    Reading the Nvidia announcement it's not a software upgrade, but a change in hardware. It only affects cards made after late May.
    • mrb 5y ago
      Nvidia did not say it will be a hardware limitation. In fact, they will almost certainly implement it in software. For example a "Lite Hash Rate" card will probably have a bit permanently set to 1 in the firmware/eeprom. The driver will read the bit, and arbitrarily enforce the restriction on such LHR card. This solves potential legal issues of retroactively crippling cards already out in the market, since only new cards sold from now on as "LHR models" will have the bit set to 1. But miners will find another software hack (just like they did for the RTX 3060 earlier) to bypass the restriction.
      • rincebrain 5y ago
        IIRC wasn't that software hack based on NVIDIA accidentally releasing a driver version that supported the 3060 but didn't enforce the LHR?
    • munk-a 5y ago
      I still think it's pretty likely we'll see a work around, but if that work around is a custom made firmware patch (like it was for the driver update they deployed IIRC) then that will probably mean the chips you purchased have a less rosy long term cost as future driver updates won't be applicable to your altered firmware. If it requires any physical tinkering with the chip then it definitely increases the effective cost by forcing a labour/card cost and opening up the possibility of expected chip defect as you break some proportion of the hardware you purchase in the process of fixing it. That all said - yea some people are totally going to hack that or my name isn't 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2.
      • hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        100% this in the short term, but in the long term workarounds will become harder to find. Have a look at iOS jailbreak history. I just hope they don’t kill functionality which matters for other meaningful purposes, like deep learning.
        • zeckalpha 5y ago
          There’s not money to be earned by jailbreaking iOS that increases in value the harder it is to jailbreak.
          • hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
            Yes, there is currently a ~$1m public bounty, probably more if you know where to look privately. You’d have to check your ethics at the door in both cases, but they do exist.
    • gsich 5y ago
      They said that previously. Then they released an unlocked BIOS by "accident".
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    Nvidia is implementing a hardware fuse system (a-la the Nintendo Switch) to prevent firmware manipulation. I can't speak to how secure these new cards will be, but the Tegra was an absolute pain in the ass to work with. It took a year before people even figured out how the firmware was loaded, much less how to interoperate between custom and official ones without blowing a fuse. To this day, approaching half a decade since the Switch's launch, you cannot coldboot the Switch into custom firmware. Considering Nvidia's history with hardware DRM, I think there's reason to be scared. Plus, they've undoubtedly paid attention to the community as the Switch was exploited, and probably intend to further secure the firmware interface with what they've learned.
    • longhairedhippy 5y ago
      I think the big difference here is there is no money behind hacking the Switch, it's an interesting problem to a small(ish) subset of people. There's tons of folks that would make actual hard cash off those hacks which will make them much more invested in finding out how to work around the solution.
      • humaniania 5y ago
        No money in video game piracy? What? https://jolt.richmond.edu/2019/02/09/the-unwinnable-war-on-video-game-piracy/ https://jolt.richmond.edu/2019/02/09/the-unwinnable-war-on-v...
        • munk-a 5y ago
          Eeeeeh, I give a lot less credence to that then I did when I was in college - back then it seemed like everyone was pirating everything (because, facts) but now a days a major consumer for video games is the millennials that have passed the cash vs. free time tipping point of piracy being attractive. Also, reasonably priced services now exist - I used pandora when I was in college and enjoyed it even with how hamstrung and limited it was - now I use spotify and like... why even bother pirating music now? Sure occasionally pirating a big title from Ubisoft out of spite alone is pretty attractive but I mostly just nab things off Steam and leave it at that. Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying. Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire. Most of this anti-piracy stuff is just lowering the value to the end consumer anyways.
• knz_ 5y ago
  > a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price Consumer GPUs had far from a 'stable price' before the mining boom. GPUs have more than tripled in MSRP once you factor in that NVIDIA has moved lower-tier chips that previously only featured in their lowest end x50 and x60 tier GPUs up the stack and started selling them for $400+ MSRP. Look at the GTX960, which launched at $150 in 2014, against the 3060 which launched at an MSRP of $330. It's even worse at the high end. Flagship GPUs like the 980ti and 1080ti launched at MSRPs of $650 and $700 respectively, now the high end GPUs are $1200 (2080ti) and $1500 (3090). > none of it is malicious. It absolutely is malicious. NVIDIA is trying to stop a strong second hand market from being formed so that they can continue to charge ridiculous prices for GPUs that should be 1/2 to 1/3 their current price if the market was healthy.
  • munk-a 5y ago
    I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then miners would be buying less of them. Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty quickly. I think Nvidia has some problems and their chips should be cheaper - but if that were the case then this solution (splitting the markets into regular consumers and miners) would be even more necessary. I also disagree with it being malicious, I think it's a perfectly reasonable decision to attribute to some pretty sane decisions around market preservation. We here know about miners eating up the GPU supply, but for the average consumer Nvidia is just hording their chips or they're idiots that didn't produce enough - no matter what the imagined reason they're the people between the average consumer and shiny ray tracing in minecraft.
    • knz_ 5y ago
      > I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then miners would be buying less of them. It would increase supply by forcing fabs to scale (would take years anyway, but should happen sooner rather than later). > Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty quickly. And that isn't going to change even with these limited GPUs. Mining with ethash is still profitable even with the halved hashrate, and other algorithms like kawpow and cn-gpu are not limited at all. The only thing that's going to get rid of PoW mining is the entire shitcoin market tanking. As long as the bubble continues there's going to be idiots spending money on scalped GPUs.
• mrb 5y ago
  c) is nonsense. There are no downsides to a temporary boost in Nvidia's profits, even if it means profits eventually falling back to normal levels when ETH drops in value. Also, LHR (gaming) GPUs and CMP (mining) GPUs share the exact same supply chain and components. When/if crypto demand suddenly drops, Nvidia will still have to deal with the oversupply of components. Having segmented the market between LHR and CMP GPUs does not in any way make it easier for Nvidia to forecast overall production capacity.
  • lazide 5y ago
    It is a real risk when gamers (the every day bread and butter) or ML model folks (emerging bread and butter) markets will stop using them because they can’t get reliable supply. Both of those groups do quite a lot of driver validation, workload tuning, and other platform specific stuff. If another competitor gets those markets, that will hurt for a long time.
  • jvol83 5y ago
    According to Tom's hardware analysis the CMP gpus are leftover Turing architecture that would otherwise have gone to the now less desirable GTX 1660 Ti, or 2080 Ti. And when they are finally using the new Ampere silicon, it's likely those chips that did not pass QA for being made into a RTX 3080. So they are getting rid of overstock/dead stock already.
• orangecat 5y ago
  Scalpers hurt literally everyone. They help people who are willing to pay the higher prices, and they provide a market signal encouraging producers to increase output.
  • eropple 5y ago
    There is no additional output.
  • beckingz 5y ago
    The issue is that production is inelastic compared to demand, so scalping provides no additional value and creates higher prices by making demand seem even higher.
    • waterhouse 5y ago
      It also creates an incentive for those unwilling to pay high prices to find ways to do without, or to delay their purchase until production has caught up.
• acomjean 5y ago
  I notice Microcenter has limited gpu sales to one per customer per month. Its weird when brick and mortar are like limiting sales, but on the other hand, they want to keep pc builders happy. https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/7334/graphic-card-limit-1-per-housold-explain https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/7334/graphic-ca...
  • paulmd 5y ago
    partners and distributors are forcing retailers and etailers to take PSUs and motherboards if they want to get GPUs, frequently very shitty mobos+PSUs that have been stuck in inventory for a long time and they've been having trouble moving. Like, large quantities, 50 A320 motherboards for one GPU type quantities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxGtMHXWpMw&t=300s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxGtMHXWpMw&t=300s This is one of the reasons that Newegg is doing the Shuffle with those terrible deals - they are passing some of the junk they've been forced to buy along. So now you get a 3 year old watercooling-only mobo and a grenade-tier PSU with your GPU. This applies to brick and mortar stores too, it's not just about keeping PC builders happy, but if they let one guy walk in and buy every GPU they've got, then they don't get the person coming in to build a PC and buying a motherboard, memory, etc, and they need to move those products because distributors are making them buy them to get GPUs. The behavior of the AIB partners and distributors is really, really predatory here, they are definitely taking advantage of being the ones in control of a highly desirable commodity.
• ajmurmann 5y ago
  Aren't scalpers only there because the product is clearly underpriced? Why not increase prices till the scalpers are gone or simply auction the GPUs off? That's clearly what the market is pointing at.
  • slownews45 5y ago
    Absolutely - if they wanted they could make a killing (short term) and auction to Eth farms. That said, they are trying to preserve market / mind share in the longer term with existing customers (gamers, AI/ML) and partners (OEMs etc). And those folks aren't ready to pay the crypto price point. So they are giving up short term money (from auctions etc) for ideally long term market share.
  • shados 5y ago
    Normally I'd agree (eg: I think limited concert tickets should simply be auctioned off). This is a little trickier. You have a consumer grade product aimed at a mass market segment (gamers) being used as a glorified financial market device (crypto). You could just sell it at whatever price people are willing to pay for (crypto) and make a big buck. You'd likely wreck the gaming industry in the process. If you feel the crypto market is there to stay forever and that it's your best bet as a manufacturer going forward, it could possibly be a good move. If you think its a temporary fad though, that the gaming market has a larger long term return (if it's allowed to thrive), and that this setback, even if temporary, is harmful to your long term plan, then it's an issue. If you think that the gaming industry beyond the GPU market (eg: streaming grids) have value, and you want to foster those because it will make more money in the long run, then the current situation isn't looking so good. What it looks like is a large public company thinking more than quarter to quarter for once. It's actually kind of confusing, but that's what it looks like to my untrained eyes.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • jhauris 5y ago
    Short term they could make a lot of money that way, but then they may lose gamers who will likely still want gpus after miners no longer need them. It's not a one off transaction.
• kbenson 5y ago
  > Scalpers hurt literally everyone. Not entirely true, and also not accepting that one person's "scalper" is another person's "bought this but decided I would rather have the money it seems to be worth now that I see how much this is". Secondary markets provide liquidity, allow for original sellers to trade money for time, provide reputational protection based on societal perceptions (this one is a bit weird, and maybe the less defensible of the reasons. Selling your own inventory on a secondary market to avoid negative press for high prices is thwarting normal market information principles, IMO), etc.
  • __blockcipher__ 5y ago
    Yeah I always find it interesting that statements like that ("scalpers hurt literally everyone") can just be made and treated as gospel by most people. Not only is the statement not self-evident, but to your point, just a small amount of thought on the issue makes it obvious what the value is. People love to get mad at a scapegoat rather than a root cause. So you blame the scalper rather than realizing that the concert you bought the ticket for set their prices way too low - perhaps because selling at the "true" price (somewhere between the sticker value and the scalped value) - would generate negative goodwill, or it would give the perception that an event (say Coachella as the classic example) is only "for rich people". The irony is of course that selling at an artificially low price doesn't suddenly make it not for rich people, it just adds a small random chance that you'll be able to convert your own time sitting there refreshing the website across many browsers into a cheaper-than-it-should-be ticket. But functionally the vast majority of people end up buying from scalpers or at least at a slightly above sticker price. There's a related discussion about so-called "price gouging". IMO it's the classic scalper argument but just in a different form. Price gouging laws are not just immoral but are actively ineffective at their stated purpose; they just lead to the hypothetical price-gouge transaction never occurring. If you drive across state lines to bring HAM radios or water filters or what-have-you during hurricane katrina, and try to sell at above market rate, you'll be tossed in jail and your goods will be seized by the police, rather than making it out to the people who actually need them and are willing to pay 2x or 3x the usual price. TL;DR: We've all got these twisted beliefs about how pricing works or the law of supply and demand, an illusion supported by the fact that our respective societies are so technologically/economically advanced that we can have massive supermarkets where you buy commoditized items that you can get at reasonably similar prices anywhere. Whereas if you go back in history to a pre-industrial time, a form of pseudo-bartering was the default and there was not this idea of a commodity, but rather every transaction, every buyer:seller relationship etc was a unique and non-commoditized interaction and thus it wouldn't seem weird to have different prices for different people or different prices at different points in time, etc.
• asddubs 5y ago
  c.2) let's produce huge amount of e-waste once coins drop again