5 ms·

That's just nuts. Sell me at what price you will but after I buy it, you should not control a single bit on my hardware. It's like we are going backward in pro

That's just nuts. Sell me at what price you will but after I buy it, you should not control a single bit on my hardware. It's like we are going backward in progress.

coldacid 5y ago
We are.
jrootabega 5y ago
Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? Or to try to find a way to keep the pipeline for designing, building, and coding for gaming GPUs flowing?
- DennisP 5y ago
  They sell another GPU specifically for mining, at twice the price. https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3090 https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3...
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I think on the whole, Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining. It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate tomorrow. And in the mean time pisses their core users off (through volume availability issues) and makes an already difficult production -> retail supply chain even more bursty. So how do you deal with that? Well, a not-terrible way is artificially segmenting your market. Crypto folks, over here in this pool with huge waves. Everyone else, back to business as usual.
  - acchow 5y ago
    Exactly. If Nvidia removed the crypto crippling, almost all of their GPUs would be bought up for crypto mining leaving their gaming market empty. A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Meanwhile, Nvidia's production (and capital expenditure with it) could ramp up dramatically to meet crypto demand, until it too collapses. Then they are left with nothing but debt.
    - Eelongate 5y ago
      > A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too. I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
      - fomine3 5y ago
        Or they just buy PS5 or Xbox (both have AMD chip) and never go to PC gaming.
        marderfarker2 5y ago
        Jokes on you, consoles have also been out stock since forever.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining because it creates too many second-hand cards, that's it. They just want to kill the second-hand market boom that happened as crypto mining has high hardware turnover, and gaming doesn't. So gamers just pick up second-hand previous generation high end cards instead of buying current gen mid-range cards. It's not a coincidence the software lockout landed right as Nvidia released an unlocked mining card without a display output ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ ). And since it doesn't have a display output, all those used mining cards become ewaste instead of something that cuts into nvidia's revenue.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? No, they are trying to piss off the miners so that their actual customers (gamers) have a chance of getting GPUs again. It's like the first Bitcoin craze many years ago when the first CUDA miners came out - you could not find any GPU anywhere because people bought them for mining. Gamers were pissed as the miners outbid them everywhere. Once ASICs came out, the complete GPU market crashed - suddenly there was a massive supply of second-hand GPUs from miners... the gamers snatched these up, and NVIDIA suddenly had the problem that their new GPU sales crashed. The only difference is that this time it isn't Bitcoin anymore but a whole bunch of random shitcoins.
htrp 5y ago
We had the same thing in software and in media content.
mperham 5y ago
Who’s “we”? You are going backward. NVIDIA’s profits are going forward.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Justify your statement that the poster is «going backward». Clearly the poster means, "in terms of values".
paulmd 5y ago
This has been the norm for a long time - the AMD Hawaii GPU was sold as the 290X to gamers with FP64 artificially crippled to run much more slowly than normal, and then sold at a much higher price to other richer customers who use them to make money as the Radeon Pro series (in the case of Hawaii - it was the FirePro S9150 and S9100). Traditionally it has been FP64 performance, as well as things like looking at the OpenGL calls and artificially limiting performance when something looks like a CAD workload (see: the big increase when NVIDIA removed the limitations on Titan X professional workloads after Vega FE came out). Somehow nobody shed a tear for the poor enterprise customers until miners came along. But that's what it is, miners are enterprise customers, they use them to make a profit. Similarly, almost all R5 consumer processors are made by artificially disabling fully functional cores on R7 chiplets. AMD already had nearly 80% of the chips coming off the line with 8 functional cores at Zen2 launch, and numbers have only gotten better since there. Yeah, maybe a few fail clock bins or other things, but those bins are chosen very loosely such that they're not throwing away any significant amount of chips anyway. The overwhelming majority of R5s are perfectly good chips being gimped and sold as lower chips, because the availability and demand are exactly opposite of each other - they have the highest availability of 8-core chiplets and the highest demand for 4- and 6-core chiplets. How do you square the two? Not by lowering prices of your high-margin products - you keep those high to extract the maximum price from price-insensitive consumers, and you artificially gimp a bunch of them for the rest of the market to protect your profits in the higher segment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination The thing to remember is that home users are almost always the beneficiary of market segmentation, because we are the most price sensitive. The alternative to Core-vs-Xeon-E segmentation isn't that everyone gets Xeons at i5 pricing, it's that the i5 now costs almost as much as a Xeon. The R&D has to be paid back one way or another, or else R&D will be significantly reduced (most likely meaning much longer product generations and slower moves to new nodes, etc). Price discrimination means enterprise customers pay more than their share and home customers pay less than their share, so if market segmentation goes away and those equalize then home customers will have to bear more of their fair share of the product cost. Again, who wants to race to pay more for their gaming graphics card so that Boeing and cryptominers can pay less? It would be great if everything were free, or priced at its true cost, but in the real world R&D needs to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the other thing is Enterprise customers actually love this, it's called Capacity on Demand and I'm sure the reason Intel is doing this is because their customers keep asking for it. Sun, Oracle, Fujitsu, IBM - all the big enteprise vendors will sell you a machine with a bunch of cpu and memory that you're not allowed to use or touch! But if your workload scales up, instead of having to shut down your mainframe to upgrade it, you can just pay money and turn the cores on! And sure, it would be nice if all software were just microservices that you could re-instantiate onto another machine, but some stuff (like databases) can't be trivially scaled and partitioning (read: stale data reads) can't be tolerated. The only surefire answer to CAP theorem is One Big Machine such that you never have to deal with splits in the first plac, and that's what some situations need, and they love this.

That's just nuts. Sell me at what price you will but after I buy it, you should not control a single bit on my hardware. It's like we are going backward in progress.

coldacid 5y ago

We are.

jrootabega 5y ago

Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? Or to try to find a way to keep the pipeline for designing, building, and coding for gaming GPUs flowing?

DennisP 5y ago
They sell another GPU specifically for mining, at twice the price. https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3090 https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3...
ethbr0 5y ago
I think on the whole, Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining. It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate tomorrow. And in the mean time pisses their core users off (through volume availability issues) and makes an already difficult production -> retail supply chain even more bursty. So how do you deal with that? Well, a not-terrible way is artificially segmenting your market. Crypto folks, over here in this pool with huge waves. Everyone else, back to business as usual.
- acchow 5y ago
  Exactly. If Nvidia removed the crypto crippling, almost all of their GPUs would be bought up for crypto mining leaving their gaming market empty. A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Meanwhile, Nvidia's production (and capital expenditure with it) could ramp up dramatically to meet crypto demand, until it too collapses. Then they are left with nothing but debt.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    > A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too. I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
    - fomine3 5y ago
      Or they just buy PS5 or Xbox (both have AMD chip) and never go to PC gaming.
      - marderfarker2 5y ago
        Jokes on you, consoles have also been out stock since forever.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining because it creates too many second-hand cards, that's it. They just want to kill the second-hand market boom that happened as crypto mining has high hardware turnover, and gaming doesn't. So gamers just pick up second-hand previous generation high end cards instead of buying current gen mid-range cards. It's not a coincidence the software lockout landed right as Nvidia released an unlocked mining card without a display output ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ ). And since it doesn't have a display output, all those used mining cards become ewaste instead of something that cuts into nvidia's revenue.
mschuster91 5y ago
> Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? No, they are trying to piss off the miners so that their actual customers (gamers) have a chance of getting GPUs again. It's like the first Bitcoin craze many years ago when the first CUDA miners came out - you could not find any GPU anywhere because people bought them for mining. Gamers were pissed as the miners outbid them everywhere. Once ASICs came out, the complete GPU market crashed - suddenly there was a massive supply of second-hand GPUs from miners... the gamers snatched these up, and NVIDIA suddenly had the problem that their new GPU sales crashed. The only difference is that this time it isn't Bitcoin anymore but a whole bunch of random shitcoins.

htrp 5y ago

We had the same thing in software and in media content.

mperham 5y ago

Who’s “we”? You are going backward. NVIDIA’s profits are going forward.

mdp2021 5y ago
Justify your statement that the poster is «going backward». Clearly the poster means, "in terms of values".

paulmd 5y ago

This has been the norm for a long time - the AMD Hawaii GPU was sold as the 290X to gamers with FP64 artificially crippled to run much more slowly than normal, and then sold at a much higher price to other richer customers who use them to make money as the Radeon Pro series (in the case of Hawaii - it was the FirePro S9150 and S9100). Traditionally it has been FP64 performance, as well as things like looking at the OpenGL calls and artificially limiting performance when something looks like a CAD workload (see: the big increase when NVIDIA removed the limitations on Titan X professional workloads after Vega FE came out). Somehow nobody shed a tear for the poor enterprise customers until miners came along. But that's what it is, miners are enterprise customers, they use them to make a profit. Similarly, almost all R5 consumer processors are made by artificially disabling fully functional cores on R7 chiplets. AMD already had nearly 80% of the chips coming off the line with 8 functional cores at Zen2 launch, and numbers have only gotten better since there. Yeah, maybe a few fail clock bins or other things, but those bins are chosen very loosely such that they're not throwing away any significant amount of chips anyway. The overwhelming majority of R5s are perfectly good chips being gimped and sold as lower chips, because the availability and demand are exactly opposite of each other - they have the highest availability of 8-core chiplets and the highest demand for 4- and 6-core chiplets. How do you square the two? Not by lowering prices of your high-margin products - you keep those high to extract the maximum price from price-insensitive consumers, and you artificially gimp a bunch of them for the rest of the market to protect your profits in the higher segment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination The thing to remember is that home users are almost always the beneficiary of market segmentation, because we are the most price sensitive. The alternative to Core-vs-Xeon-E segmentation isn't that everyone gets Xeons at i5 pricing, it's that the i5 now costs almost as much as a Xeon. The R&D has to be paid back one way or another, or else R&D will be significantly reduced (most likely meaning much longer product generations and slower moves to new nodes, etc). Price discrimination means enterprise customers pay more than their share and home customers pay less than their share, so if market segmentation goes away and those equalize then home customers will have to bear more of their fair share of the product cost. Again, who wants to race to pay more for their gaming graphics card so that Boeing and cryptominers can pay less? It would be great if everything were free, or priced at its true cost, but in the real world R&D needs to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the other thing is Enterprise customers actually love this, it's called Capacity on Demand and I'm sure the reason Intel is doing this is because their customers keep asking for it. Sun, Oracle, Fujitsu, IBM - all the big enteprise vendors will sell you a machine with a bunch of cpu and memory that you're not allowed to use or touch! But if your workload scales up, instead of having to shut down your mainframe to upgrade it, you can just pay money and turn the cores on! And sure, it would be nice if all software were just microservices that you could re-instantiate onto another machine, but some stuff (like databases) can't be trivially scaled and partitioning (read: stale data reads) can't be tolerated. The only surefire answer to CAP theorem is One Big Machine such that you never have to deal with splits in the first plac, and that's what some situations need, and they love this.