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I definitely support making GPUs less attractive to miners. I'd buy a card that could be remotely disabled when usage patterns matched crypto mining if it meant

I definitely support making GPUs less attractive to miners. I'd buy a card that could be remotely disabled when usage patterns matched crypto mining if it meant I could spend MSRP on a modern card.

ehnto 5y ago
Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Maybe make mining only cards more performant and affordable than consumer graphics cards, so that consumer cards will drop in price from less demand? I find it hard to believe that a use case specific device wouldn't be able to dethrone graphics cards as the better choice for miners at the right price, and it should be cheaper right? No need for all that extra graphics related componentry like visual ports etc. I know stuff like that is already on the market, but it's usually more expensive as they are from more niche manufacturing. NVidia has the scale to make a similar device more affordable I imagine.
- randomsilence 5y ago
  You would have to saturate the market with specific mining devices. Like with bitcoin ASIC miners, the crypto mining demands have to increase to the point where using gaming graphic cards becomes unprofitable. Otherwise miners will buy the specific mining devices and the gaming devices. The problem is that Etherum was designed to resist ASIC approaches. Instead of locking cards down, Nvidia could manage the supply. They could sell their cards in cooperation with Steam: Only people with an active steam account are eligible to a new card. If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card.
  - eru 5y ago
    > If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card. And then you have people who lose their cards, or it gets damaged, or who don't want Steam, etc. It's a big can of worms.
    - randomsilence 5y ago
      Not wanting Steam is the biggest issue. They could include further shops and even individual games. There also needs to be an option for people who want to do scientific computing. Having vouchers from scientific institutions would exclude everybody who is independent. The approach has to be refined a bit, but the general principle is that you can link cards to individuals. To balance the downsides, Nvidia doesn't have to go all in on 'Steam sales', like Sony, who sells some of their PS5 to registered gamers but not all of them. On the other hand, I don't see the problem with damaged or lost cards. Damaged cards can be treated like guarantees: send in your damaged card and buy a new one. Lost cards on their own are a problem but how do you lose your card? You have to lose your entire gaming rig which most likely means that it is stolen. So send in a copy of your police report. That way, miners will be punished for wrong legal proceedings if they make a business out of 'losing cards'.
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    > They could sell their cards in cooperation with Steam: Only people with an active steam account are eligible to a new card. If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card. I have a baby. I do anything on Steam once a month at best. Crypto miners could pretty trivially make their use cases look like they spend more time gaming than a good 30% of Steam's active user base. This is a non-starter.
    - loa_in_ 5y ago
      There are more mining rigs than people behind them, so limiting the number to number of people would be some improvement for sure
- dspillett 5y ago
  > Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Highly unlikely. There might be reasonably reliable heuristics to identify gaming operations, but any signal for mining is likely to trigger for other long-process number-crunching too. The idea puts me in mind of the other side: the police once raided a home because surveillance via helicopter identified, from the heat pattern, the property as like to have a loft-based cannabis farm. Turned out that the loft was full of equipment running coin miners. Simple checks get significant false positives.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    Oh I meant specifically avoiding those kinds of arbitrary locks and checks, by delineate I meant make two separate product lines to cater for the two different markets. My hope would be that miners would buy the one better for mining, taking some pressure off the graphics cards for graphics market. Imagine a "3080 Mining" card that has no monitor outputs, no huge memory reserves, no extra-curricular processing units. It should be much cheaper. But perhaps miners would just buy both mining and non-mining cards, since it's not a zero sum purchase, every card added to the stack is worthwhile.
  - paulmd 5y ago
    Mining does have strong indicators though: mining memory access is nothing like memory access for a game or application. Normal games and applications won't just max the whole memory bus at 100% for hours and hours. Even in a high-load situation it will still bounce around 90-100% or whatever. Mining absolutely slams the memory bus 100%, because current implementations are Proof Of Bandwidth so that's the stat you need to maximize. Normal games or applications will go out of their way to align threads in a warp to access contiguous memory blocks ("coalesced memory access"), because that can be efficiently handled as a single request and broadcast to every thread. Mining can't do that because every thread is working in a totally different place in memory determined by the DAG. So normal applications will have lots of coalescing happening, mining will have zero. Normal games or applications will have cache hits, because they're re-using at least some data frequently. Mining will have an (effectively) 0% cache hit rate because the DAG is sending threads to random places in memory and memory is much larger than cache. These are simple things that can be metered with O(1) performance counters on the hardware. If the card sees a load like that, run in cripple mode, nuke the memory bus to 10% performance. Then you can also add the capability for a whitelist - the driver can attest that a certain binary has been signed by windows from the appropriate vendor, and TPM can attest that the driver and hardware hasn't been tampered with (Remote Attestation). So no need to worry about legacy code or DIY cuda code unless it happens to look like a mining application, and then you can whitelist any edge-cases. TPM is going to be mandatory for OEM Windows 11 systems - home builders technically don't need it, but then if they happen to run some code that performs 100% random unaligned memory access you'd have to get it signed. But most code doesn't behave anything like that, so that is a real edge-case unless you are trying to write a miner. You may be morally opposed to the above, but it's not impossible at a technical level, mining code actually looks nothing like normal code at a perfcounter level.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago
  Just wait. GPU mined currencies is pretty much exclusive to Ethereum which has dedicated plans to migrate away from PoW. Monero is set on PoW but uses a psuedo random mining challenge to thwart dedicated hardware and target all purpose CPUs - its targeting, not sure if its what you want.
eru 5y ago
Eh, you can fix that problem much simpler: nvidia can raise MSRP.
zelon88 5y ago
You would allow hardware DRM in your box just to allow Nvidia to "revoke" ownership of your card when you use it "incorrectly". Yeah I'll pass.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  I can see why it's attractive when the alternative is no card at all.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    The alternative is not "no card" it's "don't buy a top of the line card" Every expensive product with potential commercial use has this situation. Anything you can easily make money with has a price that reflects it. People who want stuff for limited use cannot justify those kinds of prices so they have to buy older stuff, lesser stuff or stuff that needs effort/time dumped in in order to work.
    - tsss 5y ago
      The alternative _is_ no card. Even 5 year old cards are twice the MSRP if you can get them.
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    Short term thinking can often appear to be attractive in the short term. It's the long term implications that get you, and by then it's too late.
    - danaris 5y ago
      Allowing/supporting crypto mining is short-term thinking. It's a bunch of wealthy people burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels solely for the purpose of making themselves wealthier. There is no benefit to society from allowing this.
      - icejjfish 5y ago
Hendrikto 5y ago
Crypto mining is just one of many factors driving availability down and prices up. If it disappeared tomorrow, you still would not be able to buy a GPU at MSRP.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

I definitely support making GPUs less attractive to miners. I'd buy a card that could be remotely disabled when usage patterns matched crypto mining if it meant I could spend MSRP on a modern card.

ehnto 5y ago

Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Maybe make mining only cards more performant and affordable than consumer graphics cards, so that consumer cards will drop in price from less demand? I find it hard to believe that a use case specific device wouldn't be able to dethrone graphics cards as the better choice for miners at the right price, and it should be cheaper right? No need for all that extra graphics related componentry like visual ports etc. I know stuff like that is already on the market, but it's usually more expensive as they are from more niche manufacturing. NVidia has the scale to make a similar device more affordable I imagine.

randomsilence 5y ago
You would have to saturate the market with specific mining devices. Like with bitcoin ASIC miners, the crypto mining demands have to increase to the point where using gaming graphic cards becomes unprofitable. Otherwise miners will buy the specific mining devices and the gaming devices. The problem is that Etherum was designed to resist ASIC approaches. Instead of locking cards down, Nvidia could manage the supply. They could sell their cards in cooperation with Steam: Only people with an active steam account are eligible to a new card. If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card.
- eru 5y ago
  > If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card. And then you have people who lose their cards, or it gets damaged, or who don't want Steam, etc. It's a big can of worms.
  - randomsilence 5y ago
    Not wanting Steam is the biggest issue. They could include further shops and even individual games. There also needs to be an option for people who want to do scientific computing. Having vouchers from scientific institutions would exclude everybody who is independent. The approach has to be refined a bit, but the general principle is that you can link cards to individuals. To balance the downsides, Nvidia doesn't have to go all in on 'Steam sales', like Sony, who sells some of their PS5 to registered gamers but not all of them. On the other hand, I don't see the problem with damaged or lost cards. Damaged cards can be treated like guarantees: send in your damaged card and buy a new one. Lost cards on their own are a problem but how do you lose your card? You have to lose your entire gaming rig which most likely means that it is stolen. So send in a copy of your police report. That way, miners will be punished for wrong legal proceedings if they make a business out of 'losing cards'.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  > They could sell their cards in cooperation with Steam: Only people with an active steam account are eligible to a new card. If their performance stats don't improve after the purchase, which means they have resold their hardware, they won't be allowed to buy another card. I have a baby. I do anything on Steam once a month at best. Crypto miners could pretty trivially make their use cases look like they spend more time gaming than a good 30% of Steam's active user base. This is a non-starter.
  - loa_in_ 5y ago
    There are more mining rigs than people behind them, so limiting the number to number of people would be some improvement for sure
dspillett 5y ago
> Is there some practical way to delineate the two product usages that isn't arbitrary I wonder? Highly unlikely. There might be reasonably reliable heuristics to identify gaming operations, but any signal for mining is likely to trigger for other long-process number-crunching too. The idea puts me in mind of the other side: the police once raided a home because surveillance via helicopter identified, from the heat pattern, the property as like to have a loft-based cannabis farm. Turned out that the loft was full of equipment running coin miners. Simple checks get significant false positives.
- ehnto 5y ago
  Oh I meant specifically avoiding those kinds of arbitrary locks and checks, by delineate I meant make two separate product lines to cater for the two different markets. My hope would be that miners would buy the one better for mining, taking some pressure off the graphics cards for graphics market. Imagine a "3080 Mining" card that has no monitor outputs, no huge memory reserves, no extra-curricular processing units. It should be much cheaper. But perhaps miners would just buy both mining and non-mining cards, since it's not a zero sum purchase, every card added to the stack is worthwhile.
- paulmd 5y ago
  Mining does have strong indicators though: mining memory access is nothing like memory access for a game or application. Normal games and applications won't just max the whole memory bus at 100% for hours and hours. Even in a high-load situation it will still bounce around 90-100% or whatever. Mining absolutely slams the memory bus 100%, because current implementations are Proof Of Bandwidth so that's the stat you need to maximize. Normal games or applications will go out of their way to align threads in a warp to access contiguous memory blocks ("coalesced memory access"), because that can be efficiently handled as a single request and broadcast to every thread. Mining can't do that because every thread is working in a totally different place in memory determined by the DAG. So normal applications will have lots of coalescing happening, mining will have zero. Normal games or applications will have cache hits, because they're re-using at least some data frequently. Mining will have an (effectively) 0% cache hit rate because the DAG is sending threads to random places in memory and memory is much larger than cache. These are simple things that can be metered with O(1) performance counters on the hardware. If the card sees a load like that, run in cripple mode, nuke the memory bus to 10% performance. Then you can also add the capability for a whitelist - the driver can attest that a certain binary has been signed by windows from the appropriate vendor, and TPM can attest that the driver and hardware hasn't been tampered with (Remote Attestation). So no need to worry about legacy code or DIY cuda code unless it happens to look like a mining application, and then you can whitelist any edge-cases. TPM is going to be mandatory for OEM Windows 11 systems - home builders technically don't need it, but then if they happen to run some code that performs 100% random unaligned memory access you'd have to get it signed. But most code doesn't behave anything like that, so that is a real edge-case unless you are trying to write a miner. You may be morally opposed to the above, but it's not impossible at a technical level, mining code actually looks nothing like normal code at a perfcounter level.
mattwilsonn888 5y ago
Just wait. GPU mined currencies is pretty much exclusive to Ethereum which has dedicated plans to migrate away from PoW. Monero is set on PoW but uses a psuedo random mining challenge to thwart dedicated hardware and target all purpose CPUs - its targeting, not sure if its what you want.

eru 5y ago

Eh, you can fix that problem much simpler: nvidia can raise MSRP.

zelon88 5y ago

You would allow hardware DRM in your box just to allow Nvidia to "revoke" ownership of your card when you use it "incorrectly". Yeah I'll pass.

Mindwipe 5y ago
I can see why it's attractive when the alternative is no card at all.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  The alternative is not "no card" it's "don't buy a top of the line card" Every expensive product with potential commercial use has this situation. Anything you can easily make money with has a price that reflects it. People who want stuff for limited use cannot justify those kinds of prices so they have to buy older stuff, lesser stuff or stuff that needs effort/time dumped in in order to work.
  - tsss 5y ago
    The alternative _is_ no card. Even 5 year old cards are twice the MSRP if you can get them.
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  Short term thinking can often appear to be attractive in the short term. It's the long term implications that get you, and by then it's too late.
  - danaris 5y ago
    Allowing/supporting crypto mining is short-term thinking. It's a bunch of wealthy people burning absurd amounts of fossil fuels solely for the purpose of making themselves wealthier. There is no benefit to society from allowing this.
    - icejjfish 5y ago

Hendrikto 5y ago

Crypto mining is just one of many factors driving availability down and prices up. If it disappeared tomorrow, you still would not be able to buy a GPU at MSRP.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]