6 ms·

That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.

by beojan 5y ago

EdwardDiego 5y ago
Bingo, that's what this is.
breakfastduck 5y ago
In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  Except there is nothing "fair" about this. In all fairness these crypto-bros could buy the cards specifically made for mining, but they won't because they don't have any resale value. Only reason they are buying GPUs is that they can run it until something better comes to market and still sell it to some gamer who is actually going to use the hardware for its intended purpose. More power to Nvidia. If I could make the decision the hashrate of any cryptomining on gaming cards would be 0. Let the crypto-bros buy the crypto cards and leave the gaming cards for people who are actually going to enjoy them.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    I don't care what the use case is. I don't support artificial performance limitation on expensive hardware. It's as simple as that.
    - thn-gap 5y ago
      I do care when this use case is harmful. We shouldn't need to limit hardware for specific usages, but we already see that people won't stop themselves from wasting energy and accelerating world climate if this gives you more wealth and power. I'd also be up for limiting all military weapons from being so destructive across the globe for example. It's mind blowing how we managed to create so many harmful tools in such a small time span of our history. But I agree with you when the use case is actually useful for humanity.
      - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
        Likening Crypto Mining to military weapons is ridiculous. Not to mention you as those taking your position on crypto often to have painfully failed Chesterton's Fence.
        thn-gap 5y ago
        There's no likening, it was just one more example in the bag of hardware used for harmful activities, which is a very big scope. I'd love to learn that I'm wrong on the crypto one, give how well widespread is, but I haven't seen any fully convincing argument.
  - keymon-o 5y ago
    Woah there. I don’t like the crypto culture and mindset as the next guy, but there are plenty of other options to preventing use case you presented. If systems aren’t closed enough already… And as far as the gaming goes, I cannot see how playing games is more noble usage of gpu than crypto mining.
    - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      "I'm just gonna artificially raise price of this limited resource even though there already exists hardware specifically made for me, but after the next generation comes out I can re-sell this one to some sucker" If you don't see anything wrong with that then that's about it. I really hope US or China or someone is going to regulate cryptocurrencies to shit so cryto-bros can stop destroying the planet and normal people can again afford GPUs.
      - codedokode 5y ago
        So basically you are surprised that people want to buy a higher value and better product instead of lower value? Also, for "normal people" there are plenty of 1 and 2Gb videocards at reasonable prices, unusable for mining.
        nextlevelwizard 5y ago
        Not surprised (why would that surprise me?) just that this throttling is justifiable and I would go even further
      - keymon-o 5y ago
        I am probably not that informed on who does what artificially and intentionally, but I still don’t see a point in justifying gaming usage over crypto usage. As far as destroying the planet argument goes, gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes. Apart from the ability to check the GPU health, GPU providers could easily implement some hardware “calculation counter” or design specific solution so resell value could be more easily evaluated.
- paulmd 5y ago
  That's how the market works though. Your AMD 290X had artificial performance bottlenecks created (gimped FP64, driver performance limiter for enterprise software, etc) so that AMD could sell more Radeon WX cards. Your AMD APU has ECC artificially disabled so that AMD can sell more Ryzen Pro APUs. Your Epyc has its overclocking controls artificially disabled. etc etc. Those are accepted and normal practices to determine "what you can do with the hardware you paid for" in the industry. Miners are just mad that they got a free ride for a lot of years and are now being shifted to their own segment to try and control the infinite demand they tend to periodically create. But they are a money-making asset in a business, nobody cried a tear when AMD and NVIDIA forced Raytheon to pay a premium to buy Quadros to run their CAD software at the full performance levels the hardware is capable of. Also, generally speaking this arrangement is beneficial for consumers: if you outlawed artificial segmentation tomorrow, companies aren't going to hugely lower their prices and give up all that revenue from the enterprise market, they are going to raise prices in the consumer market. The alternative to gimped Celeron chips isn't that you get Xeon capability for Celeron prices, it's that you pay much closer to Xeon prices for your celeron. Which is like, several times as much. That R&D has to be paid for somewhere, and margins are not all that huge considering the total lifecycle (the chips are cheap once you make them, but the R&D for the first chip costs billions). You can't just give up 80% of your enterprise revenue and make a go of it. If we really did have Xeon for Celeron prices, the alternative would be much longer product cycles and other belt-tightening in the R&D department. The beige box market has a huge business component too and they won’t have any qualms about an extra $200 on every cpu if that’s what it costs. It’s just gonna suck personally for you as a consumer. Consumers are the “price sensitive” market that benefits from price discrimination, in this instance, and product segmentation is how you allow that. Take that away and those price-sensitive markets are the ones that will pay more, because business pricing is very inelastic and quantities are very large. They don’t care about you buying one celeron every 5 years as much as the business who buys 1000 office desktops every 3 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
matheusmoreira 5y ago
There should be no software limits in the first place.
Cicero22 5y ago
Wouldn't that just end up increasing the difficulty of mining in the long term since it would all be opensource? I feel like any advantage they get by patching the software would be short lived with many people following suit, but I could 100% be wrong about that.

That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.

by beojan 5y ago

That or they want to remove software limits on performance to mine cryptocurrency faster.

EdwardDiego 5y ago

Bingo, that's what this is.

breakfastduck 5y ago

In fairness, it's hardly an outrageous view to want to remove artificial performance bottlenecks on a piece of hardware you've spent a considerable amount of money on.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago
Except there is nothing "fair" about this. In all fairness these crypto-bros could buy the cards specifically made for mining, but they won't because they don't have any resale value. Only reason they are buying GPUs is that they can run it until something better comes to market and still sell it to some gamer who is actually going to use the hardware for its intended purpose. More power to Nvidia. If I could make the decision the hashrate of any cryptomining on gaming cards would be 0. Let the crypto-bros buy the crypto cards and leave the gaming cards for people who are actually going to enjoy them.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  I don't care what the use case is. I don't support artificial performance limitation on expensive hardware. It's as simple as that.
  - thn-gap 5y ago
    I do care when this use case is harmful. We shouldn't need to limit hardware for specific usages, but we already see that people won't stop themselves from wasting energy and accelerating world climate if this gives you more wealth and power. I'd also be up for limiting all military weapons from being so destructive across the globe for example. It's mind blowing how we managed to create so many harmful tools in such a small time span of our history. But I agree with you when the use case is actually useful for humanity.
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      Likening Crypto Mining to military weapons is ridiculous. Not to mention you as those taking your position on crypto often to have painfully failed Chesterton's Fence.
      - thn-gap 5y ago
        There's no likening, it was just one more example in the bag of hardware used for harmful activities, which is a very big scope. I'd love to learn that I'm wrong on the crypto one, give how well widespread is, but I haven't seen any fully convincing argument.
- keymon-o 5y ago
  Woah there. I don’t like the crypto culture and mindset as the next guy, but there are plenty of other options to preventing use case you presented. If systems aren’t closed enough already… And as far as the gaming goes, I cannot see how playing games is more noble usage of gpu than crypto mining.
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    "I'm just gonna artificially raise price of this limited resource even though there already exists hardware specifically made for me, but after the next generation comes out I can re-sell this one to some sucker" If you don't see anything wrong with that then that's about it. I really hope US or China or someone is going to regulate cryptocurrencies to shit so cryto-bros can stop destroying the planet and normal people can again afford GPUs.
    - codedokode 5y ago
      So basically you are surprised that people want to buy a higher value and better product instead of lower value? Also, for "normal people" there are plenty of 1 and 2Gb videocards at reasonable prices, unusable for mining.
      - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
        Not surprised (why would that surprise me?) just that this throttling is justifiable and I would go even further
    - keymon-o 5y ago
      I am probably not that informed on who does what artificially and intentionally, but I still don’t see a point in justifying gaming usage over crypto usage. As far as destroying the planet argument goes, gamers could equally be limited to using a specifically designed devices for optimal gaming and entertainment purposes. Apart from the ability to check the GPU health, GPU providers could easily implement some hardware “calculation counter” or design specific solution so resell value could be more easily evaluated.
paulmd 5y ago
That's how the market works though. Your AMD 290X had artificial performance bottlenecks created (gimped FP64, driver performance limiter for enterprise software, etc) so that AMD could sell more Radeon WX cards. Your AMD APU has ECC artificially disabled so that AMD can sell more Ryzen Pro APUs. Your Epyc has its overclocking controls artificially disabled. etc etc. Those are accepted and normal practices to determine "what you can do with the hardware you paid for" in the industry. Miners are just mad that they got a free ride for a lot of years and are now being shifted to their own segment to try and control the infinite demand they tend to periodically create. But they are a money-making asset in a business, nobody cried a tear when AMD and NVIDIA forced Raytheon to pay a premium to buy Quadros to run their CAD software at the full performance levels the hardware is capable of. Also, generally speaking this arrangement is beneficial for consumers: if you outlawed artificial segmentation tomorrow, companies aren't going to hugely lower their prices and give up all that revenue from the enterprise market, they are going to raise prices in the consumer market. The alternative to gimped Celeron chips isn't that you get Xeon capability for Celeron prices, it's that you pay much closer to Xeon prices for your celeron. Which is like, several times as much. That R&D has to be paid for somewhere, and margins are not all that huge considering the total lifecycle (the chips are cheap once you make them, but the R&D for the first chip costs billions). You can't just give up 80% of your enterprise revenue and make a go of it. If we really did have Xeon for Celeron prices, the alternative would be much longer product cycles and other belt-tightening in the R&D department. The beige box market has a huge business component too and they won’t have any qualms about an extra $200 on every cpu if that’s what it costs. It’s just gonna suck personally for you as a consumer. Consumers are the “price sensitive” market that benefits from price discrimination, in this instance, and product segmentation is how you allow that. Take that away and those price-sensitive markets are the ones that will pay more, because business pricing is very inelastic and quantities are very large. They don’t care about you buying one celeron every 5 years as much as the business who buys 1000 office desktops every 3 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

matheusmoreira 5y ago

There should be no software limits in the first place.

Cicero22 5y ago

Wouldn't that just end up increasing the difficulty of mining in the long term since it would all be opensource? I feel like any advantage they get by patching the software would be short lived with many people following suit, but I could 100% be wrong about that.