15 ms·
There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto. I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus that are now going to
by stuntkite 4y ago
There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto. I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand. There is A LOT that can be made of that and I intend to get mine. I think the crypto boom really covered up what we can really, really do with GPU compute and possibly stifled adoption and innovation but now we've got so many just sitting around. Which is super useful as we move more into a world after being able to get things manufactured and shipped world wide in what feels like an instant.
- quotemstr 4y ago> SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand The market knew that the PoS merge was coming. I'd have expected the market to therefore have already factored the PoS transition into GPU prices. Why do you think GPU prices are tanking now?
- plonk 4y agoThe market for GPUs isn't as efficient as the stock market. Miners might also have wanted to profit right until the end. The price doesn't come down until the used GPUs actually hit the stores.
- Grimburger 4y ago> There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto. There's a lot of stuff that isn't any better than crypto either, deepfakes, producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of the same scene. Much of this is still a garbage fire of greenhouse gases and e-waste, used GPU prices won't change that. Many ml advances are simply more compute and bigger models in the end.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoBy that logic you can include gaming in there as well. Thousands of people re-playing the same scenes over and over again, instead of just watching a let's play of the first person that bought the game. I guess the only reasonable uses for GPUs are cancer research etc.
- yaddaor 4y agoPlease provide a citation to a well researched study for that claim.
- WHATDOESIT 4y agoIf Google banned you it's still possible to use DuckDuckGo, or you could try out a VPN.
- Dma54rhs 4y agoPC gaming alone has bigger carbon footprint than crypto mining so objectively yes they are both anti environmental activities.
- wruza 4y agoPretty sure if I wasn’t gaming these few hours per week, my carbon footprint would be much higher. E.g. 2kWh is only 8 miles on an efficient EV and probably less than 4 miles on ICE. We have to measure avoidable costs in this case, not essential.
- switchers 4y agoRunning cards at full pelt 24/7 vs at most a few hours a day? Doubtful.
- Dma54rhs 4y agoThere have been see scientific prayers on power us usage snd PC gaming (only) and it comes similar to crypto usage. There are not many things that take tons of energy - heating, cooling, crypto, gaming etc.
- ben_w 4y agoLot of gamers, and the displays add a few more watts each to the total. Fermi estimate: 10 million latest Xboxes, used for 1 hour per day. Power estimates seem to vary from 120 W to 315 W, let's say 200 W including display. That's 2 GWh/day. Probably similar for Playstation, or at least close enough for a Fermi estimate. I'm going to guess similar for PC gaming also. Smartphones are what, about 1 W? But a few billion of them? 1 hour per day makes that another GWh/day? So probably about 7 GWh/day for Xbox + Playstation + PC + mobile, 2.5 TWh/year. Bitcoin is estimated to use 131 TWh/year according to Wikipedia. Yeah, you're right, it's not even close.
- visarga 4y ago> producing hundreds of thousands stable diffusion pics of the same scene Why are you twisting reality? People don't generate hundreds of thousands of stable diffusion pics of the same scene. Instead they generate dozens to hundreds of images carefully tweaking the prompt and the starter image.
- sacrosancty 4y agoIf you say something's bad, you imply something else is good. So can you identify some contrasting technologies which didn't start out as a "garbage fire of greenhouse gasses and e-waste" or the appropriate equivalent? Are you wanting a world contains only those born perfect technologies?
- behnamoh 4y agoI don't know why you're being downvoted. At least the last part is totally true; advance in ML is unfortunately just bigger models, more data, and more compute. But doing ML won't necessarily boost GPU sales because most deep learning work is shifted to the cloud.
- fennecfoxen 4y agoYou do understand that the computers they use for cloud-based deep learning have GPUs in them, right?
- mrshadowgoose 4y agoYou're not going to get very far trying to impose your subjective perspective of usefulness on other people's use of energy. Energy is one of the foundational pillars of modern society, and other people are going to use it for all sorts of things, including activities that you don't like (but that are liked by others). I'd suggest focusing your irritation on advocating for universally clean generation of energy. Regardless of how much energy each of us uses, and regardless of what we use it for (even if it's something that you consider to be "useless"), most of us seem to agree that we don't want to pollute our air and ruin our planet. However, the moment you start attacking things that make other people happy, you are risking losing support for that fundamental goal.
- mr_toad 4y ago> universally clean generation of energy There’s no such thing as completely green energy. Even wind turbines use materials that need mining, refining, transportation etc.
- mrshadowgoose 4y agoSure it is. Any polluting process can be unwound with the correct application of energy.
- CharlesW 4y ago> There is so much interesting stuff going on in GPU compute that isn't crypto. For sure, but there were many crypto operations with data centers that had hundreds or thousands of GPUs. For example, a report from JPR estimates that crypto miners bought 25% of all GPUs produced in 1H'2021.¹ ¹ https://www.jonpeddie.com/blog/crypto-minings-half-a-billion-dollar-impact-on-aib-sales https://www.jonpeddie.com/blog/crypto-minings-half-a-billion...
- latchkey 4y agoOr over 100k...
- UberFly 4y ago25% seems like a very low estimate. All sections of the supply chain were being looted. Barely anything made it to stores.
- CharlesW 4y agoIt seemed low to me too, but it was the most credible reference I could find. Surely it's an estimate, and I'd guess a conservative one.
- foota 4y agoEven a small increase in demand can result in a large price change if it pushes into a different part of the demand curve (e.g., if the "cheap" demand has been supplanted with customers willing to pay more then the market price can change drastically).
- TheDudeMan 4y agoData centers don't buy from stores.
- henearkr 4y agoA ton of not-data-center-people took mining as a hobby...
- shrimpx 4y agoAren’t they immediately going to start mining other PoW coins with those GPUs?
- dybber 4y agoMore/bigger miners ==> higher competition ==> miners will require higher transaction fee's to finance their operation? Or do I misunderstand it?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- giarc 4y agoI saw that argument on twitter when talking about the energy reduction for ETH mining. Someone commented that it won't change because they will just focus their GPUs on some other coin.
- apeace 4y agoTFA is pointing out that other GPU-based POW chains have become unprofitable. Partly because of the massive influx of GPUs increasing the difficulty of those chains, and partly because those coins are just not worth as much as ETH. If that's true, then lots of miners are going to be shutting down their GPUs and selling them.
- latchkey 4y agoPower companies are incentivized to sell power. They will just find other buyers.
- elil17 4y agoPerhaps you are right about power companies wanting to sell more power (although it seems like that is not the case for the marginal kWh given all that power companies do to incentive energy efficiency for their customers). But even so, at least that power would go to something useful (keeping buildings comfortable, purifying water, who knows what) rather than being burned in the crypto-pit.
- ars 4y agoI predict the opposite will happen. GPU demand will drop, which means GPU manufacturers will have less money to spend on R&D. GPU prices may go down in the short term, but long term GPU speeds will stagnate. I wish there was a way to put a 1 year timer on this comment to see who's right me or stuntkite.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoThere's more than enough demand for GPUs with gaming, video rendering, and machine learning that R&D will continue without crypto mining.
- Fabricio20 4y agoWe are already at a stagnating point in GPU speeds, with the most recent generations from NVIDIA simply being pump more juice (watts) instead of big design changes and efficiency optimizations. I don't believe R&D funds will dry as well, since they will simply be relocated to AI and datacenter workloads which have been on the rise more recently.
- stuntkite 4y agoMaybe kind of in like clock... but the parallel throughput and the ability to securely slice and provision GPU workloads is what was delivered this go around. As well as optical NV-Link and all the crazy new stuff coupled with their CPUs. Go look at crowdsupply and look at the previous gen cores being strapped to massive software defined radio arrays. This isn't just about pushing framerate. It's about vector processing being massively more efficient than CPU for almost everything and the tooling to start floating consumer needs that aren't just making pretty bleep bloops go boom boom for fun times is very, very mature.
- ls612 4y agoThe rumored 4090 is going to pull 450W and score ~19000 on 3DMark time spy extreme. The 3080 pulls 350W and scores 9000 if we are being optimistic. If these numbers are ballpark correct we are talking about 60% more performance per watt in two years. Your story may eventually come true but it is not yet true.
- hinkley 4y agoI'd like to see some PoW scheme for public good projects like SETI or Folding@Home or even CGI for a fan fiction, where there's perhaps something more than just bragging rights for contributing. I'm not sure what that would look like exactly.
- stuntkite 4y agoSince the new GPU offerings from nvidia have secure multi-tenancy, I think you're going to start seeing things like that. Especially when you look at what's happening with compute being more universally adapted via Vulkan. I haven't seen the framework for such a thing yet but you make a good point. I think I've got half a model in my head that could be retooled for something like that in a flexible fashion. It could work both ways too. Either you are giving away GPU cycles for research or you are paying for people to be paid for their cycles, or you post up your own job to be computed for pay or donation of cycles or money. As an example, wanna render predictions for erosion on a property you wanna buy? Put up the job and people that wanna contribute can and you get the result. Any user could set their hierarchy of things they contribute to. Like patreon sort of. So bucks or compute cycles can be chunked out to them by order of need and weighted priority. Humm. Someone beat me to this idea so I don't have to do it.
- djbusby 4y agoGPUslice.com
- rexstjohn 4y agoTasteful plug: https://youtu.be/Hjt5Mnrb__w https://youtu.be/Hjt5Mnrb__w Been expecting this since working on edge computing software ecosystem at NVIDIA.
- my123 4y agoVulkan isn't suitable for this, with most GPGPU compute stacks not accommodating Vulkan's SPIR-V dialect, including Khronos's own SYCL. Note that this wave of datacenter GPUs doesn't support OpenGL or Vulkan, because they either don't have rasterizers at all (AMD MI250X) or have them only on two TPCs for basic SW compat and don't expose OGL/Vk via virtual functions (NVIDIA). As such, better OpenCL drivers are what you should ask for. But then AMD's OpenCL drivers are not exactly that great, and NVIDIA's have their own quirks.
- acchow 4y ago> I'm really excited about this because there are SO MANY gpus that are now going to be cheaper than sand Over the course of a GPU's lifetime (in your hypothetical use-case), how much of the cost is the GPU itself and how much electricity?
- wheresmycraisin 4y agoWhat are the interesting things?
- thaneross 4y agoOne I'm interested in is graph databases powered with linear algebra (see GraphBLAS and RedisGraph). Putting the graph structure in a sparse matrix in GPU memory and doing matrix-multiplication to perform queries means you can effectively traverse the entire graph quickly by using the massive parallel nature of the graphics card.
- eachro 4y agoWhat other things can you do with GPUs outside of machine learning, generalized scientific computing and gaming?
- qeternity 4y agoCan’t tell if sarcasm…
- jamal-kumar 4y agoLearning how to program shaders is actually a pretty cool thing to do. It's the most math heavy programming I've ever delved into and for that I like how it feels like it's getting my knives real sharp.
- WalterBright 4y agoI'd like to see it used for converting old movies to hi-res and color. Like what Peter Jackson did for "They Shall Not Grow Old".
- thesz 4y agoSpeeding up databases, for one example.
- megablast 4y agoAnd 99% of them will be used for games. So sad.
- ryder9 4y ago
- grishka 4y agoWhy is it sad? They'll bring joy into people's lives.
- anonporridge 4y agoCarbon intensive joy. Is it really worth it with the climate emergency?! /s
- Melatonic 4y agoLast big crypto crash I bought a used Titan XP for like 350$ (still running strong and kicks ass). Got me through this whole GPU debacle. Always buy low!
- scoofy 4y agoI'm just finishing up Andrew Ng's course, and would like to pick up a GPU for building models (probably focusing on U-net image models), do you have any references on what I should expect from trying to buy a used one like you did? I know it's a pretty random question, but i honestly don't know anything about GPU's other than that my life would be a lot easier if I had one (I run an old Macbook Pro, and I have an old Asus laptop that runs a debian distro, and finally my very old gaming pc is a alienware alpha).
- plonk 4y agoAre you concerned about damage from heat during previous use? You're going to be running it for hours or days anyway if you train on large complex datasets, so a GPU that's been used for a few months might not have lost you too much lifetime. Otherwise it should work exactly as new.
- sgt101 4y agoI am no expert, but my off the cuff thought is that buying a gpy and trying to run it as an external for any of those machines will be pretty pointless. First it probably won't work; certainly for the mac you will face driver issues that were beyond me the last time I tried (about three years ago). I suspect things are worse now... Nvidia have not been helpful. Probably you could get a radeon working as an egpu, but for ML you really need Nvida and Cuda (unless you are seriously into homebrewing code). But the other issue is that you need to feed the beast - that is you need to pump data in and out of the GPU. For that you need a fairly fast CPU and fast ssd, and fast interconnects to the GPU. You also need power, a good power supply that can keep everything running -- including the fans... which need to be in a good box so that there is good airflow.. or quite quickly you will have no GPU! Maybe build a box like this with a cheap nvidia GPU, get it working so you know that you have a viable rig, benchmark it to see if you are bottlenecked on the GPU (long time since I did this, so I'm not 100% how - but basically if the GPU is 90% for ages and everything else is sitting looking at it then that's a good sign). Then buy a top notch second hand (about £500 right now on ebay) and resell the cheap one. If you hit a hitch inbetween you know you have a problem to solve and haven't spent all your money. The extra points are for getting multiple GPU's running... again I did that in a corporate with supermicro boxes about 8 years ago and it drove me up the wall at the time... I suspect now it's possible to have 2 GPU's in a consumer box/motherboard but I am not sure what the state of play is.
- tempie_deleteme 4y agoor maybe 'it' created this scenario in which there are going to be a lot of GPUs that are going to be cheaper than sand (as you said).
- abledon 4y agowhats your top 5 interesting things aside from crypto?
- bogota 4y agoWhy is the assumption that crypto has held back innovation? If anything normally pumping a ton of money into something causes more innovation to happen.
- anonporridge 4y agoInnovation on GPU fabrication, yeah, mining might have turbocharged it. Innovation on other use cases for GPUs were probably held back by excessive costs.
- chii 4y agonow that there's a glut of GPUs from the drop in demand from mining, there's likely to be people looking to use them profitably, and thus new innovation. The dot-com boom bust caused a lot of dark fibre to be built - and i think the internet has been better for it. Without that dark fibre, the expansion of the internet wouldn't have been as easy and mainstream, as fast as it did.
- addicted 4y agoDark fiber is useful for a lot more than GPUs built solely for a specific type of processing. But more importantly, it’s not even clear that buying a miner’s GPU is a good deal because these GPUs tend to be really worn out with short working lives. Most people will probably be better off simply buying cheaper GPUs new, or buying slightly cheaper used GPUs on eBay that were not popular for mining.
- chii 4y agoi'm not really talking about second hand GPUs, i'm talking about new GPUs that was made on the assumption that the prices would be high, and demand high, due to mining. Of course, a 2nd hand GPU might be a bit useless after the abuse of mining for many years (tho i think with proper cooling, and replacement of the fans, those GPUs should've been able to be kept in good working condition for resale).
- 4y ago
- 14 4y agoI have been using a gtx 980 for a long time now and have wanted to upgrade but everything still seems so expensive. Right now on newegg Canada a ASUS ROG Strix NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 OC is $1039.99. Seems like a lot. Will that price go down? Or should I be looking deals with used cards?
- locutous 4y agoMy speculative call is that it will go down, haven't hit bottom yet. Nvidia is sitting on a bunch of ampere stock, the miner liquidation, and new gen cards coming out. My guess is January-February when the Christmas buying season is past and all these are in full swing. Flash memory is also experiencing a price crash.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jimmydorry 4y agoUntil demand was proven, nobody was interested in making GPU compute at scales beyond niche (e.g. for scienctific calculation or for server clusters). As-is, we are about to enter a squeeze that is going to see a few of the big players in retail GPU manufacture drop out, so don't expect this glut of cheap GPUs to last.