NVIDIA Launching "CMP" Cards For Professional Mining, Limits RTX 3060 Mining Potential

[Luke]

Nvidia's market segmentations disgust me and make me glad I don't use their products: They don't allow power management in Nouveau in signed firmware cards for fear data centers will be able by using Nouveau to avoid the driver TOS that forbid using consumer cards in data centers. In case someone sets up a data center in a copyright-hostile country they limit FP64 performance on consumer cards. Now this mining issue. While this will no doubt help with the problem of miners scarfing up all the cards, simply adding production would do the same. Unless that is they cannot make enough mining cards and plan to use that shortage to run prices up for miners without causing gamers to put off overpriced updates. They remind me of John Deere's efforts to prohibit farmers from working on their own tractors.

I don't know much about ethereum, but back when Bitcoin mining on GPU's was the hot deal, AMD cards were overwhelmingly better than NVIDIA cards for it, by so much a $100 AMD card would outperform anything Nvidia made. Same for "first passphrase shooters": if you capture an encrypted Proud Boys (US fascist group) server disc or image of it and its encrypted, you put AMD cards on a long motherboard and start throwing passphrases at it. Five years ago that would have taken many times longer with Nvida cards than AMD, as the hashing used to slow down dictionary, book (phrase) and brute-force attacks on passphrases in LUKS favors the same factors for performance is bitcoin mining. Hell, maybe a modified bitcoin mining box would be what you'd really want for that job, so as not to have to run a 1,500 watt "digital hair dryer" for months trying to get into that server full of encrypted Nazi terror plots.

Maybe just limiting GPU purchases to one at a time at the store/order level would slow down mining purchases? Or are most of them using only one card per CPU these days?

[theriddick]

I hope they can also allow stuff like Looking Glass to work with these cards which is a great idea for reducing e-waste.
Otherwise when these cards are no longer valid for mining, they go into the bin due to no resell-ability.

I'm sick of companies making throw away tech, its going to be the end of us all!

[stiiixy]

I'm on solar powered (PV cells), so once my batteries are full, I'm actually WASTING electricity as the cells are constantly generating ppwer anyway.

Well, I could cover them to preserve their life, which in my area, would be a MASSIVE extension (UV15+ often, and 14hrs of direct sun) to their life.

However, until then, I'll use that excess power to burn ants and other nefarious deeds.

[Shevchen]

Here's what we should strive to achieve:

• Educate as many people as possible, incentivize them to have fewer children or no children at all, reduce the clout of religion as much as possible
• From an early age teach people to be frugal, consume as little resources as possible and reuse as much as possible
• Improve healthcare in underdeveloped countries (including India) because it's the primary reason they are breeding like rats
• Eliminate/replace/reduce the use of plastic
• Start a war on the consumerist culture

A little late for a reply, but I'll do it anyway:
- Education requires teachers. You can't just get teachers out of thin air and its a process that takes generations to properly build up. It also requires a stable socioeconomy that has enough ressources to fund educational places including the people working there. Lastly it also requires the parents to see the benefits of sending their children to education instead of child labor fabrication plants. (or just sitting at home and do nothing at all because learning is bad or something)
- While you can say "consume as little as possible" the entire industry (we are dependent on) is doing the exact opposite - and they want us to consume in unreasonable ways as this is their profit generating honey jar. And even if you "save" on ressources, along comes another CEO that looks at the saved ones and thinks: "Thanks, I'll take that!"
- You need a method to clean the oceans (and tap water), recycle it and you also need to make sure that the main culprits of plastic waste don't just throw their stuff into the ocean. You can educate first world countries all you want, but if 90% of the plastic waste comes from india, you need to change gears
- The consumerist culture is a double edged sword. It fuels advancements to a certain degree, but the focus is not to make it "better", but more profitable. It only gets "better" if "better" means more profits. The entire time humans existed, this basic principle of supply and demand worked until the point of mass production, where freshly produces stuff gets destroyed to "adapt to market prices". This behavior alone should have shown us, that our current system is unsustainable in the long term.

To summarize: We can only get out of this mess if we - as humans - change. But we won't. There will always be people who will take advantage of the "savings of others" and just continue the cycle until we reach total collapse. This is the big filter. We do not have the ressources to fight our own greed, as greed is part of the human nature. It helped us for a while to advance in tech and science, but aside from the top 1-2% of our entire population - nobody is willing to "change".

And its pretty simple too: If you are starving, you don't care about plastics in the ocean or global warming. You want something to eat - thats all you care about. I fear that list of your is - even if I see goodwill in it, nothing more than a virtue signal, as the solution to our problems isn't just a simple "wake up call". People know we are destroying the planet and still drive their cars to get to work - because nobody can affort electric cars with solar panel coating. Or a self sufficient greenhouse in the garden, a local water filtration unit for every household, drones to make deliveries etc

Also - our economy would have to change principles overnight. We would have to abandon currency as we know it. Or to put it bluntly: Start over again - on a planet resembling a waste dump.

[ms178]

A workaround for NVIDIA will be impossible for absolute most people because:

• NVIDIA requires signed firmware, so VBIOS editing has been unavailable for many years now (AMD does the same to be honest)
• Most modern PCs have secure UEFI boot mode on which means you cannot modify drivers as well

Linux NVIDIA users normally have secure boot disabled, so it could be a non-issue for them.

Well, I've heard differently from Igor's lab and Moore's law is dead (Link to Igor's article [EN]). Both have great sources in the industry. Both state that these mining firms hire their own driver and firmware developers and could possibly circumvent what Nvidia does with their official stack (unless Nvidia does pull some strings on the firmware level or hardware strap on the package).

[birdie]

Some early info about the whole issue from VideoCardz

All newly produced RTX 3000 cards might have this limitation enforced by default.

I'm on the fence about it. I don't like how miners are buying up all the cards and create scarcity, and at the same time I really hate that as a consumer I'm buying a castrated product (this limitation might not affect just mining but other CUDA workloads as well).

[reavertm]

I said it before and I'll say it again. Cryptocurrencies are fine as value representation, money transfer, stocks etc but mining cryptocurrency by anyone should be illegal. It is single the most dangerous to environment thing that was invented recently. It provides enough incentive to be massively pursued but contributes to environment degradation due to heat it produces and is not regulated in any way because it falls under typical server farm that produces business logic or online services. Cryptocurrency mines should be treated like coal power plants. Something you need to get government approval to run.
I hope we will eventually get to this, and I can already hear the scream of actual "libtards": but I want to have my freedom to destroy the environment. Fascist government should not limit me!!oneone

[spykes]

I said it before and I'll say it again. Cryptocurrencies are fine as value representation, money transfer, stocks etc but mining cryptocurrency by anyone should be illegal. It is single the most dangerous to environment thing that was invented recently. It provides enough incentive to be massively pursued but contributes to environment degradation due to heat it produces and is not regulated in any way because it falls under typical server farm that produces business logic or online services. Cryptocurrency mines should be treated like coal power plants. Something you need to get government approval to run.
I hope we will eventually get to this, and I can already hear the scream of actual "libtards": but I want to have my freedom to destroy the environment. Fascist government should not limit me!!oneone

It's great to consider the environmental impact of Crypto-mining, but what about the cloud and the gaming industry ?
Maybe we should add a carbon tax to each GPU sold...

[qarium]

I said it before and I'll say it again. Cryptocurrencies are fine as value representation, money transfer, stocks etc but mining cryptocurrency by anyone should be illegal. It is single the most dangerous to environment thing that was invented recently. It provides enough incentive to be massively pursued but contributes to environment degradation due to heat it produces and is not regulated in any way because it falls under typical server farm that produces business logic or online services. Cryptocurrency mines should be treated like coal power plants. Something you need to get government approval to run.
I hope we will eventually get to this, and I can already hear the scream of actual "libtards": but I want to have my freedom to destroy the environment. Fascist government should not limit me!!oneone

the development of tech and the blockchain technology solved this already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_stake

Ethereum does implement the Proof of stake instead of proof of work.
this reduce the power consumsion for than 95%

the bitcoin itself is outdated technology.

[uid313]

You've got it backwards. Inflation (devaluing) happens when the supply is *increased*.

If the supply is decreased, the value goes up, that's called "deflation".

Oh, my bad. I guess that's what I meant. Thanks for the clarification.
Either way, I am not a decreasing supply has to be solved by mining new coins, maybe it would be better just to have automatic expiration of coins or re-circulation after a certain expiry date to prevent the coin supply from shrinking.

They do not just waste energy. The process of mining is signing and legitimating transactions, getting a coin for it and the transaction fees is the payment for doing that.

Banks also have giant servers signing and processing the transactions of people over the normal IBAN system.

Well the Bitcoin protocol, as well as other cryptocurrencies are designed with algorithms to make it as computationally expensive as possible. These algorithms could be fast, and run on the CPU, but they are designed to be slow so you need really powerful and power hungry hardware to run.

Most of the energy used in cryptocurrencies are not for signing and processing transactions, it is just wasted in this stupid mining game.

Last few things I have heard repeated is that pumping more money into the economy drives up inflation. I never personally liked the whole idea of the cyptocurrency stuff. Why? I feel its part of the new voodoo economics system that doesn't have your wellbeing in mind. I think its just another set of digital manacles people are slurpping up and embracing.

Just a belief in a digital savior that is never going to come, but when the appearence of it comes, only more control is going to be exerted over everyone. I don't think there is anything good about it.

People can call me stupid and think that I am ill informed. I don't feel that I am, I feel I am 100% spot on. It's part of new voodoo economics and I doubt your best interest is at heart.

Just my two cents.

I don't know enough about economies to know if I even have a clue of anything. I just find this cryptocurrency mining stupid, it uses up so much energy.