can manufacturers

[mdram]

can manufactures somehow disable mining in a gpu? some hardware cod or something?

just curious

 

[EXCellR8]

I briefly mentioned this before... it's most-likely possible to do with the BIOS (drivers can be patched) but I don't see it actually happening. Personally, I'd love the feature but there's plenty of people on here and elsewhere that would cry foul and bring up their livelihood and yada yada. At the end of the day it wouldn't be fair, but it would certainly help this ridiculous market for gamers.

 

[mdram]

well since they have been talking about mining only cards with no video out
why not?
let the miners drive the prices of the other cards up, and the gamers get their for regular price

 

[Headfoot]

i dont know how you'd block mining and not block other compute workloads except by heuristics or a ML based approach. Which wouldn't necessarily be great in terms of false negative/false positive. I dont know why you'd go to such effort to piss your customers off

 

[mdram]

well they are pissing off thier customers now with lack of cards and sky high prices

 

[aigomorla]

At the end of the day it wouldn't be fair, but it would certainly help this ridiculous market for gamers.

actually its already not fair for the GPU makers when people are loading up their cards 24/7 and breaking them then doling a RMA.

the entire GTX line was not originaly intended for work duty, that was the Nvidia Quadro line that handles that.
But no one will buy a Quadro because the GTX line is a lot cheaper.

Nvidia needs to kill mining on the GTX line and force them to go on the Quadro line, as well as AMD and Firepro.

Get these darn miners off our gaming cards.

i dont know how you'd block mining and not block other compute workloads except by heuristics or a ML based approach. Which wouldn't necessarily be great in terms of false negative/false positive. I dont know why you'd go to such effort to piss your customers off

Because these cards are NOT intended nor designed to be left running at full load 24/7.
Then because of shortages, it gimps out gamers who may have had a failed card, not from mining but from other stuff, because miners either bought out entire inventory, or killed there cards from constant loads.

This is in turn NOT fair for both gamers and card makers, because again, miners are using the cards to a degree which it was not designed for on a thermal / pcb level.

This is why some manufactors have even stepped up and stated they would not accept a mined card.
How will they know its mined?
Beats me, but i feel gamers will be shafted for this again too, because they will be accused for mining on the card, when they didn't, hence ultimately, miners will end up killing us gamers.

Kill Mining on the RX / GTX line.... move them on the Quadro / Firepro line.
10/10 gamers will agree, dont steal our cards, go steal the production ones, which were designed to be put under load at 100% 24/7.

 

[AdamK47]

I doubt can manufacturers... can.

Card manufacturers may have the ability to do so. I wish and hope that some day they do.

 

[mdram]

the only ones that really benefit are the retailers
they pay normal price from suppliers, then jack it up

 

[Newbian]

They are making a great profit from the demand so why would they for their current customers?

 

[Markfw]

actually its already not fair for the GPU makers when people are loading up their cards 24/7 and breaking them then doling a RMA.

the entire GTX line was not originaly intended for work duty, that was the Nvidia Quadro line that handles that.
But no one will buy a Quadro because the GTX line is a lot cheaper.

Nvidia needs to kill mining on the GTX line and force them to go on the Quadro line, as well as AMD and Firepro.

Get these darn miners off our gaming cards.



Because these cards are NOT intended nor designed to be left running at full load 24/7.
Then because of shortages, it gimps out gamers who may have had a failed card, not from mining but from other stuff, because miners either bought out entire inventory, or killed there cards from constant loads.

This is in turn NOT fair for both gamers and card makers, because again, miners are using the cards to a degree which it was not designed for on a thermal / pcb level.

This is why some manufactors have even stepped up and stated they would not accept a mined card.
How will they know its mined?
Beats me, but i feel gamers will be shafted for this again too, because they will be accused for mining on the card, when they didn't, hence ultimately, miners will end up killing us gamers.

Kill Mining on the RX / GTX line.... move them on the Quadro / Firepro line.
10/10 gamers will agree, dont steal our cards, go steal the production ones, which were designed to be put under load at 100% 24/7.

So are you including people running DC into this since they run their cards 24/7/365@100% ?

So curing cancer isn't allowed unless we buy Quatro cards ?

And BTW, I have never RMA'ed a card, except the voluntary "recall" of the EVGA cards where they forgot to put some thermal pads in a few places.

 

[VirtualLarry]

At the end of the day it wouldn't be fair, but it would certainly help this ridiculous market for gamers.

At the current (relative lack of) profitability of miners, shouldn't card prices have already come back down? That is, if "miner demand" was the sole reason for high card prices...

But it's not. TSMC 14nm fab allocation, being squeezed by Samsung and Apple products, and global worldwide DRAM supply shortages, are enough, on their own, minus "miner demand", IMHO, just given "gamer demand", to push retail prices to DOUBLE MSRP.

Of course, what little "miner demand" there is, has pushed prices to TRIPLE MSRP, in some extreme cases.

 

[ao_ika_red]

I imagine manufacturers can disable it on driver level. Just disable some openCL and CUDA features will render the card useless for mining. But it will also annoy lot of people /students who need cheap accelarator card for early CAD learning.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Why in god's name would they want to? The idea of disabling mining so the price of their cards is NOT driven up... are you people on drugs?

 

[nathanddrews]

While I understand the frustration of not being able to buy GPUs for anything at or below launch prices, the reality is that miners are legit customers just like gamers. It's not reasonable to be angry at people for using a component differently than you would. Crypto, games, CAD, folding, doesn't matter - we simply need greater supply to meet demand. :/

 

[mdram]

well my question was based on the speculation of the mining only cards that have been mentioned in the news.
there will be no video output
therefore if they have dedicated mining cards, that cannot be used for gaming
why not gaming cards that cannot be used for mining?

 

[VirtualLarry]

why not gaming cards that cannot be used for mining?

That's like... computers that can't be used for pr0n. Not gonna happen.

 

[bystander36]

How is the drivers even supposed to know what application is using it? If you disable a feature for mining, you disable it for gaming too. While most games may avoid certain commands that miners use all the time, that doesn't mean those features are not used in other games. There aren't specific mining features on cards. Mining software just uses the existing commands to mine.

 

[Headfoot]

How is the drivers even supposed to know what application is using it? If you disable a feature for mining, you disable it for gaming too. While most games may avoid certain commands that miners use all the time, that doesn't mean those features are not used in other games. There aren't specific mining features on cards. Mining software just uses the existing commands to mine.

exactly, there is no silver bullet here. Im sure they could do some heuristic learning algorithms but they'll never have a 100% accuracy rate. And it would take real software development for highly questionable benefits (if not just pure negatives)

 

[Red Squirrel]

The answer is not to stop the miners but to simply produce more. If ram is the issue, then they should produce their own ram. In fact the whole productivity chain of how GPUs are made is super inefficient. You have one company make the actual chip, then a company makes the ram, then another makes the actual card. The chip one may even be split off into different companies for packaging etc...

Why can't they just do it all in one factory from start to finish. It would be so much more efficient and they would not have to depend on outside factors like ram shortage.

Reminds me of the hard drive shortage years ago, because there is only one company in the world that makes the motors (Nidec) and the company's factory flooded. How do you manage to run a company in such a way that all your eggs are in one basket like that?

 

[Stuka87]

Why in god's name would they want to? The idea of disabling mining so the price of their cards is NOT driven up... are you people on drugs?

They are making a great profit from the demand so why would they for their current customers?

nVidia and AMD are not making any extra money off the high GPU prices. All of that increase in cost is going to the AIB's and Resellers. So it is most definitely in nVidia/AMD best interest to have a mining only card. This card can have a price outside of what gaming cards sell for, and that cost can absorb the RMA's for cards that are being run 24/7.

 

[gorobei]

the shortage in gpus is strictly a function of nv/amd not producing more chips.

amd got burned in the last btc boom/bust and the market got flooded with used cards which hit ASP. neither of them will ramp for the current mining boom because it is too risky/legally irresponsible. until the demand from mining demonstrates consistent statistically reliable demand, they cant risk the chance of a bigger production run going unsold because of a coin failing or an exchange getting hacked. stockholders would sue them for spending all those millions without hard numbers demonstrating that it isnt reckless.
it will probably take a one or two more years of constant demand from the miners for them to become a segment that they will gamble on when booking additional wafers at the fabs.

even then, more cards wouldnt necessarily improve the miners overpaying problem. they cant make a mining-only chip since there are so many altcoins using different code. comitting to one coin's code function in the silicon is expensive and even more of a gamble since no one can predict which coin will take off. making more chips is their only option.

ideally one of the add-in board partners would make a product that is more attractive to miners than single chip cards in performance/power/cost like the asic miners did for btc.
a multi chip (4x,6x,8x,etc) on one board with just enough memory for whatever DAG algorithm is in vogue and good cooling would be the only thing that would make standard single gpu cards unattractive. you could even just use the low binned reject chips since underclocking for hash/watt is more relevant for most farms.

neither one is going to gimp general compute functions given the HPC is a defined and growing segment.

ultimately as consumers all you can do is vote with your wallet, which means no more buying used cards. if miners cant recoup costs by selling to the consumer market then it will reduce the initial investment/outlay they can make when buying hardware for the next round of the new gen of gpu. unless you know for certain that an ebay seller didnt mine/run24:7/flash firmware/expose to dehumidified air conditioning then that card's lifetime is seriously suspect.

 

[Bouowmx]

Why can't they just do it all in one factory from start to finish.

How do you manage to run a company in such a way that all your eggs are in one basket like that?

Contradicting your own message?

Designers, standard fabs, and memory fabricators don't want to buy each other.

 

[SMOGZINN]

nVidia and AMD are not making any extra money off the high GPU prices.

They are selling every card that can produce just as fast as they can produce it. They might not be making the extra premium that the AIBs are making, but they are making record profits off this. Expect that next generation they will price their cards to capture some of that premium, meaning more expensive GPUs even if this boom busts. It is easy to lower their prices, but once the contracts with the AIBs are written they can't easily raise them.

I imagine manufacturers can disable it on driver level.

Do that and miners will just not update their drivers, or roll back to previous ones, or if all else fails someone will write their own. Same goes for firmware. There is a lot of money in mining. You are not going to be able to do this in software, it would have to be a hardware solution, and that is not going to happen in the next generation or two.

 

[2is]

actually its already not fair for the GPU makers when people are loading up their cards 24/7 and breaking them then doling a RMA.

the entire GTX line was not originaly intended for work duty, that was the Nvidia Quadro line that handles that.
But no one will buy a Quadro because the GTX line is a lot cheaper.

Nvidia needs to kill mining on the GTX line and force them to go on the Quadro line, as well as AMD and Firepro.

Get these darn miners off our gaming cards.



Because these cards are NOT intended nor designed to be left running at full load 24/7.
Then because of shortages, it gimps out gamers who may have had a failed card, not from mining but from other stuff, because miners either bought out entire inventory, or killed there cards from constant loads.

This is in turn NOT fair for both gamers and card makers, because again, miners are using the cards to a degree which it was not designed for on a thermal / pcb level.

This is why some manufactors have even stepped up and stated they would not accept a mined card.
How will they know its mined?
Beats me, but i feel gamers will be shafted for this again too, because they will be accused for mining on the card, when they didn't, hence ultimately, miners will end up killing us gamers.

Kill Mining on the RX / GTX line.... move them on the Quadro / Firepro line.
10/10 gamers will agree, dont steal our cards, go steal the production ones, which were designed to be put under load at 100% 24/7.

Is it documented that GTX cards aren't intended to run at load 24/7? If so, what is the documented duty cycle of GTX cards?

Because unless there's some official statement that they are not, this theory sounds completely made up and baseless.

 

[dorion]

You are not going to be able to do this in software, it would have to be a hardware solution, and that is not going to happen in the next generation or two.

We could always go back to fixed hardware! DirectX 9 isn't that old.