Question Jen Sung makes questionable decision? [RUMOR] NVidia tries to disable GPU mining?

[VirtualLarry]

So now, not only is Nvidia's chairman selling GPUs that can be used for Compute (*formerly called GPGPU - "General Purpose"), he's rum0ored to be attempting to effectively regulate WHAT PROGRAMS are ALLOWED to be run on the GPUs that they mfg?

Imaging if Intel decided to decree, that their CPUs, could no longer be used for searching for prime numbers.

This whole idea is a slippery slope that I am NOT willing to go down.

And to think, this is all just an (alleged) stupid band-aid, over their mfg and supply-chain issues.

If Nvidia could effectively supply all of their GPU markets with product, this wouldn't even be an issue.

Edit: If this rumor turns out to be true, expect class-action lawsuits against NVidia, much like what happened to Sony with the PS3 losing functionality (running Linux) after people purchased them.

Now, ALL NVIDIA RETAILERS will be forced to post a prominent disclaimer of the software that is NOT ALLOWED to be run on these GPUs, or they will get sued as well.

Update:
NVidia to phase out all existing Ampere PCI device-ids, phase in EtH mining "block" across ALL new Ampere line-up!

 

[Glo.]

Two thoughts:
Even at 1/2 mining speed, a 3060 is an instantly profitable card for miners

and

Most of the professional miners are already running reverse engineered custom BIOS. That will take about 30 seconds.

Just like Quadro and Teslas are easily reverse engineerable?

They are using the same silicon as gaming cards. So how come there is no easy way to make a Quadro RTX GPU from a Ampere/Turing GeForce card?

 

[Leeea]

Just like Quadro and Teslas are easily reverse engineerable?

They are using the same silicon as gaming cards. So how come there is no easy way to make a Quadro RTX GPU from a Ampere/Turing GeForce card?

I was going to respond with e-fuses being laser cut and etc, but this took less then a minute to find:

[MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts - Page 62

[MOVED] Hacking NVidia Cards into their Professional Counterparts - Page 62

www.eevblog.com

those guys are doing a 2080ti.


It seems the 10 series required resisters to be added to the back of the card to convert to pro. That will slow down a pro-miner for about another 30 seconds.

 

[coercitiv]

I was going to respond with e-fuses being laser cut and etc, but this took less then a minute to find:

Now take into consideration some hefty bounties set for the first parties to provide a reliable solution to the Nvidia problem. Look at this page - completed tasks for the Monero project. Their RandomX Audit was valued at 1400XMR ($120 000 at time of approval), other tasks are far less lucrative obviously.

How much time until a team seriously attempts this for a $50K bounty? How about for $500K? Each day with the driver lock will only increase the financial pressure, unless the mining bubble pops before the driver does.

 

[Heartbreaker]

Seems pretty simple. If you want to mine on your GPU, you aren't going to like this.

If are looking for GPU to just play games on, you probably will like this, as it should reduce the demand for these cards among miners, and put more of them in gamer hands.

As someone that doesn't want to mine. I'm all for it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I just had an epiphany.

If NV halves the hash-rate for RTX 3060 cards, doesn't that just mean that the miner just turns down the power-usage even more, to achieve the same performance/watt, at the expense of density.

The only way that doesn't work, is that NV inserts "power-burning" opcodes to the GPU like every-other opcode.

But then, Nvidia is part of the problem, with regards to the environmental aspect of mining. NV just made it doubly-worse!

And if NV doesn't do that, they instead allow miner to achieve same performance/watt at lower hashrates AND lower power levels, albeit at lower density - guess what, now miners are going to be buying double the number of cards, taking them away from gamers even more so!

There's NO WAY for NV to actually "win" with this gambit.

It's purely a PR move for gamers that are easily fooled.

 

[coercitiv]

It's probably at BIOS level.

Just a minute or two after starting, the hash rate has dropped from 41.5 MH/s to 26-24 MH/s. Since the author of the video has no drivers for this card, this would suggest that the anti-mining algorithm is not present in the software, but rather implemented in the BIOS itself.

If the card starts with full hash rate... I give it days from release until someone comes out with a fix.

 

[Ajay]

Maybe next time, NV and AMD can build a small micro-controller into the GPU ASIC which has a one time flash limit. Then they can really make gaming and mining cards separate and control supply for each market better.

 

[Mopetar]

So how come there is no easy way to make a Quadro RTX GPU from a Ampere/Turing GeForce card?

It's not that you can't do this, it's that if you're doing something where you care about having the professional drivers which are certified by Nvidia then you pay the extra cost, which your business will just pass on to the customers anyhow. The added cost of actually certifying your own hack job hasn't caused any unintended side effects likely costs you more than the mark up the Nvidia chargers for a Quadro.

Anyone mining cryptocurrencies probably doesn't care if there are potential side effects as long as it doesn't seem to negatively impact the ability of the card to mine for a long enough period of time to recoup the initial investment into the card.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If the card starts with full hash rate... I give it days from release until someone comes out with a fix.

As a naive first-pass guess at how they're doing it, possibly just counting number of GPU opcodes since last texture/rop operation. Since games have them sprinkled fairly evenly, whereas miner software basically (I think) ignores the texture/rop hardware. Shouldn't be too hard to "cloak" a miner, maybe just run furmark at the same time as mining, or integrate it with miners?

they may have MSR-like "Performance Counters" in their GPUs, like Intel has in their CPUs, and NV has used them to "profile" ETH miner software, and possibly the BIOS's SMI handler inserts memory wait-states or downclocks memory or disables / flushes caches while the miner is running.

 

[simas]

I agree, I could see governments around the world restricting access to cryptocurrency in some way if it becomes too widespread. It has already happened in China to some extent, where the exchanges are all controlled by the government.

i see this as less about liking or hating crypto and more about making sure various protections placed are still enforced in the new world. for example, in financial industry you complete disclosures of all accounts you have in every institution , along with prohibition (with few exceptions ) of having accounts outside of the firm you are working for. You did not disclose - > discipled/fined and never work in this industry again. Disclosed accounts have their statement sent to your Compliance department and filled and reviewed. Your firm (FINRA member) is required to monitor to ensure you are not doing insider trading, not suddenly receiving income you can not explain , etc. You have access to proprietary information including information that may move stock price because any earnings are announced so yes, they must and will know every major financial transaction you make. Here comes in crypto where you claim that you out of the blue "mined" or received some X amount in value from some unknown counter party . Why? Who paid? for what? how does this comply with authorized activity disclosure that ANY activity you performed for compensation must be disclosed to your firm to avoid conflict of interest. If you perform any work for any compensation without first getting cleared by Compliance to do so, at minimum you are fired

it is even worse when it comes to any secure information, now you have people who have 'wallets' completely under control of third parties. It does not matter what they WILL do , it matters what the CAN do if faced with blackmail, treat of removing their wallet or access to it. Very quickly crypto can become a major liability in many of such scenarios..

 

[Shivansps]

Well if the 3060 mines at 25MH/s as i saw in the video, Nvidia is doing this for nothing, because 26MH/s is what you get off a unmodded RX580, and the 3060 is probably a lot more power efficient, specially if its running "at 50%". With standart bios mod you can probably push that to 30MH/s at least.

It is worthless, what they are doing is worthless, thats still a good mining card, they fell well short with that "50%" limit, it should have been like 20% now they can do nothing about it.

 

[Glo.]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1362530083391561736

Some on /r/gpumining are saying Chinese miners with RTX 3060s are reporting as low as 10Mh/s

Bloody hell.

As a gamer: crossed fingers for this to be true.

 

[Mopetar]

It is worthless, what they are doing is worthless, thats still a good mining card, they fell well short with that "50%" limit, it should have been like 20% now they can do nothing about it.

Does it really matter what they put the limit at if all it takes is someone to cobble together a driver the removes those limitations entirely? The miners probably already all know this or suspect that it's the case, but people who don't know anything about mining likely don't. I suppose it's free publicity for Nvidia to look like they've done something about a problem that's effectively out of their hands. It probably

It might seem like a solution for this problem is to produce ASICs that so vastly overpower what a GPU can do that using a GPU isn't cost-effective, but that's limited to the ability to produce an ASIC that can overcome some currencies ASIC-resistant algorithm. Some number of people want something that can mine on commodity hardware, so there will always be someone to create a currency to take advantage of those desires. That's essentially how we wound up with Etherium.

I think that the actual best bet would before a company to figure out how to use a chiplet based approach, which would enable building low-cost, highly efficient GPUs specifically for mining that don't need to use the newest bleeding edge wafers, but are ultimately so much more cost effective than the bleeding edge gaming GPUs that no one who wants to mine at scale will bother purchasing the bleeding edge gaming GPU.

Unless someone creates an algorithm that requires a bleeding edge gaming GPU (say one that essentially requires you to solve ray tracing problems or something like that) then there is an effective way for companies to satisfy both camps while constructing it so that there's relatively little cross over. Basically Nvidia and AMD need to make a GPU that's enough like a gaming GPU that it's capable of mining the same currencies that GPUs are used for while constructing it in a way that makes it inexpensive for them to do so and doesn't compete with their newest gaming cards.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think that the actual best bet would before a company to figure out how to use a chiplet based approach, which would enable building low-cost, highly efficient GPUs specifically for mining that don't need to use the newest bleeding edge wafers, but are ultimately so much more cost effective than the bleeding edge gaming GPUs that no one who wants to mine at scale will bother purchasing the bleeding edge gaming GPU.

Unless someone creates an algorithm that requires a bleeding edge gaming GPU (say one that essentially requires you to solve ray tracing problems or something like that) then there is an effective way for companies to satisfy both camps while constructing it so that there's relatively little cross over. Basically Nvidia and AMD need to make a GPU that's enough like a gaming GPU that it's capable of mining the same currencies that GPUs are used for while constructing it in a way that makes it inexpensive for them to do so and doesn't compete with their newest gaming cards.

Finally, a valid idea!

But this might require millions in R&D costs...

 

[Glo.]

If there is a hardware check, on the GPU, that if hacked, or removed bricks the entire GPU - Nvidia may have a point in saying that the lock is impossible to lift.

 

[Mopetar]

Finally, a valid idea!

But this might require millions in R&D costs...

I don't think it requires too much, particularly in light of the profit potential from implementing such an idea. Both Nvidia and AMD already have done the layouts for chips on older nodes. GPUs to some degree are already split up into smaller clusters that could serve as the basis for a chiplet. For AMD it's the ACE (Asynchronous Compute Engine) and for Nvidia it's the GPC (Graphics Processor Cluster) which are probably about the appropriate level of hardware to turn into a chiplet.

The only thing that they need to do is build what's essentially an IO die with any of the missing hardware that the chiplets would require to function using the same mining program. Apparently that kind of design has been described as perfectly fine for compute tasks, but for some reason doesn't work well with games. I'm willing to bet the same limitations don't apply to mining, so it shouldn't matter.

If you target the cards to operate at peak efficiency the amount of energy used is probably low enough that you can just cram a massive amount of those chiplets onto a single card and since you're not making giant monolithic GPUs, the cost to manufacture goes down considerably. Even though they're using an older node, the fact that each card can just contain so much additional compute power means they'll dwarf the gaming cards.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't think it requires too much, particularly in light of the profit potential from implementing such an idea. Both Nvidia and AMD already have done the layouts for chips on older nodes. GPUs to some degree are already split up into smaller clusters that could serve as the basis for a chiplet. For AMD it's the ACE (Asynchronous Compute Engine) and for Nvidia it's the GPC (Graphics Processor Cluster) which are probably about the appropriate level of hardware to turn into a chiplet.

The only thing that they need to do is build what's essentially an IO die with any of the missing hardware that the chiplets would require to function using the same mining program. Apparently that kind of design has been described as perfectly fine for compute tasks, but for some reason doesn't work well with games. I'm willing to bet the same limitations don't apply to mining, so it shouldn't matter.

If you target the cards to operate at peak efficiency the amount of energy used is probably low enough that you can just cram a massive amount of those chiplets onto a single card and since you're not making giant monolithic GPUs, the cost to manufacture goes down considerably. Even though they're using an older node, the fact that each card can just contain so much additional compute power means they'll dwarf the gaming cards.

This is getting dangerously close to the design and business model of ASIC miners.

 

[Mopetar]

This is getting dangerously close to the design and business model of ASIC miners.

The point is making something that's still functionally a GPU because if you just make an ASIC it isn't any good against an algorithm designed to resist being run on an ASIC. Regular gamers can still use their cards to mine, but the people who want to do large scale mining get the best returns from using the specialized cards which are made on a separate node so they don't compete for wafers with the gaming cards.

It's probably not a perfect solution, but it's about the best solution that could be hoped for that doesn't try to rely on trying to artificially cripple cards or any number of other really stupid ideas. From the perspective of a gamer it's like someone making a 32x Crossfire or SLI setup that's physically on the same board. Theoretically you could game on it if someone writes their game to be able to support that, but I'm guessing that the resources which need to be shared for a game would result in too much bandwidth between the chiplets for it to scale to that point.

 

[Heartbreaker]

Does it really matter what they put the limit at if all it takes is someone to cobble together a driver the removes those limitations entirely?

I read somewhere earlier where NVidia claimed it couldn't be disabled with software...

 

[Mopetar]

It might require some kind of hardware modification, but it isn't likely to stop miners. There's also nothing preventing a change in algorithm to something that Nvidia's driver doesn't flag.

 

[Heartbreaker]

It might require some kind of hardware modification, but it isn't likely to stop miners. There's also nothing preventing a change in algorithm to something that Nvidia's driver doesn't flag.

They could spend a lot of time trying to defeat it. Or they could just buy another card. It's not like the 3060 is the only card to mine with.

 

[MrTeal]

A change to the algorithm to make it harder for ASICs is something that might be done, but I doubt at this point they would start hardforking just to try and stay ahead of Nvidia to ensure that people can still mine on a subset of cards.

That being said, I imagine Nvidia could do a better job of making a DH mining ASIC than say Innosilicon. How much better? I don't know. The upcoming A11 Pro system has a hashrate of 2000MH/s and power consumption of 2500W, so equivalent to about 20 3080s using half the power. It also costs $20,0000 and ships in June which really limits the returns during this lucrative time. Can Nvidia make it cheaper, especially if they're still set in the standard computing form factor? I doubt it. Companies like Bitmain and Innosilicon have had years of producing miners bare bones on the edge of stability for the lowest price. They are also extremely aggressive in protecting their market and not above doing some selfmining to lower their costs.

Nvidia jumping into the mining asic world and expecting to throw their weight around would be a lot like Intel deciding they're going to start making Arm SOCs for budget phones like Oppo and push the Mediatek's out of the business.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Ok, let's say this really works... Do the 3060Ti on up next...

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, let's say this really works... Do the 3060Ti on up next...

If they reduce any of the *advertised* capabilities of their existing released product line, expect lawsuits. SEVERE lawsuits. Potentially from every CUDA developer out there.

 

[Artorias]

Why cant they double or triple production? If they are worried about having too much stock, why not just take an extra year in between releasing a new series. Have a new top end version 6 months into that extra year.

I'm beginning to see a problem with having a short 1-2 year gap between series, they need to slow down and let a series mature in the market for a longer period of time.

It's only going to get worse with mining.