New GA106-302 RTX 3060 Revision coming with Hardware Based Mining Limiter coming in May, Possibly coming to the rest of RTX 30 series

[GalacticRuler]

2 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

Bitminer is ahead of you. While there is no release date, the E9 should be coming out soonish. There's also other ASICs out for ETH. 

https://www.innosilicon.com/html/a10pro-miner/index.html

https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/innosilicon/a11-pro-eth-2000mh

I didn't even realize that, it sounds good for the future of GPU stock, both new and used. And even if it doesn't catch on, the EIP 1559 should cause a fair portion of miners to jump ship and sell their cards.

[IkeaGnome]

7 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Are you crazy? None of those companies are going to keep the cryptocurrency long term. They will definitely transfer it into usable currency. You think that these companies don't need money to continue buying necessary raw materials and paying workers? What are they going to pay workers in bitcoin? I highly doubt that. You also realize that Tesla is not the most profitable company out there. Sure they are getting by but its not like they can afford to sit on cryptocurrency like that. And again that doesn't change the fact that cryptocurrency is not a currency because you can't use it for general use. Its not like I can pay for gas in cryptocurrency or buy groceries with cryptocurrency or do so many different things. You can use it at like 6 places. That doesn't make it a legit currency. If that was the case then vbucks for fortnite is about as much of a currency as cryptocurrency as you can use it to buy stuff. 

Hmm

https://www.thebalance.com/how-do-bitcoin-credit-cards-work-4173215

https://usa.visa.com/solutions/crypto.html

While the Visa doesn't do crypto to fiat, they're still showing up as debit cards and can be used as a normal debit card.

2 minutes ago, GalacticRuler said:

I didn't even realize that, it sounds good for the future of GPU stock, both new and used. And even if it doesn't catch on, the EIP 1559 should cause a fair portion of miners to jump ship and sell their cards.

Watching stock bots, it's getting better and better every day. I think if people have a little more patience they can stop complaining. With all the excess demand for GPUs manufacturers just haven't been able to keep up. They're getting there though.

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, tishous said:

I don't get your point... How can a CPU company be blamed for GPU shortages?

well, we don't really know this, but theoretically they very much can ...

 

There were rumors (speculations) Nvidia has actually been selling directly to mining farms... and it would not be a first,  and tbh, kinda surprising if they didn't...

 

 

Also interesting they pretty much stopped selling FE cards in many territories very quickly... without *any* reason given, that's just super sus imo...

 

So yeah as the manufacturer they could have very much helped getting more cards into gamers hands... they however decided not to. 

 

Basically what this sounds like is Nvidia wanted the cake and eat it, and it was super yummy! 

 

 

[tishous]

46 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Are you crazy? None of those companies are going to keep the cryptocurrency long term.

And you know that how? These companies have people a lot smarter than either of us, and the best thing to do with crypto is to keep it for the future. That extra however much may be nice now, but an extra 4x that in a few years sounds a whole lot better.

48 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

You think that these companies don't need money to continue buying necessary raw materials and paying workers? What are they going to pay workers in bitcoin? I highly doubt that. You also realize that Tesla is not the most profitable company out there.

I never said they don't. I said without that extra money they would get from swapping their Bitcoin into fiat their business wouldn't suddenly crumble. Even Tesla, the least profitable company in the list that other guy said, had a profit of more than $700mil in 2020, so they have plenty of "headroom" I guess you could say to keep their crypto for the future. 

55 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

buy groceries with cryptocurrency

You actually can at WholeFoods. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/who-accepts-bitcoin/

[Moonzy]

6 hours ago, SolarNova said:

people are not going to be crypto mining with a single GPU, its hardly worth it afterall.

Please... Do your research before saying things like this

One gpu or 10, the profit margin is approximately the same for now

Earning $7 a day in a single GPU may not sound like a lot, but if your PC is $1000, you'll recoup the cost in half a year, that alone is enough incentive to make people mine

 

-shrug- it's okay to use electricity to do whatever, but if it's earning money then suddenly it's bad

People believe we should be spending thousands of dollars on our hobby and not see a single cent of it, and making money without doing anything is wrong, while

1) not against automated factories

2) not understanding what mining is to begin with, just a very basic level understanding and then jump into the hate train. I urge you to do further research

 

4 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

None of those companies are going to keep the cryptocurrency long term.

I mean... Tesla did say they'd buy $1.5bn of bitcoin or something, so they're definitely not selling it(?) Unless they changed their mind

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Also now that code 43 isn't a thing you could just bypass these and anything else by way of GPU passthrough to VM and report to the VM OS that the GPU is x16 connected and a dummy HDMI plug per GPU.

 

Did you ignore what I said on 1 and 2?

 

Quote

 

1) Card connected at 1x: Nerf CUDA (Direct Compute, Vulkan, OpenCL, etc), lock-in nVidia ML libraries only (eg Tensorflow)

2) Card connected to no monitor, or monitor with no EDID (eg dongles): Nerf CUDA if nvlink not connected to another nVidia GPU

 

 

For case 1, the CARD should look for PRSNT pins and does not initialize CUDA unless electrically connected at x16. Gaming GPU's are always installed in the x16 slot, even if they operate at x8. 

For case 2, the card does not initialize additional nvidia cards unless they are connected via nvlink. 

 

This is something polled from the card's side. eg

1. PCIE x16 slot MB power, card immediately polls for the nvlink, and if not attached, does not initialize if no monitor (not EDID) isn't attached, this can be tested for by polling for the HDCP features. No EDID, it's not a monitor, and no HDCP it's not a Monitor-like device. Sure you could emulate a monitor.

 

But you can't tell me that thing supports HDCP. There's also ways to poll that it's actually a monitor, like trying to change the resolution that requires HDCP and various required information that the emulator clearly doesn't support.

http://headlessghost.com/faq.html

 

All this thing is, is an I2C EPROM with fake EDID on it, it's doesn't emulate anything. It's the equivalent of taping over pin 19, and turning the monitor on once.

 

Anyway, beyond the point of caring, if you needed an EDID emulator, you've done something wrong in the first place. Like many of those chinese-market graphics tablets don't support HDCP, but they are electrically USB-C, so logically they should be connected and powered by the GPU, but they aren't, they just use USB-C so the monitor only needs one connector.

 

The point I was trying to make, is they CAN do counter-measures, but they will always have collateral damage. The weakest point in the miner's computer is the attempt to run everything at 1x on a platform that doesn't have enough lanes to run them all at x16, which can be done by the card itself looking for a nvlink to communicate with the other card, and if it's not present, assume it's the single card in the system and try to initialize at x16, if it fails, then put itself into a boot-loop where it can't be initialized, even with a virtual machine.

 

That's why I prefaced the entire section with "Like if I was "nvidia the gamer-friendly, miner hating"", there is a lot of collateral damage, to folding, to ML, to multi-monitor setups, to vr setups that would come from doing this.

 

Quote

Simple fact is like I keep saying the issues is distribution and procurement, not what the cards can and cannot do.

 

Clearly. One would have to have not been paying attention to see that this was all a direct consequence of the pandemic shutting things down, which meant a lot of manufacturing and logistics got scaled back, and then the panic-buying caused by tariffs. That's squarely where the problem started. The scalpers and miners were always going to cause a problem, but saying they are entirely the problem ignores history when this happened with the GTX 10 series. Same with the game consoles, Game consoles are always hard to buy during their first year of availability because people want to be the first to own them, nothing else.

 

Quote

Maybe this is a giant clue that maybe the shortages are not primarily miners if unrelated, impossible to mine on, products are also supply MIA. Seems to be a hell of a lot of blame gaming going on with no actual evidence.

 

I'm sure miners would be mining on PS5's and Xbox Series X and S right now if they could find an exploit to run Linux on it. Remember a supercomputer was built with PS3's which was enabled by it running Linux, this is just the logical thing that happens when no security to prevent "misuse" is in place. Unless everyone wants to suddenly use M1 MacMini Mac's (which ironicly are available and selling $100 below MSRP) for gaming, I think we're all SOL until 2023 when these logistics problems should be ironed out.

 

Or you know, we could enter the 4th round of covid because certain countries and states are full of people who would rather die with covid than prevent spreading it.

 

 

[leadeater]

50 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Did you ignore what I said on 1 and 2?

Did you ignore what I said. You know when you pass a PCIe device through it's possible to lie to the VM how that PCie device is connected i.e. this device is x16 connected. I think you should ready more carefully.  Once that PCIe device initializes inside that VM for all it knows it's connected at x16.

 

50 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Gaming GPU's are always installed in the x16 slot, even if they operate at x8. 

Not correct, very often if not most often the second slot is x16 in physical size with only x8 actual pins in the slot.

[leadeater]

46 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

Clearly. One would have to have not been paying attention to see that this was all a direct consequence of the pandemic shutting things down, which meant a lot of manufacturing and logistics got scaled back, and then the panic-buying caused by tariffs.

Irrelevant, if miners are actually the problem then you can solve it in the areas I said. You can actually control who gets the cards, that is actually possible and Nvidia is capable of doing that. Making new products and/or restricting features is simply not required.

 

You're making great points for why it's NOT miners that are the problem.

[Moonzy]

12 minutes ago, leadeater said:

with only x8 actual pins in the slot.

Actually, most secondary consumer boards I know of only have x4 lanes electrically on the second x16 slot, because it goes through the chipset

 

High-end consumer boards and hedt boards are x8 or above yes

[Mark Kaine]

2 hours ago, Moonzy said:

shrug- it's okay to use electricity to do whatever, but if it's earning money then suddenly it's bad

People believe we should be spending thousands of dollars on our hobby and not see a single cent of it, and making money without doing anything is wrong

Well, it's "ok" because everyone does it i guess, but generally every one should try to use as little as possible. 

And I said that many times now it really doesn't matter if someone plays games, or mines,  or does anything else that uses up energy in normal amounts,  what's not ok is if people have 100s or 1000s of gpus and "mine" 24/7...  this is indeed the same as big companies that use a lot of energy,  it's not good for the planet and it's not good for people and animals living on it,  plus no one "really" profits from it other than a bunch of already super rich people. 

 

So what some gamers do here really isn't even worth mentioning in terms of impact , it's not much different than other "hobbies" (if you can call it that)

 

Of course people are salty and say you shouldn't mine,  because (they don't have a shiny new card)!  But really it's the big farms that do the damage,  and additionally to what's going on already anyway, so like other "industries" this should and needs to be regulated... so they wanna use up energy to make profit?  Well that's not really a novel idea but then they should pay for it , and since they certainly don't contribute to the society like other industries it should be comparatively a lot.

 

Idk is this regulated at all, do they pay taxes, etc, how much? 

 

See, I think that's another thing that annoys people,  the uncertainty, how, and in what capacity (and by who exactly) this is currently done and under which conditions and regulations. 

 

 

[leadeater]

59 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The point I was trying to make, is they CAN do counter-measures, but they will always have collateral damage.

Yep and my point is they can always be bypassed and nobody has actually proven it is necessary in the first place. I do not support your or anyone else's ideological only reason for restricting or removing features on products when zero analytical assessment has been done on the sitution.

 

You're all sounding like violent video games cause kids to be violent. Don't be one of those people.

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Actually, most secondary consumer boards I know of only have x4 lanes electrically on the second x16 slot, because it goes through the chipset

 

High-end consumer boards and hedt boards are x8 or above yes

Yea kind of depends though, the more expensive X570 boards are x8 but utilize a switch chip to do it. Cheaper ones i.e. Asus TUF are indeed x16/x4

 

[Kisai]

22 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yep and my point is they can always be bypassed and nobody has actually proven it is necessary in the first place. I do not support your or anyone else's ideological only reason for restricting or removing features on products when zero analytical assessment has been done on the sitution.

 

You're all sounding like violent video games cause kids to be violent. Don't be one of those people.

Maybe if nvidia wasn't making mining gpu's, it doesn't need to be an ideological argument, it can simply be "business trying to maximize their profit by restricting their own products", which they do already with Quadros and data center gpu's.

 

I don't think they should bother trying to limit the functionality on the Geforce cards, but they are being pushed to do it anyway probably by business units responsible for the data center. Or did you forget about this https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/joao-silva/blower-style-rtx-3090-graphics-cards-are-being-discontinued/#:~:text=Multiple AiB partners are starting,%2C ASUS%2C Galax and Emtek.

 

Quote

Multiple AiB partners are starting to discontinue their RTX 3090 graphics card featuring blower-style custom cooling solutions, including MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS, Galax and Emtek.

Since the launch of the Nvidia RTX 3090, AiB partners such as MSI, Asus, Emtek, Gigabyte, and Galax have launched their own graphics cards featuring blower-type cooling solutions. Now after a very short window of availability, attempts at taming the RTX 3090 with a blower cooler are seemingly being scrapped.

 

As reported by VideoCardz, there are five models that have been discontinued: Emtek RTX 3090 24GB Blower Edition, Asus RTX 3090 24GB Turbo, Galax RTX 3090 24GB Classic, Gigabyte RTX 3090 24GB Turbo, and MSI RTX 3090 24GB Aero.

Blower style cards are used in data centers. Which is another way to increase density. So if they were told to pull the blower models, that probably came from nvidia. That didn't have to be for combatting mining, it could just be to protect their interests in the data center units.

 

Which is still a stupid way to go about it. I'm sure the cloud platforms don't want people running mining on their gpu systems either since it would block legitimate ML applications from being used.

 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

27 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Idk is this regulated at all, do they pay taxes, etc, how much? 

In the us you are supposed to pay income taxes on anything made, but it might be one of those thats not enforced much if at all, like taxes for online shopping (when they're not included)

[Bitter]

3 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

In the us you are supposed to pay income taxes on anything made, but it might be one of those thats not enforced much if at all, like taxes for online shopping (when they're not included)

Income isn't made until a sale happens, if you just hold an asset you're not taxed on it since you didn't actually make any money.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

2 minutes ago, Bitter said:

Income isn't made until a sale happens, if you just hold an asset you're not taxed on it since you didn't actually make any money.

Yeah, but it comes down to people actually paying the taxes on the usd they get from selling, as you are supposed to. 

Having BTC/eth/whatever is treated like if you have a car. You can use if however, but if you sell it, you should pay taxes on it (but who does?)

[Bitter]

3 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Yeah, but it comes down to people actually paying the taxes on the usd they get from selling, as you are supposed to. 

Having BTC/eth/whatever is treated like if you have a car. You can use if however, but if you sell it, you should pay taxes on it (but who does?)

Coinbase does tax forms (for the US) which means they report it which means you either pay taxes or get caught eventually.  Not sure about anyone else though. Honestly I'm just hoarding until Vanguard can do something with crypto assets, then I'll move my 'money' there with the rest of my investments. They're not much but every bit now helps for later. I'm living with the assumption that Social Security won't exist when I retire.

[leadeater]

29 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Blower style cards are used in data centers.

Actually they are passive and use the server airflow. The blower cards can be more easily used in servers because they are actually 2 slot not 2.x slot and the don't disrupt the airflow in the chassis by circulating air within the chassis and adhere to the front to back airflow design.

 

The other thing that made those cards more usable was the power connectors moved to the end rather than on top.

 

Those cards were a pretty obvious attempt by the AIB to market and sell them to server users which is against Nvidia's ToS. Nvidia told them all to stop because they weren't really "allowed" to do it in the first place. And generally speaking I do not support Nvidia doing this but they do and they can because they are the only viable option in the DC/HPC market currently so they can do whatever they want.

 

But people can and still do use non blower Geforce cards in servers.

 

29 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Which is still a stupid way to go about it. I'm sure the cloud platforms don't want people running mining on their gpu systems either since it would block legitimate ML applications from being used.

Doesn't happen because what cloud providers charge for GPU access means you can't make a profit mining. You'd have to seek out the more janky hosting providers that offer up essentially rack mounted gaming systems on a 1 to 1 allocation basis. 

[leadeater]

47 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Maybe if nvidia wasn't making mining gpu's, it doesn't need to be an ideological argument, it can simply be "business trying to maximize their profit by restricting their own products", which they do already with Quadros and data center gpu's.

Except for those cards there is actually a hardware difference, like Quadro for example which has ECC support and larger VRAM chips. Or for Tesla the same but also full NVLink hardware. They aren't just taking GPU dies and purely segmenting on a superficial level. On the software and driver side sure although some of that is starting to be lifted with studio drivers but even those have an actual cost to business reason for being different to regular Geforce gaming drivers.

 

There is at least something more going on with those product lines than simply taking away something you could once do on an existing product line.

 

For mining GPUs themselves I like that they exist but sadly have to also acklowdge that they won't actually be a compelling option to many without actually being significantly cheaper, re-sale value. It's a good idea for Nvidia, or AMD, to take GPU dies that are capable of operating but failed to pass validation for an actual gaming product so instead of scrapping and reprocessing it selling it as a mining card. Good idea but I'm not sure there is enough of these GPU dies in the first place.

 

If Nvidia were actually making huge sales to miners and thought it was a long term viable business they would actually create a mining GPU architecture aka ASICs and have that as a real product line and business unit. This is why DC/HPC and Automotive business units exist within Nvidia, because they check off both of those factors so Nvidia do make dedicated real products for those markets, unlike mining.

[LogicalDrm]

*** Thread cleaned ***

 

Somewhat pointless posts removed and some quoted edited.

[kiska3]

I do want to know what will happen with consumer protection as I outlined a few posts ago:

Cause I can see NV doing this mining nerf, then the one or two GPU miners who mine when they aren't playing games going "why is my hashrate half that of someone else's with the same card"

[Bombastinator]

14 hours ago, SolarNova said:

I've always been an advocate for being able to use ones PC any way they see fit.

However, there is a distinct difference between using something for its intended purpose, and not, especially when it comes at the expense of other people. When that happens, it is certainly necessary and usual for said 'thing / 'product' to be separated into 2 distinct items, one for the intended purpose and one for the other purpose.

 

An example in the UK, im sure the US has something similar, is Red Diesel.

Red Diesel is essentially the same as normal Diesel, its just Dyed Red, its only used in farm vehicles and some construction equipment. Red Diesel has a very low Tax Duty rate.

Initially farm vehicles used normal diesel that was simply cheaper due to less Duty cost, however this caused 'normal' people to buy said diesel under the guise of using it for farm equipment, and/or otherwise 'acquire' it and use it for their every day car and ofc for resale. This ofc caused a problem, so they solution was to Dye the Diesel red, anyone caught using it in a regular vehicle is subject to penalties.

 

So in this instance, the 'cheap' Diesel is the GPU, intended primarily for farmers to use so they can affordably ..farm. However, the average joe started to realize they could save some money and avoid Taxes by buying / acquiring said Diesel to use in their every day vehicle and worse still acquire it to resell, they are the Crypto Miners.

The solution, Dye the Diesel Red to differentiate between the almost Duty free Diesel and 'normal Diesel' making it very easy to find and fine those who use the 'cheap' Diesel outside its intended use. This is Nividia adding the limiters to the GPUs.

 

The average joe isnt going to be harmed here. Most people are not going to be crypto mining with a single GPU, its hardly worth it afterall. By the time you have enough GPU power for it to be worth it, ur well within being a 'miner' territory, and thus are causing an problem for other people.

 

This is a slippery slope however, so its well worth consumer keeping a close eye on things.

Complaint seems to be that the dye solution was a whole lot more effective than this one

[Bombastinator]

14 hours ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Actually i think most people are mining off one gpu: their gaming one. Which it most definitely is. Im profiting on mining on my rx480 4gb. Mining eth. on a 3070 i might be making $5.50 daily, as apposed to $1.00 on my 480.

 

As long as you use a pool ofc. If you are solo mining it would take like more than the lifetime of the universe to mine a block or something.

That would be an interesting limitation: limit GPUs to one for everything but the industrial stuff (FirePro/quadro). The big miners will run dozens of GPUs off a a single cpu.  Forcing them to buy a cpu for every gpu could cause issues and it wouldn’t affect the vast majority of gamers at all.

[Moonzy]

14 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

That would be an interesting limitation: limit GPUs to one for everything but the industrial stuff (FirePro/quadro).

I think the "leaked" beta driver was to test how that would turn out

The limitation of that driver is pretty much a hassle free experience to gamers and a middle finger to miners

 

Yet gamers yelled at them, so I guess Nvidia said no and decided not to release the drivers like that anymore

[Helpful Tech Witch]

16 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

hat would be an interesting limitation: limit GPUs to one for everything but the industrial stuff (FirePro/quadro). The big miners will run dozens of GPUs off a a single cpu.  Forcing them to buy a cpu for every gpu could cause issues and it wouldn’t affect the vast majority of gamers at a

They would probably go to an electronics recycler. Just get dozens of systems for bassically nothing, though it might become a nightmare to manage all of them.

 

Edit: or, VM pssthrough to a diffrent VM for each gpu might work... Make the driver think there's only one gpu (as a VM can't access outside info)