AMD is Advertising NFTs Now

[ivycomb]

Summary

The folks over at Ryzen UK have blessed us with, NOT news of ThreadRipper consumer chips, but a series of new NFTs in collaboration with Hackatao.

 

Quotes

Quote

AMD is equipping Hackatao with the Workstations powered by AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processor, bringing the performance capabilities of crypto-art creation to a new technological and artistic level.

 

Quote

Our Kingdom is the Metaverse that we create for ourselves.

 

 

My thoughts

I use a ThreadRipper 3960X based system for my work. Although it's a small market segment, there are a lot of creative professionals that benefit hugely from HEDT CPUs like ThreadRipper, and it was a smoking gun that put them far ahead of Intel, not just in Price/Performance, but overall multithreaded and multitasking capability. This feels like a shot in the foot from an enthusiast's standpoint. It sends a message that AMD doesn't care about artists, but about artists that can take advantage of the Fear of Missing out Specifically. I'm disappointed that they're yet another company that have opted to hop onto this bandwagon rather than stand against it and continuing to innovate. Even if AMD isn't selling the NFTs themselves, it doesn't sit right with me.

 

It is worth mentioning that ThreadRipper being discontinued and this NFT line are unrelated, but being timed so closely together is a serious slap in the face.

 

Sources

https://ryzen.gg/hackatao/

https://opensea.io/collection/queenskings

 

P.S. as of writing, no articles have popped up about this but it has been up for a few days. One of my friends sent me a link to this. AMD also made a Reddit post around half an hour ago, which was removed less than ten minutes after being posted due to immediate and immense backlash.

 

Edit: It's at least 12 hours old since promoted posts started to pop up. 

 

[Moonzy]

5 minutes ago, JBee said:

I'm disappointed that they're yet another company that have opted to hop onto this bandwagon rather than stand against it and continuing to innovate. 

but isnt NFT blockchain an innovation of sorts?

[ivycomb]

1 minute ago, Moonzy said:

but isnt NFT blockchain an innovation of sorts?

The concept of NFTs from a technology standpoint is an innovation, but not a recent one (more than five years old), and not one that AMD themselves built. 

 

Although this is a matter of opinion, the NFTs that Hackatao and AMD produced here don't strike me as innovative in any meaningful way. They are being sold on Opensea (which also is not a new platform) like many other projects and are (subjectively) not a type of artstyle I haven't seen before.

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

but isnt NFT blockchain an innovation of sorts?

A bad one. But I guess that still is an innovation then.

[Lightwreather]

*Claps slowly*

wow.

 

[porina]

49 minutes ago, ivycomb said:

I use a ThreadRipper 3960X based system for my work. Although it's a small market segment, there are a lot of creative professionals that benefit hugely from HEDT CPUs like ThreadRipper

Out of interest, what is the system requirement for your work? Where does consumer platforms fall short? Is the requirement not covered by other products (workstation, like TR Pro)? HEDT of recent times was an odd space. It was essentially a cheaper route to server like platforms and consolidation to server/workstation seemed logical. Yes, it does leave a price gap. I'd love to see a new HEDT platform appear from both sides that isn't server based so has more consumer tolerable pricing.

[ivycomb]

13 minutes ago, porina said:

Out of interest, what is the system requirement for your work? Where does consumer platforms fall short? Is the requirement not covered by other products (workstation, like TR Pro)? HEDT of recent times was an odd space. It was essentially a cheaper route to server like platforms and consolidation to server/workstation seemed logical. Yes, it does leave a price gap. I'd love to see a new HEDT platform appear from both sides that isn't server based so has more consumer tolerable pricing.

I do a mixture of 3D Vtuber Twitch streaming, 3D & 2D rendering, video editing, animation, modeling, music production, game compiling, and other miscellaneous multimedia tasks.

 

Upgrading to ThreadRipper ended up being a necessity as my workflow became more complex and my previous system was no longer able to play certain games on stream with my setup due to severe lag. The rendering benefits are nice, but the main thing is multitasking capability (this is also the reason I run two GPUs)

 

 If given the choice, I'd rather stick with regular consumer chips (overall FPS when not recording is higher, considerably), but having the option for ThreadRipper was great and overall the system has been genuinely useful in boosting my productivity and reliability.

 

This system overall was more cost effective than building two systems, but not by much. This is what I may end up replacing it with though with how good the 12900k is.

[Arika]

Way to go AMD

 

[porina]

10 minutes ago, ivycomb said:

I do a mixture of 3D Vtuber Twitch streaming, 3D & 2D rendering, video editing, animation, modeling, music production, game compiling, and other miscellaneous multimedia tasks.

Looked you up on Twitch, nice following  Still looking to understand where the limitations in consumer tier hardware lay. Is 16 cores not enough (or more correctly can always use more)? PCIe connectivity? Ram capacity? I debated going two system streaming since it isolates gaming from streaming stuff, but am lazy as one works ok. 

 

[Moonzy]

1 hour ago, ivycomb said:

The concept of NFTs from a technology standpoint is an innovation, but not a recent one (more than five years old), and not one that AMD themselves built.

should AMD not do anything else other than build things, in your opinion?

 

that's a weird stance

[Spotty]

I don't understand what AMDs involvement in this is? When I read AMD + NFT I assumed AMD would be making AMD themed NFTs. These "Queens + King" NFTs are not new NFTs and have nothing to do with AMD. They claim that there is a limit of 6900 NFTs that can be minted as part of this collection and there's currently 6942 items in the collection available for sale on OpenSea. It looks like they were minted between 1-3 months ago.

 

What is AMD's role in this and why is AMD promoting this particular NFT collection?

[ivycomb]

6 minutes ago, Spotty said:

I don't understand what AMDs involvement in this is? When I read AMD + NFT I assumed AMD would be making AMD themed NFTs. These "Queens + King" NFTs are not new NFTs and have nothing to do with AMD. They claim that there is a limit of 6900 NFTs that can be minted as part of this collection and there's currently 6942 items in the collection available for sale on OpenSea. It looks like they were minted between 1-3 months ago.

 

What is AMD's role in this and why is AMD promoting this particular NFT collection?

This is what I was thinking. It's extremely bizarre that they're making fresh ads of something that's already been out for a while, and I'm not sure who they're trying to target with the ad shown in the reddit post. Only thing I can think of is an executive at AMD UK thought "hey, NFTs are being talked about a lot right now, maybe some studios will see successful NFT companies using our stuff and buy our systems." 

 

Sidenote, I edited my post because I realized that with how it's worded it might have seemed like AMD was selling NFTs themselves. Clarified my description and title. 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, ivycomb said:

This system overall was more cost effective than building two systems, but not by much. This is what I may end up replacing it with though with how good the 12900k is.

I was going to ask why not two systems instead. Any idea if a single 12900K would work or is that still a no go?

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

Why does anyone specifically need to be against NFTs? 

 

Although there are tons of bad actors right now, tech is tech. 

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

Why does anyone specifically need to be against NFTs? 

 

Although there are tons of bad actors right now, tech is tech. 

Because it perpetuates the demand and "need" for GPUs.

• The existence of NFTs
• GPU availability

Pick one of the above.

 

That's how people see it, that's one of the reasons why it's hated. It's also so far been utilized really badly/stupidly so that's another reason.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Because it perpetuates the demand and "need" for GPUs.

• The existence of NFTs
• GPU availability

Pick one of the above.

 

That's how people see it, that's one of the reasons why it's hated. It's also so far been utilized really badly/stupidly so that's another reason.

 

I'd say the same for gaming. 

 

In the ideal world everyone would be F@H and doing their best to contribute to society. 

 

I highly doubt the demand for NFTs make a significant enough of a dent to the overall crypto market that miners are buying gpus specifically for NFT transactions. 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

I'd say the same for gaming. 

 

In the ideal world everyone would be F@H and doing their best to contribute to society. 

Gaming is a very large industry that creates many jobs, directly and indirectly. It's also culture and community contributor too. Mining by comparison creates very few jobs and culture wise only contributes in a way to be the butt of jokes or to be hated, that is due to it not being able to demonstrate and prove it's worth.

 

F@H doesn't really create jobs and thus doesn't contribute to the economy. It's nice and has a value but saying gaming doesn't contribute isn't accurate either.

 

You can also do both, mining may as well say never both.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Gaming is a very large industry that creates many jobs, directly and indirectly. It's also culture and community contributor too. Mining by comparison creates very few jobs and culture wise only contributes in a way to be the butt of jokes or to be hated, that is due to it not being able to demonstrate and prove it's worth.

 

F@H doesn't really create jobs and thus doesn't contribute to the economy. It's nice and has a value but saying gaming doesn't contribute isn't accurate either.

 

You can also do both, mining may as well say never both.

 

And yet it is flouted with controversy after controversy, abuse of artists and getting unprecedented amounts of unsuspecting young people addicted each year. 

 

If crypto truly did not contribute to much it would never have gained traction. The amount of companies that have invested into crypto and the amount of new start ups that have happened because of crypto. To say that it doesn't contribute to much is flawed too. Even mining farms would've needed a team of technicians. 

 

Just to clear things up I do not believe that gaming does not contribute to much but by your statement, Its contribution would've been the same as the crypto industry. 

 

I have yet seen a valid reason to be against this tech. Against the people? Absolutely. But not against the technology. 

[Sauron]

3 hours ago, Moonzy said:

but isnt NFT blockchain an innovation of sorts?

No. It brings nothing new or useful to the table. It's just using existing and overall pretty bad technology to encode a link to a jpeg.

 

I don't think AMD doing this will have much of an impact on the demand or supply of chips which is already in a bad spot for other reasons but I think it does harm in a more pernicious way; companies normalizing and advertising this stuff helps create artificial interest for something that in itself has no worth or value for society and is mostly the domain of scam artists and stock manipulators. Some people will read this, see it as a demonstration of legitimacy and lose money they may absolutely need in a bad investment for the profit of liars.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

If crypto truly did not contribute to much it would never have gained traction. The amount of companies that have invested into crypto and the amount of new start ups that have happened because of crypto. To say that it doesn't contribute to much is flawed too. Even mining farms would've needed a team of technicians. 

Subprime mortgages had a bunch of investment behind them too, didn't make them any less garbage. All the promised real world use cases of crypto are still just vaporware over 10 years in. Fabricated interest and continuous advertisement aren't proof that something is worthwhile. If it were so good it wouldn't need such aggressive marketing and pushing; people would just want to use it rather than have to be convinced.

[Arika]

34 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

Why does anyone specifically need to be against NFTs? 

 

Although there are tons of bad actors right now, tech is tech. 

When it costs the same amount of electricity to mint a single NFT as a entire holdhold uses in 9 days, how can you NOT be against them?

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Subprime mortgages had a bunch of investment behind them too, didn't make them any less garbage. All the promised real world use cases of crypto are still just vaporware over 10 years in. Fabricated interest and continuous advertisement aren't proof that something is worthwhile. If it were so good it wouldn't need such aggressive marketing and pushing; people would just want to use it rather than have to be convinced.

 

And yet it has created jobs hasn't it? 

 

What you've listed are valid reasons. But they aren't reasons to be against this tech. Against the people? Yes!

 

3 minutes ago, Arika S said:

When it costs the same amount of electricity to mint a single NFT as a entire holdhold uses in 9 days, how can you NOT be against them?

 

I've seen the power argument and looked at some papers. However when you look at the sheer amount of power that data centers and general IT uses it does actually exceed that of crypto. And the calculations for minting one NFT is mostly inaccurate since there are eco friendly block chains now(for quite sometime actually)

 

I can't be against this tech because it would mean that HAVE to be against PC gaming(for example). The sheer amount power that is needed to play a game when a steam deck or PS5 can do so much more efficiently.  I'd have to denounce my iphone too since a lower powered and cheaper android phone can do the same without the cost, usage of rare earth metals and carbon footprint that goes along with buying an iphone. 

 

Just because a piece of tech is this way now does mean it will be like this forever. It will be changing. I mean you've seen it for yourself how fast technology evolves. 

 

Again, not so much a reason to be against the technology

[TetraSky]

Oh ffs AMD...
Time to destroy my AMD based PC I guess, that's the only reasonable thing to do when a company hurts my feeling.

/s

 

[Fasterthannothing]

Is AMD trying to become the annoying company now? First locked OC on new chips and now NFTs! 

[Arika]

2 minutes ago, Kinda Bottlenecked said:

I can't be against this tech because it would mean that HAVE to be against PC gaming(for example). The sheer amount power that is needed to play a game when a steam deck or PS5 can do so much more efficiently.  I'd have to denounce my iphone too since a lower powered and cheaper android phone can do the same without the cost, usage of rare earth metals and carbon footprint that goes along with buying an iphone. 

Maybe the stupidest justification i think i've ever seen and not even within the same plain of existence in terms of equivalency...but you do you