THG: Nvidia Mulls Restarting Cryptomining GPU Production

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Nvidia Mulls Restarting Cryptomining GPU Production​

By Anton Shilov an hour ago

Nvidia: We don't know how cryptomining affects GeForce RTX 30-series pricing.

The entire article was quoted below, but this was the huge standout to me that makes this entire article come across as paid-for propaganda.

NVIDIA has such a hugely high "bad" yield rate on Ampere GPUs that it can sell miner cards with no impact to the gamer market.

Since miners only need compute capabilities of a GPU, they do not need display outputs, and they do not care if the GPU they use comes with disabled texture mapping units or lacks video processing capabilities. As a result, Nvidia can sell them graphics processors that would otherwise go to waste.

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Nvidia is thinking about beginning production of crypto-mining specific Ampere graphics cards that come without display outputs, but first, it needs to find out whether there's enough mining demand for the latest graphics processors.
"If crypto demand begins or if we see a meaningful amount, we can also use that opportunity to restart the CMP [mining-specific GPUs] product line to address ongoing mining demand," said Colette Kress, chief financial officer at Nvidia, at the 19th Annual J.P. Morgan Tech/Auto Forum Conference (via SeekingAlpha).



Demand for gaming graphics cards, high-performance processors, and game consoles has exceeded supply for months as people spend more time at home and entertain themselves playing the latest game titles. Cryptocurrency valuations have skyrocketed recently, reactivating miners who rushed to get graphics cards, further increasing demand for GPUs. Nvidia has had a hard time understanding how demand from cryptominers affects its current sales, but it is mulling restarting the production of mining-specific graphics cards.

"We don't have visibility on how much of the GeForce RTX 30-series end demand comes from mining," said Kress. "So, we don't believe it's a big part of our business today. Gaming demand is very strong, and we think that's larger than our current supply."

It doesn't always make a lot of sense to mine Bitcoins using Nvidia's latest GPUs, which tend to be pretty expensive. There are special accelerators designed for Bitcoin mining, and those ASICs tend to be considerably more efficient than graphics processors. In contrast, GPUs are used to mine Ethereum, which has been gaining price in recent weeks, just like Bitcoin.

Since demand for Nvidia's products has generally been high in recent months, it isn't easy for Nvidia to understand how significantly cryptominers affect this demand, especially keeping in mind the fact that select makers of graphics boards have mined cryptocurrency at their own facilities before releasing these cards to the market.

It is beneficial for Nvidia to clearly understand how many of its GPUs are needed by cryptominers. Since miners only need compute capabilities of a GPU, they do not need display outputs, and they do not care if the GPU they use comes with disabled texture mapping units or lacks video processing capabilities. As a result, Nvidia can sell them graphics processors that would otherwise go to waste. Those come in the form of the aforementioned CMP GPUs.

But before making such chips available to add-in-board (AIB) manufacturers, GPU designers need to figure out the total available market that they are trying to address so they don't bin chips that aren't needed. Before that happens, GPU developers may just enjoy additional demand for their products.
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auntjemima said:
I don't think anyone disagrees... But to say "we don't know if there is a mining demand" is pretty asinine.
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That seem changing from do not know how much of the demand come from mining vs otherwise:
We don't have visibility on how much of the GeForce RTX 30-series end demand comes from mining,

The fact that they talk about possibly starting to make mining specific GPU would make little sense if they would say we do not know if there is a mining demand.

Because gaming demand is much more stable than mining demand that can go to zero fast on sudden change, they will push that most of the demand is for gaming no matter what (to a point, they were already fine by the SEC for this), but they would not push the ridicule that much.
 
GotNoRice said:
Why not? If it allows cards that would otherwise go in the trash to be sold and help fill the demand, then I don't really see any negative.
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And how many units do you think that accounts for exactly? And now down the road as yields mature, it is a "Hey, let's top throwing all those away!" moment? I will usually fall to the side of journalist ignorance when it comes to articles like this, but this this comes across as a big smoke screen for an excuse when more NVIDIA miner sales are leaked to the public.
 
SnowBeast said:
God I am really starting to hate them at Nvidia. "No, we have no mining demand to know of!"
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In NVidia's defense unless its a direct sale it's not a metric they can track, if the miners just buy a crapload of cards from NewEgg or EVGA or whoever directly unless those vendors report back to NVidia that they definitely sold those cards to miners, and not scalpers, or retailers they have no actual metric they can track. NVidia and their board aren't idiots they know the cards are being bought in large quantities but they aren't lying either because they don't have any specific numbers to back up any claims. If anything this just proves that NVidia needs to launch a series of Mining specific GPU and sell those direct or with partner AIB's. Then it becomes a metric they can track, with cut down cards specific to the task, which then stops gamers from having to fight with miners for the same hardware, NVidia could plan their manufacturing accordingly, even if they were to split gaming and mining production 50/50 it would be better than the current situation as both parties would be waiting for supply instead of one using bots to order cards by the dozen and the other left pounding F5 on a hope and a prayer.
 
Krenum said:
Except miners won't buy them. Why buy something that you can't resell when crypto takes a dump?

Go home nVidia , you're drunk.
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Outside being cheaper, because they cannot find has many regular GPU to buy they would want ?
 
so will these also be usable for AI workloads - similar to A100 based implementations?
 
Miners will still buy the full gaming gpu first if available. They have longer warranties and have far better resale down the road. This would do nothing to improve availability to gamers only NVIDIA's bottom line.
 
Twisted Kidney said:
It still seems strange to me that all of these GRQ coins shot through the roof just in time for an nVidia launch.
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It is hard to remember because how little it actually been possible to buy them, but nVidia "launch" was at the end of september 2020, ethereal/bitcoin shot through the roof at the end of december I think, 3 full month after NVidia launch.
 
LukeTbk said:
Outside being cheaper, because they cannot find has many regular GPU to buy they would want ?
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They may sell them to the small fries but the big miners, the ones in China, who own wearhouse's & farms will still buy the graphics cards.
 
bufodr_T said:
Miners will still buy the full gaming gpu first if available. They have longer warranties and have far better resale down the road. This would do nothing to improve availability to gamers only NVIDIA's bottom line.
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Exactly, its all about optics. Nvidia knows this won't quell the shortage. But it makes them look like they're trying to do something to combat it. Which they aren't.
 
GotNoRice said:
Why not? If it allows cards that would otherwise go in the trash to be sold and help fill the demand, then I don't really see any negative.
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Because this time, instead of ending-up with a pile of unsold-but-functional 1070/1060 cards. they will be left with a pile of market-specific unsalable trash.

And, there is no indication that such a disabled product line will actually sell (GPUs are more flexible, and can be resold more easily, so I imagine there will be more smart buyers targeting those); they will be taking more of a risk creating these specific SKUs that they did increasing Pascal production during the last peak.

The reason dedicated mining ASICs sell is because they are order-of-magnitude better price/performance, but these offer exactly the same performance for a little lower price (only going to sell to a few desperate buyers before they actually meet fully-enabled GPUS demand)!
 
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GotNoRice said:
Why not? If it allows cards that would otherwise go in the trash to be sold and help fill the demand, then I don't really see any negative.
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I agree.

By selling miner cards as compute only NV will make a profit there by increasing over all sales/profitability and in theory maybe even allow the price of current gen NV cards to go down....... well ok this is NV prices wont go down, it is possible it could slow down how fast NV has been raising its price generation/generation lately... maybe.
 
The previous mining cards from Nvidia without display ports when configured to use the IGP (Intel) to display worked just fine. No binning was obvious from the older mining cards from Nvidia. As for Nvidia not knowing mining market demand but then starting up production of mining cards seems less than truthful or disingenuous.

The small time miners, hobbyist or bored folks (like me) would most likely buy gaming cards, the ones that make sense to buy and are available at a reasonable price, not with intent to resell but having that option if things go south. The best cards today if available are the 5700(XT), 3080, 3060 Ti if reasonably priced. Older cards like the 1080 Ti, Vega's are still profitable if cheaply obtain or already owned.

Also as more get into mining, same rewards are spread around more meaning your earnings will go down. My 5700 XT 2 weeks ago was making over $5 a day. Today same hashrate, it is $3.80/day. In that time period the price of Ethereum actually went up. So if Nvidia flooded the market with mining cards and they are bought, it could reduce the rewards to the miners, making most just stop mining or even start mining -> less gaming cards would be bought for mining. In many cases people just mine with what they have for an extra $ and when they are not gaming or doing something else. Nicehash folks for example in general.

Frankly I don't see how Nvidia would make the same mistake twice. The mining market is erratic at best, unpredictable, most likely have too few cards or too many never to be bought. Just make more gaming cards, streamline the product line.
 
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Colette Kress is a liar or a deeply incompetent hire who should be fired. My gut tells me she was hired based on what's between the legs not the ears.

 
Nvidia should release mining cards again with one caveat. They should not try to charge more for the mining card than for the direct equivalent gaming card like they did with the P106. That makes zero sense and of course no miner is going to choose to buy a dedicated mining card when the gaming card equivalent has more functionality, more resale value, and has the cheaper MSRP. What a joke. There has to be an advantage. higher hash through memory tuning, unlockable firmware, no RGB and evident power savings, better quality dual ball bearing fans for better cooling and longevity, etc. Change the feature set around to match the need, and lower or at least make equivalent the price - and they’d sell every single mining card they could produce in a cryoto boom cycle.

They sold all their P106 cards as best I know. Did you read any articles about the massive inventory of P106 mining cards they had to bury in a landfill? Nope?
Neither did I.
 
Krenum said:
Except miners won't buy them. Why buy something that you can't resell when crypto takes a dump?

Go home nVidia , you're drunk.
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Surely you’re not suggesting that miners aren’t in it for the long haul?
 
GotNoRice said:
Why not? If it allows cards that would otherwise go in the trash to be sold and help fill the demand, then I don't really see any negative.
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Why not? Because its a load of horse shit thats why. If anyone believes for a second that Nvidia hasn't been selling to miners first well Ive got a bridge I want to sell you. Its in Brooklyn. Fresh paint.

Personally I think its absurd for them to pretend they dont know the mining demand and have a high enough bad yield rate to "satisfy" it. What I think is going on is they see an excuse to blow some smoke up our collective asses while they shift they officially shift product to mining and say fuck you to all of us. Suddenly all those 3080 chips didnt quite make the cut...even though they would have two weeks ago.
 
kju1 said:
Personally I think its absurd for them to pretend they dont know the mining demand and have a high enough bad yield rate to "satisfy" it. What I think is going on is they see an excuse to blow some smoke up our collective asses while they shift they officially shift product to mining and say fuck you to all of us. Suddenly all those 3080 chips didnt quite make the cut...even though they would have two weeks ago.
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And there you have it. Selling a cheaper card to produce at more profit margin. Just like the p106. They clearly lied about how many cards were bought during the pascal era for mining, not sure why they wouldn’t now.
 
kju1 said:
Why not? Because its a load of horse shit thats why. If anyone believes for a second that Nvidia hasn't been selling to miners first well Ive got a bridge I want to sell you. Its in Brooklyn. Fresh paint.

Personally I think its absurd for them to pretend they dont know the mining demand and have a high enough bad yield rate to "satisfy" it. What I think is going on is they see an excuse to blow some smoke up our collective asses while they shift they officially shift product to mining and say fuck you to all of us. Suddenly all those 3080 chips didnt quite make the cut...even though they would have two weeks ago.
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Knowing demand and proving it are different, if a miner buys 50 cards how does NVidia know? I’m sure they have all sorts of internal estimates, and have had meetings with prominent mining warehouses and blah blah blah. But if they are sourcing consumer parts from any retailer they can at random then their demand is something that is hard to quantify and because of the volitile nature of the market it’s also difficult to predict demand.
But I’m sure that if they took a say 3060 TI, gave it a single DP mini output, a basic cooler design and no RGB on a cheap boring green PCB and gave them volume discounts it would go over pretty well and not hamper their resale value overly much.
 
Lakados said:
Knowing demand and proving it are different, if a miner buys 50 cards how does NVidia know? I’m sure they have all sorts of internal estimates, and have had meetings with prominent mining warehouses and blah blah blah. But if they are sourcing consumer parts from any retailer they can at random then their demand is something that is hard to quantify and because of the volitile nature of the market it’s also difficult to predict demand.
But I’m sure that if they took a say 3060 TI, gave it a single DP mini output, a basic cooler design and no RGB on a cheap boring green PCB and gave them volume discounts it would go over pretty well and not hamper their resale value overly much.
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Given the amount of data available now I would be very shocked if they didnt have this data. Credit card companies harvest data, stores harvest data, etc etc. I am sure they can purchase data that will tell them in aggregate that miners are buying X% of cards out there. The ones they probably cant really track well are the cards that get resold on the secondary market by scalpers. But I doubt the miners are buying from them.

I personally, and this is not a personal attack its a general statement, think its naive for consumers to think that major companies are entirely unaware of the demographics of who buys their product. Or that manufacturers cannot get detailed data (anonymized of course) about these sales from retailers and/or credit card companies.
 
kju1 said:
Given the amount of data available now I would be very shocked if they didnt have this data. Credit card companies harvest data, stores harvest data, etc etc. I am sure they can purchase data that will tell them in aggregate that miners are buying X% of cards out there. The ones they probably cant really track well are the cards that get resold on the secondary market by scalpers. But I doubt the miners are buying from them.

I personally, and this is not a personal attack its a general statement, think its naive for consumers to think that major companies are entirely unaware of the demographics of who buys their product. Or that manufacturers cannot get detailed data (anonymized of course) about these sales from retailers and/or credit card companies.
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That’s why I think they want to do a specific line for miners, if they were to do them direct with no frills and limited outputs I think miners would buy especially if their MSRP was below the gaming ones. The colour matched PCB’s, stylized shrouds, RGB, and multitude of outputs adds cost strip all that out and maybe shave $20-30 bucks off a card. Offer to sell them in bulk orders to the miners and they could get a bit there too so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them. Resale down the line wouldn’t be hurt too bad, assuming NVidia doesn’t offer a trade in program.
 
auntjemima said:
I don't think anyone disagrees... But to say "we don't know if there is a mining demand" is pretty asinine.
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More 'will it last longer than the 2-3 months to produce the cards before the inevitable crash and boomer tears'.
 
deruberhanyok said:
Surely you’re not suggesting that miners aren’t in it for the long haul?
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Well, most the fools ducked-out the last time the market took a crash

When you can't make money, there's no point in sitting on your GPU army waiting for years for another spike. Or do you have some magical fucking knowledge that the next crash will only last a month?

This is why I feel like there "Critically-cut" GPUs will find no market - who do you unload these compute-only cards to when nobody wants to mine for the next two years?

It's much easier to unload your completely-functional GPUs for half what you paid; as anyone still buying mining-only cards is going to offer you pennies-on-the-dollar!
 
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defaultluser said:
Well, most the fools ducked-out the last time the market took a crash

When you can't make money, there's no point in sitting on your GPU army waiting for years for another spike. Or do you have some magical fucking knowledge that the next crash will only last a month?

This is why I feel like there "Critically-cut" GPUs will find no market - who do you unload these compute-only cards to when nobody wants to mine for the next two years?

It's much easier to unload your completely-functional GPUs for half what you paid; as anyone still buying mining-only cards is going to offer you pennies-on-the-dollar!
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I think there may be a market for cheap GPU's that don't have any of the bling that are designed for an open-air environment, no RGB, no stylized shrouds, and the most basic components and design to meet the requirements with little room for alteration. If they limit the outputs on it to a single DP or DPMini connector it would still have some resale value in the second-hand markets down the line and would also let them purchase them in bulk for less than they could the gaming branded ones. NVidia could also test the waters with a form of buyback program for this.
 
Lakados said:
I think there may be a market for cheap GPU's that don't have any of the bling that are designed for an open-air environment, no RGB, no stylized shrouds, and the most basic components and design to meet the requirements with little room for alteration. If they limit the outputs on it to a single DP or DPMini connector it would still have some resale value in the second-hand markets down the line and would also let them purchase them in bulk for less than they could the gaming branded ones. NVidia could also test the waters with a form of buyback program for this.
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That's what they already did with miner-only cards in the Pascal days. this article is talking about destroying rops, and texture rendering blocks in order to ship a compute-only cut, without any display outputs.

Those two different options are completely different target markets (the one you are talking bout is feasible, but the second is complete horseshit.)

you can be sure they are going o build more Ampere minimal mining GPUs, but this other option of cutting the very heart out of each chip is simply bad value.
 
defaultluser said:
That's what they already did with miner-only cards in the Pascal days. this article is talking about destroying rops, and texture rendering blocks in order to ship a compute-only cut, without any display outputs.

Those two different options are completely different target markets (the one you are talking bout is feasible, but the second is complete horseshiit.

you can be sure they are going o build more Ampere minimal mining GPUs, but this other option of cutting the very heart out of each chip is simply bad value.
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Really depends on how cheap that lets them sell it, if the price drops lower than what they would possibly get for resale 2 years down the road then it technically pays off. For example say they were buying a bunch of 3060TI's at MSRP of $400, with a hopeful resale of $100 2 years down the road, but they were able to sell the cut-down card at $275 with no resale value later then technically they are coming out ahead. So it could work, but it seems pretty far-fetched, but I suppose if they were to do a specific chip for it with all that extra stuff gone the chip itself would be pretty small they could probably get really good yields on it which would further drive down costs. The biggest problem would then be not stepping on the toes of their actual compute cards. I just don't see why it would be an attractive market for NVidia to be in, though it could go a long way towards solving their supply issues going forward.
 
Lakados said:
Really depends on how cheap that lets them sell it, if the price drops lower than what they would possibly get for resale 2 years down the road then it technically pays off. For example say they were buying a bunch of 3060TI's at MSRP of $400, with a hopeful resale of $100 2 years down the road, but they were able to sell the cut-down card at $275 with no resale value later then technically they are coming out ahead. So it could work, but it seems pretty far-fetched, but I suppose if they were to do a specific chip for it with all that extra stuff gone the chip itself would be pretty small they could probably get really good yields on it which would further drive down costs. The biggest problem would then be not stepping on the toes of their actual compute cards. I just don't see why it would be an attractive market for NVidia to be in, though it could go a long way towards solving their supply issues going forward.
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You can't build a mining-cut GPU card without the same VRAM, VRMs and GDDR6 / GDDR6X memory, and the rest of the maze of electrical components on high-end GPUs (so why not buy the real-deal?

I imagine total savings would be under $50.... still a better than the $20 cost reduction that we saw with Pascal mining skus, but not a good value.
 
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