THG: Nvidia Mulls Restarting Cryptomining GPU Production

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.
Could be a supply thing, cutting out all those components off the chip would reduce its physical size by at least half, which would not only let them get double the chips off a single wafer but also slightly better yields due to the greatly simplified design. So NVidia could position it as "You can get 50 of these now and get started, or you can spend the next 4-6 months trickling in the gaming parts while your competitors get the jump on you"

It's not a good value but I can see how NVidia could strong-arm a market for it.
 
Could be a supply thing, cutting out all those components off the chip would reduce its physical size by at least half, which would not only let them get double the chips off a single wafer but also slightly better yields due to the greatly simplified design. So NVidia could position it as "You can get 50 of these now and get started, or you can spend the next 4-6 months trickling in the gaming parts while your competitors get the jump on you"

It's not a good value but I can see how NVidia could strong-arm a market for it.
Gotta give it to you, you will jump through all the hoops to give NVIDIA an out to sell to miners while making it sound like no impact to gamers, which of course is the entire reason behind the propaganda published by THG.
 
Gotta give it to you, you will jump through all the hoops to give NVIDIA an out to sell to miners while making it sound like no impact to gamers, which of course is the entire reason behind the propaganda published by THG.
I just want to buy a video card, my F5 skills are shit and I will not support the scalpers, may they burn in hell.
 
NV isn't just a gaming company. With that said they built their name that way and I don't begrudge them making money any way they can. They just need to be honest where they are making their money and hopefully they do so with their investor guides and guidance. If not then sue them again.

Anyway, I own no AMD or NV stock or any other interest in those companies so I don't have a dog in this hunt to curse either for making money. Neither seems to be able to supply the market at this time and prices reflect that. However, I'm not going to stop buying either companies products because they decide to sell to miners as well as gamers. That's just good business at this time. Gamers aren't a protected species.

PC gaming is getting expensive from this point forward if you want to be on the bleeding edge. Well, it always was expensive on the bleeding edge. Nothing new here.

Edit: Let me clarify myself.

I believe if NV had released all of their product at retail that we might be slightly better off. But I believe miners would have simply used bots to buy everything though they might not have gotten all. I'm not so sure it mattered either way with the BC increasing in price like it did. We'll really never know.
 
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NV isn't just a gaming company. With that said they built their name that way and I don't begrudge them making money any way they can. They just need to be honest where they are making their money and hopefully they do so with their investor guides and guidance. If not then sue them again.

Anyway, I own no AMD or NV stock or any other interest in those companies so I don't have a dog in this hunt to curse either for making money. Neither seems to be able to supply the market at this time and prices reflect that. However, I'm not going to stop buying either companies products because they decide to sell to miners as well as gamers. That's just good business at this time. Gamers aren't a protected species.

PC gaming is getting expensive from this point forward if you want to be on the bleeding edge. Well, it always was expensive on the bleeding edge. Nothing new here.

Edit: Let me clarify myself.

I believe if NV had released all of their product at retail that we might be slightly better off. But I believe miners would have simply used bots to buy everything though they might not have gotten all. I'm not so sure it mattered either way with the BC increasing in price like it did. We'll really never know.
Double liked for posterity.

If anything the Tariff and price increases help the miners because they don’t pay that increase.
 
If one of the problems is GDDR6X supply, then they can't really save money because inferior memory chips are useless to the current crop of miners. Inferior GPUs aren't as big of a deal as long as the memory is fast enough.
 
I don't think anyone disagrees... But to say "we don't know if there is a mining demand" is pretty asinine.
They didn't say they didn't know there was demand, there obviously is. They said they are not sure how it affects pricing.

To me, this would come down to who is buying the scalper priced cards, is it miners? Not sure that is something they can just divine out of thin air. You can assume Miners get "some" of the normal priced market as well as "some" of the scalper market even. Who the hell knows how much. Part of the pricing is also where the card is manufactured, Chinese made have high tariffs applied to them atm.

It's a slew of issues causing shortages - covid, materials/supplemental parts, possibly yield, but also and most importantly: fab availability. New cell phones want chips, car manufacturers want chips, Xbox wants chips, PS5 wants chips, AMD gpus want chips, Nvidia gpus want chips. Everyone wants chips are there are 2 companies (not sure how many fabs) that can make these?? But if there are chips that have defective portions that do not affect mining uses, by all means make them into cards for that purpose. It should help alleviate some of the scalping and shortages. Gamers will generally not want these cards, so miners would 'theoretically' have an easier time procuring them than they currently have getting gamer cards. And ultimately it means more chips get produced/used. Since a supply that isn't meeting demand is the issue, this can't hurt. If they are lying and are playing up to the mining market and just going to redirect chips, that sucks for us and would piss me off. Then again, they do not have any obligation to make a chip for me to use as a GPU. And whining about it isn't going to accomplish anything. If they don't even need the gamer market, we are fucked.
 
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The gamer's market is more reliable than the miner market. They can pretty much calculate the increasing demand over time for gaming graphics cards. They cannot calculate the urgency or market timing of the crypto booms.

I would think they could also calculate the need for their AI products, but then you hear something out of left field like Tesla partnered with AMD to make the chips for their automated driving systems? That makes no sense because Nvidia has been working on the AI stack products? I guess nvidia must have overpriced their bid.
 
I would think they could also calculate the need for their AI products, but then you hear something out of left field like Tesla partnered with AMD to make the chips for their automated driving systems? That makes no sense because Nvidia has been working on the AI stack products? I guess nvidia must have overpriced their bid.
I heard Tesla is partnering for AMD to power their video game console / media center computer in their car, not for the automated driving system. Was this announced since ?
 
I heard Tesla is partnering for AMD to power their video game console / media center computer in their car, not for the automated driving system. Was this announced since ?
No, Tesla designs their own silicon for the AI systems and has it manufactured by TSMC. It was being made by Samsung’s 12nm process but they recently made the migration to TSMC’s 7nm. The AMD stuff is strictly for the media console and its only given info on the GPU nothing on the CPU nor the OS.
 
Bad yield at Nvidia from Samsung is a huge lie.
How does it come, the only cards that come repeatedly in stock are the RTX 3090. Not because the other 3060Ti or 3070 or 3080, particularly the 3080, are bought faster because they never get stocks.
Because there are so many RTX 3090 sold meanwhile no RTX 3080, this means there are no problems with yields at Samsung manufacturing. This is the same manufactured piece of silicone. Even more, this means there is no DDR6x shortage since RTX 3090 consumes 2.4 more than RTX 3080.
AMD and Nvidia are selling really big chips and only those and this is new and the only reason for the shortage. They cannot have missed that and even better, they made the move together at the same time. Them and Intel who evades competition, have created some kind of a GPU Cartel against the people.
 
Bad yield at Nvidia from Samsung is a huge lie.
How does it come, the only cards that come repeatedly in stock are the RTX 3090. Not because the other 3060Ti or 3070 or 3080, particularly the 3080, are bought faster because they never get stocks.
Because there are so many RTX 3090 sold meanwhile no RTX 3080, this means there are no problems with yields at Samsung manufacturing. This is the same manufactured piece of silicone. Even more, this means there is no DDR6x shortage since RTX 3090 consumes 2.4 more than RTX 3080.
AMD and Nvidia are selling really big chips and only those and this is new and the only reason for the shortage. They cannot have missed that and even better, they made the move together at the same time. Them and Intel who evades competition, have created some kind of a GPU Cartel against the people.
"Never waste a good crisis"
 
Bad yield at Nvidia from Samsung is a huge lie.
How does it come, the only cards that come repeatedly in stock are the RTX 3090. Not because the other 3060Ti or 3070 or 3080, particularly the 3080, are bought faster because they never get stocks.
Because there are so many RTX 3090 sold meanwhile no RTX 3080, this means there are no problems with yields at Samsung manufacturing. This is the same manufactured piece of silicone. Even more, this means there is no DDR6x shortage since RTX 3090 consumes 2.4 more than RTX 3080.
AMD and Nvidia are selling really big chips and only those and this is new and the only reason for the shortage. They cannot have missed that and even better, they made the move together at the same time. Them and Intel who evades competition, have created some kind of a GPU Cartel against the people.
I agree. Its all bullshit. Both companies and set to make as much profit as possible. They choose to sell to miners. If a couple of their cards trickle through the cracks and are sold to people who actually game on them, so be it.
 
I agree. Its all bullshit. Both companies and set to make as much profit as possible. They choose to sell to miners. If a couple of their cards trickle through the cracks and are sold to people who actually game on them, so be it.
Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. If they hadn’t sold to Miners first probably at a higher margin they would have been sued by their shareholders and they would have lost.
 
Gonna have to be that guy and tell you girls the uncomfortable truth, so pull your pants down and start lubing up your precious booty holes because I'm gonna break down multiple reasons why gamers are no longer NVIDIA's bread and butter: It was only in the last few years that we have see that the server business is now more profitable than gaming. It's obvious to any economist and professional user if you just look at the facts: Just by looking at the 3090 CUDA core count alone that it arbitrarily doubled, yet provide no linear performance boost in gaming as we're starting to see in the benchmark scores, however if you're a professional user these are a boon for you. VRAM also doubled, yet are not good to gamers but are an absolute must to 3d designers and machine learning scientists. And now we have SLI support being axed completely, yet NVLink will freely available to the 3090's.

hmmmmmmmmm... I wonder why.

Still don't believe me? Well NVIDIA now has clients who are buying 27,000 gpu's for their supercomputers, and with the last years pandemic, supply side issues, tariffs, who do you think they're going to capitulate to first when it comes to taking care of first? And guess who else is finding out that RTX's are a hot item, miners. If you are NVIDIA, if you are about profit and staying ahead of the curve in terms of where the technological shift is going, then it's time to realize the gaming division is going to continue ride pine to the big boys like Google, Facebook, and particularly China, and all of the other data giants who are in fierce competition for your and my metadata.

I gotta hand it to their marketing team, they did an excellent job attempting to manipulating the masses that the 3090 was not a TITAN and that they were going to handle the bots until it was too late. when the hardware specs all said otherwise, and Gamers Nexus finally nailing the point home. It's obvious that if they intended it to be a professional card it would eat into their profits from gamers so it's advantageous to appeal to both both audiences to maximize their bottom line. Unfortunately gamers (you guys) are more naive and not nuanced on these things. Additionally, the fact the NDA wasn't lifted until after the GPU was released was by design, they knew this was going to get butchered in reviews for gaming. And my final nail in the coffin to this whole point: If you look at the benchmark scores with rendering programs like Blender, Octane, and V-Ray look at how impressive these scores are with just a 3080. Quick snippet from this report:

"When we wrote our RTX 3080 launch article, we mentioned that it was a “2080 Ti Killer for $700”, but the truth is, this new GPU even has the TITAN RTX in its sights. Versus that, the RTX 3080 is 47% faster, but in comparison to the previously-gen $699 2080 SUPER, it’s 103% faster. It’s 3x faster than the 1080 Ti, released also at $699 a few years ago."

To put this in perspective , running two 2080 Ti's on average scores 738 mpaths from the Chaosgroup benchmark site. The 3080 is at 635. That is a ridiculous performance bump for a fraction of the cost. On top of that, it's also destroying both Quadro RTX 6000 and 8000 which both retail over $4000-5500 and are only averaging 350 on the mpath score. The writing is on the wall boys, just like how all the gaming divisions decided to design for consoles first and pc gamers had to play second fiddle, we're now witnessing the technological shift where data is worth more than oil.

Brave new world, kids.
 
Something, something, dark cyberpunk future. :borg:
Actually, scratch the 'future' part of that - we are actually living in it now, and know what it is officially like to be run, and owned, by the megacorps.

Welp, PC gaming was fun while it lasted!
 
Bad yield at Nvidia from Samsung is a huge lie.
How does it come, the only cards that come repeatedly in stock are the RTX 3090. Not because the other 3060Ti or 3070 or 3080, particularly the 3080, are bought faster because they never get stocks.
Because there are so many RTX 3090 sold meanwhile no RTX 3080, this means there are no problems with yields at Samsung manufacturing. This is the same manufactured piece of silicone. Even more, this means there is no DDR6x shortage since RTX 3090 consumes 2.4 more than RTX 3080.
AMD and Nvidia are selling really big chips and only those and this is new and the only reason for the shortage. They cannot have missed that and even better, they made the move together at the same time. Them and Intel who evades competition, have created some kind of a GPU Cartel against the people.

In general this sounds logical. But you have to remember, a gpu has about 20 different sections on it, some bigger than others. Flaws can be anywhere. Flaws in the big section such as compute units or tensor units are what get mapped out to make the lower end but usable chips. Other sections are more vital (to display output, gaming) and cannot be mapped out, but might be un-necessary sections for compute purposes like mining.
I am camped out in a twitch channel watching for stock alerts, and when the big drops happen, there are always more 3070's than 3080's, and more 3080's than 3090's. From what I have seen in over 3 weeks of newegg shuffles, every day there has been a shuffle, there have been 3070 cards, sometimes 7 or 8 different choices of 3070's. Only 1 day, max 2 days out of >3 weeks were there 3090's, maybe 4 or 5 days there were 3080s. But every day they have shuffled, there have been 3070's. Clearly there is way more supply of 3070's than anything else.

Gonna have to be that guy and tell you girls the uncomfortable truth, so pull your pants down and start lubing up your precious booty holes because I'm gonna break down multiple reasons why gamers are no longer NVIDIA's bread and butter: It was only in the last few years that we have see that the server business is now more profitable than gaming. It's obvious to any economist and professional user if you just look at the facts: Just by looking at the 3090 CUDA core count alone that it arbitrarily doubled, yet provide no linear performance boost in gaming as we're starting to see in the benchmark scores, however if you're a professional user these are a boon for you. VRAM also doubled, yet are not good to gamers but are an absolute must to 3d designers and machine learning scientists. And now we have SLI support being axed completely, yet NVLink will freely available to the 3090's.

hmmmmmmmmm... I wonder why.

Still don't believe me? Well NVIDIA now has clients who are buying 27,000 gpu's for their supercomputers, and with the last years pandemic, supply side issues, tariffs, who do you think they're going to capitulate to first when it comes to taking care of first? And guess who else is finding out that RTX's are a hot item, miners. If you are NVIDIA, if you are about profit and staying ahead of the curve in terms of where the technological shift is going, then it's time to realize the gaming division is going to continue ride pine to the big boys like Google, Facebook, and particularly China, and all of the other data giants who are in fierce competition for your and my metadata.

I gotta hand it to their marketing team, they did an excellent job attempting to manipulating the masses that the 3090 was not a TITAN and that they were going to handle the bots until it was too late. when the hardware specs all said otherwise, and Gamers Nexus finally nailing the point home. It's obvious that if they intended it to be a professional card it would eat into their profits from gamers so it's advantageous to appeal to both both audiences to maximize their bottom line. Unfortunately gamers (you guys) are more naive and not nuanced on these things. Additionally, the fact the NDA wasn't lifted until after the GPU was released was by design, they knew this was going to get butchered in reviews for gaming. And my final nail in the coffin to this whole point: If you look at the benchmark scores with rendering programs like Blender, Octane, and V-Ray look at how impressive these scores are with just a 3080. Quick snippet from this report:

"When we wrote our RTX 3080 launch article, we mentioned that it was a “2080 Ti Killer for $700”, but the truth is, this new GPU even has the TITAN RTX in its sights. Versus that, the RTX 3080 is 47% faster, but in comparison to the previously-gen $699 2080 SUPER, it’s 103% faster. It’s 3x faster than the 1080 Ti, released also at $699 a few years ago."

To put this in perspective , running two 2080 Ti's on average scores 738 mpaths from the Chaosgroup benchmark site. The 3080 is at 635. That is a ridiculous performance bump for a fraction of the cost. On top of that, it's also destroying both Quadro RTX 6000 and 8000 which both retail over $4000-5500 and are only averaging 350 on the mpath score. The writing is on the wall boys, just like how all the gaming divisions decided to design for consoles first and pc gamers had to play second fiddle, we're now witnessing the technological shift where data is worth more than oil.

Brave new world, kids.
Server is more profitable, but the reality is all about the supply being unable to meet demand.

Why in their right mind would a company only serve 1 market (server), when they can serve 3 or more? Ignoring a market leaves money on the table. Server market: highly profitable. Gamer market: profitable, stable, and steadily growing - but also an outlet for those chips that are not 100% perfect or usable in your "premium" server market. 100% perfect chips go in the $6000 cards. 98% perfect and lower go in the gamer cards. 2019-2020 saw a growth of 10% in the gamer market, or + 60 million new gamer pc's. This is an un-ignorable piece of the pie. One would even argue a necessary piece of the pie, as discarding large amounts of chips that are expensive to make is just plain stupidity. Miner market: smaller, but on the plus they make bulk purchases, as well as can use some chips that even your secondary Gamer market couldn't use - but on the minus is also unstable and somewhat cyclical. The Miner market is not your bread and butter, it's just the frosting.
 
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You're all probably thinking too directly. With the resources of NVidia, they'll be sure to come up with a novel idea to retool the sales chain so they don't need to produce the mining cards or gaming cards themself. The story of direct sales to miners from NVidia hinted that GPU dies and GDDR6X chips were sold, and not always fully integrated cards. I can imagine a future, where this chain of events becomes the norm: Nvidia sells dies and chips to miners (some are converted AIBs), who invest in temporary housing PCB's to utilize dies and chips for mining, via MCM PCB's. After X difficulty and/or Y profitability and/or Z months (per a release schedule), they disassemble the temporary housing and permanently integrate the dies and chips onto cards to resell to gamers. NVidia may continue to sell any excess stock to AIB's if they're still around, or to gamers directly at the same time. However, the mass supply will come from used mining re-assemblies. Gamers will disappear forever as the first point of sale.

With Discover, Visa, PayPal getting into crypto, that's a strong backing for its future. Should be enough for any producer to consider a business strategy change.
 
Nvidia has zero interest in selling $100 mining cards while they cant keep anything ampere in stock. They are more than happy with the status quo. They are blowing smoke, nothing more.
 
Nvidia has zero interest in selling $100 mining cards while they cant keep anything ampere in stock. They are more than happy with the status quo. They are blowing smoke, nothing more.
I still think that a dedicated mining card would be 1/3’rd the die size and require a much simpler PCB. They could charge 80% the price and sell 3x as many of them. Miners would buy those as fast as nVidia could pump them out.
 
I still think that a dedicated mining card would be 1/3’rd the die size and require a much simpler PCB. They could charge 80% the price and sell 3x as many of them. Miners would buy those as fast as nVidia could pump them out.
That would take time and money to design and spin up a new chip, even if it's just a cut down of an existing product.
 
That would take time and money to design and spin up a new chip, even if it's just a cut down of an existing product.
If it’s a dedicated product line for a specific intended market NVidia wouldn’t have any problems putting a little coin into the R&D, especially if it let them increase profits, and increase production yields.
 
Nvidia has zero interest in selling $100 mining cards while they cant keep anything ampere in stock. They are more than happy with the status quo. They are blowing smoke, nothing more.
I can easily believe that, if a company could make good mining card why sell them $100 with the current demand, people are ready to buy whole laptop just to mine right now ? at that price point, better keeping them to mine themselves.

Where the $100 come from ?
 
I can easily believe that, if a company could make good mining card why sell them $100 with the current demand, people are ready to buy whole laptop just to mine right now ? at that price point, better keeping them to mine themselves.

Where the $100 come from ?
Really all they need to do is sell it for less than its gaming equivalent. So if they were going after the 3060's for mining and say they wanted to resell those 3060's down the road for $100 then all they need to do is sell it for $100 less than the 3060 and the TCO is equal to or better than the 3060's due to decreased power requirements from the supposedly modified chip. If NVidia then offered some sort of trade-in program to keep those mining cards off the market down the road towards some sort of discount towards the purchase of more mining cards then all the better.
 
You're all probably thinking too directly. With the resources of NVidia, they'll be sure to come up with a novel idea to retool the sales chain so they don't need to produce the mining cards or gaming cards themself. The story of direct sales to miners from NVidia hinted that GPU dies and GDDR6X chips were sold, and not always fully integrated cards. I can imagine a future, where this chain of events becomes the norm: Nvidia sells dies and chips to miners (some are converted AIBs), who invest in temporary housing PCB's to utilize dies and chips for mining, via MCM PCB's. After X difficulty and/or Y profitability and/or Z months (per a release schedule), they disassemble the temporary housing and permanently integrate the dies and chips onto cards to resell to gamers. NVidia may continue to sell any excess stock to AIB's if they're still around, or to gamers directly at the same time. However, the mass supply will come from used mining re-assemblies. Gamers will disappear forever as the first point of sale.

With Discover, Visa, PayPal getting into crypto, that's a strong backing for its future. Should be enough for any producer to consider a business strategy change.
It's begun: https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-publically-endorsing-gpu-mining-farm-tags-it-pcgaming
 
This cycle is going to end like the last cycle. Eventually GPU mining will end up not be profitable enough to continue on a large scale and used cards will hit the market. Both companies will be hit hard because of this. History just has a habit of repeating itself.
We haven't had an AIB be this bold before.
 
Mining cards only make sense when you have the extra capacity to make them or there is a massive component reduction allowing you too make significantly more of them. I don't think either of these things are true, so I wouldn't expect to see them anytime soon.

They are also a riskier investment for miners as they can't be resold to gamers if \ when mining becomes unprofitable.
 
Sad times, imagine wasting all this electricity globally warming the planet so we can get useless speculation hashes.
 
Sad times, imagine wasting all this electricity globally warming the planet so we can get useless speculation hashes.
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You make things with gold that people like you, use every day.

And banking helps our economy function.
 
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