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bigcheesegs | 4 years ago

> it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel

This is very obviously wrong. The economics of crypto mining are almost entirely dominated by power cost. Nvidia's decision here simply means they will use other hardware, not more of the LHR hardware.

Nvidia already can't make enough GPUs to satisfy demand. Why would they try to increase undesirable demand (which is going away soon anyway, at least for ETH).

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sleepybrett|4 years ago

I'm not sure nvidia actually sees mining as 'undesirable demand' .. sells cards, makes them money. They wouldn't give a shit if people were buying them to use as firewood.

z3c0|4 years ago

If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but it does not change my point that a single company being able to bottleneck a resource is problematic.

lukeschlather|4 years ago

The resources are bottlenecked due to the chip shortage, which happened because the entire automotive industry mis-forecast demand for the pandemic. All the GPU manufacturers have the same problem: they don't want to build GPU production lines for a market that is going away. The problem isn't Nvidia, it's proof of work, which will bottleneck as many resources as it can by design.

This is what happens when you try and build a planetary messaging system with inefficiency as a design goal.