Mining vs Gaming Products or something *spawn*

Nvdia, AMD may see 2018 profits weakened by waning mining GPU demand
22 May 2018

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180521PD205.html

 

Why is this happening, anyway? And is it just a slump, or is the bubble actually bursting?

 

Expectation of Ethereum switch from PoW to PoS?

 

Worth remembering Jensen did state that he saw Crypto revenue going forward to be flat or reducing allowing a return to focus on gaming albeit with the caveat that crypto mining segment is highly volatile in terms of supple/demand.
But then his statements do seem to swing a lot each month lol; in February stated looking forward in 2018 flat to decline for crypto mining, then maybe a month ago I think he mentioned crypto mining-blockchain here to stay however maybe context is slightly different POV between each of his statement as he did not see it has a primary-core revenue driver for Nvidia.

Makes one wonder if part of the delay for next Geforce models is to tie into the crypto mining slump to keep the revenue-growth narrative strong, or at least contributed to strategic decision along with component-BOM pricing,logistics, the ideal product cycle window from a business perspective; part of such a decision process though would also hold back Quadro/Tesla so *shrug* although they have the V100 versions for now.

 

Bitcoin Gold, a hard fork from Bitcoin, suffered from a 51% hashing attack from an unknown hacker.

Although that particular crypto wasn't very strong at all and not that much money was lost (only $18 Million were reportedly lost), it brought the attention to everyone about the dangers of a centralized cryptocurrency.

And since Bitcoin itself is heavily centralized on Bitmain (a chinese mining company), everyone became aware that Bitcoin is a lot more fragile than it was generally thought.
So Bitcoin suffered its monthly crash and all other cryptos followed, as usual.

 

Bitcoin Gold unfortunately shares an algorithm which is also used by a much larger coin ZCash (which is the original user of the algorithm IIRC). Zcash's total nethash is about 20 times more than BTG. That means it's relatively easy to find a lot of hash power out there to attack a smaller coin. However, the attack is not cheap, it's been estimated that the attacker spend ~0.12BTC per minute to rent enough hash power for the attack. Of course, the attack is still hugely profitable.

Also it's actually not about "the dangers of a centralized cryptocurrency," quite the opposite. it shows the danger of huge number of smaller coins, as those smaller coins are not as secure as the large coins (which is, ironically, similar to the case of sovereign debts...). It could drive people to the larger coins and make it's much harder to sell smaller coins (which IMHO not a bad thing).

One big problem with the current PoW system is, unfortunately, most "miners" are just doing the hash, not the validation. Therefore, it kinds of invalidate the idea of PoW, because those miners are just printing tickets for a much smaller number of real validaters, and it's those validaters who have the potential to disrupt a blockchain. That's why there are various PoS schemes being proposed.

 

Graphic cards firms to see shipments fall on weak mining demand in 2H18
Tuesday 19 June 2018

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180619PD205.html

 

If hardware companies were totally earnest about selling to PC gamers instead of miners, I'm sure the swarms of highly intelligent software engineers over there could come up with some driver limitations against mining use.

Maybe.

edit: Obviously, for all existing GPU families it's already too late, as miners would only switch to older drivers. But for upcoming architectures, it could be doable.

 

I'm sure the miners will just do a few INI/Hex Edits and circumvent all that anyways.

I have an overly pessimistic outlook on gamers actually ever being able to pick up these new toys.

 

*badumm_tssss*
https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...rtx-3060-driver-will-limit-mining-performance

 

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

 

I hope the mining algorithm detection won't screw up other stuff....

 

So far it seems to be only for upcoming 3060. I don't think they have the right to enforce this on existing cards. 3060 haven't launched yet so they can decide however they wish and customers will choose a product accordingly.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16493/nvidia-launches-cmp-dedicated-mining-hardware

 

They could, and Miners with existing cards would only use older drivers. That won't help anyone on any side much.

Those (from minerstat) are already at suggested powerlimits/undervolts/downclocks, in case you were wondering how Nvidia would want to compete with 90HX against an RTX 3080.

 

I'd guess the next possible step would be accelerate plans for a refresh of the product stack. Perhaps this was a contributing factor to the sudden delays of additional Ampere SKU releases that hit the rumour mill? Maybe even the 3080ti staggering could be to monitor how this turns out.

3060, 3070ti (new GA104, likely discontinue 3070), 3080ti (already rumoured, new GA102) as the new "gaming" SKUs with this lock, as these are typically the ones that I'd assume command a higher margin (eg. I doubt 3060ti and 3070 actually cost anymore near $100 difference in unit costs). While the cut die configs due to yield get effectively relegated to mining, OEM sales or "lucky" finds in retail for purely gaming.

 

Or they could just change the IDs of current models for future cards and limit them to the same driver version as a minimum.

 

Could existing card owners sue nvidia if mining as feature was gimped? It would be new waters if existing feature is removed from a card retroactively? New models is different if the restrictions is communicated up front.

 

Nv never promised anything on the hash rate performance of any of their GPUs.