Mining vs Gaming Products or something *spawn*

Nvdia, AMD may see 2018 profits weakened by waning mining GPU demand
22 May 2018
The abrupt waning of the crypto mining craze starting in April is expected to affect the profitability of major graphics card suppliers Nvidia and AMD from the second to fourth quarters of 2018, and players in their supply chains will see weaker earning and shipment growth momentums than a year earlier, according to industry sources.
....
But the sudden decline in demand for mining graphics cards in April caused TUL's (Power Color) revenues for the month to plunge 80% sequentially to NT$280 million, the lowest since May 2017. The other Taiwan makers had scored revenues from motherboards, servers and notebooks in the month, making their actual declines in revenues from graphic cards sales hard to figure out.
https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180521PD205.html

 
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.
 
New Why is this happening, anyway? And is it just a slump, or is the bubble actually bursting?
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
Taiwan graphic cards makers including Asustek Computer, Gigabyte Technology, Micro-Star International (MSI) and TUL have seen their inventories pick up significantly amid the drastic shrinkage in demand from cryptocurrency mining sector. But they have only slightly cut sales prices, maintaining gross margins at around 20%, which, though lower than the previous high of 40-50%, is still twice the level of 8-10% seen in early 2017.
...
Industry sources said that the prospects for cryptocurrency mining will be increasingly dim due to the enhanced crackdowns by governments in many countries, declining mining investment reward, and the possible move by governments to hike the electricity rates for cryptocurrency-mining uses. In fact, many individual miners and small mining farms have quit the market, and some medium and large-size mining farms have also scaled back their procurements of mining devices.

Accordingly, the sources expected the graphic cards supply chain to return in the second half of 2018 to the previous state of serving mainly the gaming sector seen before the rise of the cryptocurrency mining craze. And those makers with weaker deployments in the gaming sector may see their overall shipments of graphic cards fall significantly in the future.

Meanwhile, TUL is stepping up sales of industrial PC and datacenter acceleration cards as part of its efforts to offset the sales decline in mining graphic cards, the sources indicated.
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.
 
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NVIDIA to limit mining on gaming cards through drivers, will introduce a new Ampere based cards specifically for miners.

The manufacturer also announced that the upcoming GeForce RTX 3060 will have a special driver that will automatically detect mining-specific algorithms, which will limit the hash rate by 50%. This would ensure that the RTX 3060 would be useful to gamers, not miners.

NVIDIA has never attempted to discourage miners from buying GeForce graphics cards in such a way. It is unclear how the software will work and if this only applies to Windows drivers.

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...rtx-3060-driver-will-limit-mining-performance
 
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.
 
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.
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.
 
They could, and Miners with existing cards would only use older drivers. That won't help anyone on any side much.

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.
 
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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.
 
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