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NVIDIA To Launch Graphics Cards Specifically Designed For Digital Currency Mining (cnbc.com)
Digital currency mining is in high demand, causing GPU prices to skyrocket. Nvidia is planning to capitalize on this trend by releasing graphics cards specifically designed for cryptocurrency. From a product listing on ASUS' website: "ASUS Mining P106 is designed for coin mining with high-efficiency components --
delivering maximum hash-rate production at minimum cost. ASUS Mining P106 enhances the megahash rate by up to 36% compared cards in the same segment that are not tailored for mining. The new card is also engineered to be seriously durable, enabling 24/7 operation for uninterrupted coin production." The ASUS Mining P106 uses an Nvidia chip, according to the specifications page on the website. CNBC reports: Nvidia, AMD and ASUS have not officially announced the digital currency mining cards, according to their website press pages. It is not certain when the cards will be available for sale. Nvidia is likely making the cards designed for this use so that the surging digital currency demand doesn't affect its ability to serve the lucrative PC gaming market.
Selling shovels to gold miners is a much better and more profitable business than gold mining.
Miner miner fourty-niner.
If you care that much buy a dedicated asic to do it.
Cryptocurrencies are moving towards being mineless. Most of the newer cryptocurrencies can't be mined and bitcoin and ethereum and moving towards an upgrade that will remove mining to a much more efficient system (that uses less than 1/1000th of the energy mining does). They are moving to a "Proof-of-stake" system from a "Proof-of-work" system.
It is the nature of cryptocurrency mining that the more people mine, the less each one gets in actual value. Making the hardware cheaper will let more people in, but will also reduce the payoff.
I understand why nVidia would want to "protect" its graphics cards from being snapped up for off-label uses, and I imagine AMD would like to do the same, and this should work -- for them. But for the miners (especially the ones who already bought hardware), it's going to dilute the value of mining significantly.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
You mine your gold by selling the shovels.
Are they going to sell these for less money than they will mine within a year or two? Maybe Nvidia should just keep them.
You really have to wonder what the total cost of electricity (and CO2) has been for this nonsense. For what is essentially just a failure to come up with a better software technique.
This is pure marketing on the part of ASUS, all they did was cut out all the display ports and call it "Mining oriented!" It doesn't really do anything beyond a normal GTX 1060. It should be noted that AIBs have almost no control over GPUs, they are there to slap branding on it and take over warranty duties. They're a bit like car dealerships, in that they're middle men and I'm not sure why they exist anymore. Which isn't to say AMD and Nvidia won't be putting out newer GPU types that'd get more out of AI/Sim/Mining etc. eventually. Just that they haven't yet, and so any claim that an AIB has is bullshit.
The whole grinding for hashes is such a waste of time and energy. Imagine if, instead of simply grinding for some random number, that same amount of time and energy were applied to, say, any of a number of distributed computing projects that actually serve humanity in some sense? *ANYTHING* than just turning an expensive computer into a space-heating paperweight...
> But...but...this makes me money!!
While *some* may be making money off these schemes, until it's offsetting your electric bill, the cost of a rig that puts many gamers to shame, and pays your rent, it's a money pit and little more. This doesn't even consider the lack of any kind of economic backing; there's no commodity, no production, that backs these cryptocurrencies. Their value is reflected by the speculation of its holders. You may as well trade baseball cards.
granted.. Still, I'd like to buy a gfx card for a sane price.
In 1929 when Joe Kennedy (JFK's dad) was getting his shoes polished, the shoe shine boy told him a tip about some hot stocks to buy. That's when he realized it was time to GTFO of the market, and so he remained a rich man and later was able to finance his son's career in politics.
The miners are killing the enthusiast market. They may pay top dollar for gaming hardware, but they aren't stupid: demand-based pricing and scarcity means they will take their dollars elsewhere.
Non-graphics uses for GPUs have been around since 2004 or so. I recall Nvidia releasing headless GPUs for these purposes years ago. I also believe the numerous scientists and engineers using GPGPU don't have much idle time to spare, as supercomputer time is expensive.
So I'd really like to know what makes these GPUs mining-only. In my understanding, it's either an ASIC for a specific algorithm, or a general-purpose GPU which could be used for science/tech and mining alike.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
If all the graphics card used by the miners were put to use for folding@home or SETI, we would have cured cancer, Parkinsons, and Alzheimers by now.. .... AND we would have found aliens.
But oh no.... gotta waste the world's resources on make believe instead for personal greed.
Humanity sucks.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Am I missing something? being a more efficient GPU miner is like being a more efficient Model T ford. GPU mining is far beyond being competitive that a 30% increase in performance wouldn't be enough to make it worthwhile even if they were giving them away compared to an ASIC.
Joe Kennedy...i.e. the Kennedy family, made their fortune running moonshine during prohibition, so I'm not sure what weed you're smoking to peddle this version, fyi.
I thought graphics card mining went the way of the dodo years ago when the 1st block erupter asics hit the market? The asics were and are far faster, cheaper and less power hungry than graphics cards. Sure the cards have improved since then, but so have the asics as well.
I guess at least with graphics card mining you are still left with a graphics card to use for its intended purpose, rather than a huge paperweight when the average asic is no longer cost effective to run and you have to upgrade it again. and there really is no use for these things than the purpose the asics were built for. I guess you have a space heater when winter time rolls around.
To the business of mining the issue is how long does it take to make a return on my investment? You want to make money, you need to have a hardware setup that makes it pay to mine... Pay the hardware costs and the power bill.
BitCon (and other mined currencies) already have scads of mining hardware setups that can produce hashes for less power and cost than I could ever imagine a GPU would be capable of. I've already seen the price dropping on USB hashing ASICS on E-bay so much that new ones are no longer being made and used ones are approaching a dime a dozen. That tells me that the market for hashing hardware is saturated and unless you can drive the operating costs per hash down significantly there is no market.
Plus, as BitCoin gets older, the mining return keeps declining. The time to get into mining, and selling equipment to miners is quickly passing. It's like walking into the mountains and taking orders for shovels after most of the gold is already gone.... You might sell a few...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
NVIDIA isn't launching shit, ASUS is making mining cards from both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.
They can custom produce hardware for each digital currency that interests them. Keep the hardware in-house and mine the shit out of their targets.
Beware of people saying "I have this great system to make money, that I don't use myself, but you should pay me money to buy into it!".
Are they really GRAPHICS cards then, or really "DIGITAL CURRENCY MINING" cards?
-Styopa
that the political family connections he had tipped him off so he could get out of the market before it crashed. But hey, the shoe shine story sounds much happier and lets go on us pretend we're not an oligarchy where privilege and nepotism are weighted more than good sense. I suppose if I was going to pass a story down I'd pick it instead of "nepotism".
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Only during a gold rush. They don't last forever. Eventually you do run out of fools. For a while.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
as are the ransom payments, which is why both currencies exist as more than a curiosity. Wanna stop both? Legalize drugs, implement Nordic style drug rehab everywhere and take care of your poor (especially the well educated ones that can't get jobs) so they stop looking to shady ways to make a living.
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Not Asus, nVidia. AMD will also release a headless card too. It's said these are binned chips that would otherwise have been shitcanned. However, the RAM has been optimized for improved mining performance, or so it's been rumored.
It's like those frozen chickens that are reaching their expiration date. Rather than toss them, they get cooked in a rotisserie and sold as a secondary product.
One of the reasons GPU mining is preferable over ASIC (and up to a point FPGA) mining is that the leftover GPU can be resold at a used marketplace, keeping some of its value. This is more of a "hedge" against a probable market crash.
On the other hand dedicated cards have almost no resale value (maybe 10% compared to 50% of a one year old GPU), taking away a huge value from the initial investment.
Of course there will be some buyers, but I personally will stay away from them, unless they come with a 40% discount (which is very unlikely to happen).
The miners have been buying up all the mid-tier GPU cards. The RX 480 is edging up to $300 and now miners are buying up 1060s.
AMD got fucked by the last big mining wave. Miners bought up the cards, raising the price and discouraging consumer purchasing, then dumped them on the market afterwards. This both cut into their market share (of gamers as seen on Steam stats) and flooded the market with old, but still good cards when the miners sold them off.
This could help protect NVIDIA's consumer market, thought I don't know if their cards will be out soon enough
unless the *profit* from selling them is greater than the return they would get for using it for cryptocurrency mining. If they could just mine currency, they can have the hardware at cost and be RICH!
Given that their profit is much less than the consumer cost of the unit and they aren't even interested, someone buying one should probably be skeptical of the value of these units.
Should the generation of cryptocurrency be the function of a graphics card? I thought that a graphics card's purpose is to process the various graphics operations so that they get optimal performance in the latest and greatest displays, such as 4K
For something like cryptocurrency, why not have dedicated DSPs that one can plug into the PCI-E slot of a motherboard? Or, if it's to be hooked to a laptop, have an add-on module that can be connected via Superspeed USB, and have the laptop kick off operations to the module and then go about its own business, while the module continues generating money for whichever entity.
Well, that's what happened the first time around. A gpu based hash generator was developed first. Eventually, generating valid hashes was made more difficult such that gpus were no longer sufficient. A rash of specific ASICs followed, and the prices for radeon gpus slowly dropped (nvidia cuda on geforce was/is intentionally crippled). Seems like this time around, the price hike seems to affect both nvidia and amd. 1070s used to be 350-400.. A quick check on amazon shows the cheapest one at 500.
As I understand it proof of stake always fails because nothing prevents double spending by devious miners/minters.
The real problem is that the work done by bitcoin is useless work. What one needs is to convert it to useful work. And not just useful work in the public interest, like say SETI at home, but useful work that have actual value, and hopefully value close to the energy input.
I've listened to the Etherium tech talks and while it seems like a bunch of smoke and mirrors as described by it's enthusiasts, I do get a hint that etherium will at some point actually compute on paid computational program submissions.
maybe I have that wrong about etherium, but that's what wil win in the end.
right now the only way to win with bot coin is to find some use for 100KW of heat that is worth the value of 100KW of electricity. Like maybe growing weed or orchids or shrimp.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There is not particular reason why we need to burn cpu for this.
There is no security reason to require fining the 'nonce' that causes a hash with four zeros 0000.
That is an arbitrary requirement designed to emulate scarcity (when combined wtih the decreasing payout of "mining").
The same result can be achieved with "proof of elapsed time", "proof of stake", or others which perhaps reward randomly.
The point is to encourage nodes in the network for processing transaction (and perhaps to emulate a deflationary currency).
Generating 0000 hashes is one way to do this, but very wasteful.
A GPU is already a PCIe attached chip with a large number of number processing units in it. All the supporting bits and pieces are already part of the chip. Makes sense to use this, rather than develop a new chip.
I wouldn't be surprised if the chip NVidia is contributing is an uncrippled Pascal chip, which is what they sell for parallel computations already.
So, if one of these cards costs $500, and it can generate $500 in Bitcoin in 6 months, why are they selling it instead of using it? They should stop retail sales immediately and focus on making Bitcoin!
OTOH, if the card can't pay for itself, why would anyone invest in it? This is a conundrum.
It sounds very much like the TV huckster who wants to show us how to make millions in real estate. If he knows this secret, why is he wasting time with us?
...omphaloskepsis often...
There's always VDI as well. Not just GPGPU.
It's a _graphics card_ configured to do a job for which there already is _specialized hardware_, it will be slow and expensive in any comparison. If you want to do Bitcoin mining you buy Bitcoin mining hardware, not real-time 3D graphics hardware.
Should the generation of cryptocurrency be the function of a graphics card? I thought that a graphics card's purpose is to process the various graphics operations so that they get optimal performance in the latest and greatest displays, such as 4K
GPUs are also used in image processing (IP) and computer vision (CV), and various other computationally intense non-cryptocurrency tasks. Also a stand alone graphics card is not necessary to drive the display if you are just at the desktop OS, its games and other 3D apps that need the GPU.
Someone doing IP/CV/etc could use one of the "cryptocurrency" cards for their needs while letting the embedded Intel graphics drive the desktop.
This is pure marketing on the part of ASUS, all they did was cut out all the display ports and call it "Mining oriented!" It doesn't really do anything beyond a normal GTX 1060.
Other computationally intense tasks could use cards of this nature as well, image processing, computer vision, etc. Pretty much anything that lends itself to parallel processing. Think of the specialized parallel processing machines based upon GPUs, this is just a consumer oriented version.
Maybe PR statements about cryptocurrency are pure marketing but the underlying hardware is not. It has uses beyond the crypto mining "fads" that come and go with 10x spikes in cryptocurrency pricing that temporarily makes home mining "profitable".
You may as well trade baseball cards.
Magic the gather cards not baseball cards. :-)
""Mt. Gox"
"In late 2006, programmer [redact] thought of building a website for users of the Magic: The Gathering Online fantasy-based card game service, to let them trade "Magic: The Gathering Online" cards like stocks."
"In July 2010, [redact] read about bitcoin on Slashdot, and decided that the bitcoin community needed an exchange for trading bitcoin and regular currencies."
"Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Launched in July 2010, by 2013 and into 2014 it was handling over 70% of all bitcoin transactions worldwide, as the largest bitcoin intermediary and the world's leading bitcoin exchange.
In February 2014, Mt. Gox suspended trading, closed its website and exchange service, and filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors. In April 2014, the company began liquidation proceedings.
Mt. Gox announced that approximately 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing and likely stolen, an amount valued at more than $450 million at the time. Although 200,000 bitcoins have since been "found", the reason(s) for the disappearance—theft, fraud, mismanagement, or a combination of these—were initially unclear. New evidence presented in April 2015 by Tokyo security company WizSec led them to conclude that "most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the Mt. Gox hot wallet over time, beginning in late 2011.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If it was the equivalent of a shovel, it wouldn't be so bad. With ASIC machines that are in the order of 10,000 times faster for approximately the same price, this is like selling shovel handles to the miners.
I want to base my entire political and social system on it's the occasional pang of conscience from a member of the ruling elite.
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Ban them. Like in Europe.
Nvidia will release graphic cards specifically designed for cryptocurrency mining through its partners, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Name your source or it didn't happen. Then further down in the article it contradicts itself by saying:
Nvidia, AMD and ASUS have not officially announced the digital currency mining cards, according to their website press pages. It is not certain when the cards will be available for sale.
It also clearly says ASUS __ONLY__ has announced a specific card with this purpose in mine, specifically the MINING-P106-6G. The more logical explanation for this is that modern graphics cards contain APU's not GPU's that can be used for high speed general purpose computing like Physics calculations. We already know this. Because ASUS decided to use it for this purpose doesn't say anything about AMD or NVIDIA endorses this or created reference boards for this purpose. The article is clickbait GARBAGE! I'd be highly skeptical of CNBC for having poor journalism at this point.
We'll make great pets
Sometimes shovel handles break. Sometimes ASICs don't exist for a given coin yet.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Only during a gold rush. They don't last forever. Eventually you do run out of fools. For a while.
Unlike crytocurrency, gold is an actual finite resource on the planet, so the analogies aren't exactly fitting.
To prove my point, watch and see how [NextGenCoin] creates a new "rush" to mine.
The "rush" in this activity is also based around the valuation. The larger the investment by powerful people, the more cryptocurrency values will be artificially inflated and maintained.
(Yeah, I know, sounds a lot like other forms of traditional currency...)
Did you first check whether it's a historical truth that much of human enlightenment has depended upon this exact thing? Because if you didn't, you might be throwing the only successful system we've ever had out the window with the bath water.
Show me the political system that hasn't depended upon this, and presently works better than the current environment of anti-bipartisan American politics.
David Zetland on Water
Glorious visions of human affairs lacking intellectual rigour are also hard to rely on.
My own standard of rigour includes honesty. Superficially ridiculous is not enough. One also has to prove there's actually something with less blemished skin that has ever worked. (Diogenes was a wimp. He should have spent his pointless existence searching for an honest libertarian.)
Libertarians basically believe that linear superposition applies to giant systems. If for any x, with enough cleverness, one can make a market to good social and economic effect, then for any 7000 different {x}s, you can instigate all these independent markets to good social and economic effect at the same time with correspondingly large benefits.
Perhaps, but I wouldn't want to rely on it.
This is funny, because in software, we can barely manage to compose three desiderata (quality/scope/budget), on a good day.
Markets sure look good set against the backdrop of social equity accumulated by other means over hundreds of years (the British enlightenment took place on the backs of exceptional individuals whose existence one wouldn't wish to have to rely upon).
What other idea, postulated for the highest reach of human complexity, circulates on the founding metaphor of frictionless composability?
That any experienced software person bites on this for a millisecond seriously blows my mind.
Canice Prendergast on How Prices Can Improve a Food Fight (and Help the Poor)
Here's a guy who designed a market clean sheet and actually got it right. Glorious when it happens, I'm totally with you on that point.
Two reasons:
1. A $500 card can only generate $500 in bitcoins in 6 months when it also sucks down $500 worth of electricity.
Bullshit, pure unmitigated bullshit. You know nothing of which you speak. For instance, just using my one cheap nvidia 1060 to mine the Ethereum coin when I'm not otherwise using my computer I make around $60 pure profit per month and it hardly affects my power bill. And that's just at the current coin value, if I don't trade the coin for $ but sit on it instead it could end up being worth far far more.
Idiots like you and grandparent poster are why everyone isn't doing it. Those who do even the most basic research and math do do it even if just a little with what they have on hand.
Might as well have said, "Let them eat cake!" If all of the humans were to volunteer for worthy causes instead of wasting the world's resources on gainful employment, all of those good causes would be solved!
GPU miners aren't getting rich from any of this. They're trying to make some living money in a world fucked up by the astronomical greed of a tiny fraction of humanity.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
not in the real world. What's really needed is a scientific approach to society. Which is to say: Recognize that no system will ever be prefect and will require constant adjustment. Accept that you can be wrong and that there is no bedrock to stand on. You're standing on a bedrock of Libertarianism. It'll crumble and when it does you won't move. What's worse, you'll grab everyone around you and try to force them to stand on that crumbling infrastructure with you.
Until we are each and every one a God unto itself we'll be vulnerable to change. Progressivism can be summed up with the old "I only know I know nothing". It's only principle is to take care of everyone because all humanity deserves a good life simply by being born human. e.g. nobody gets left behind. After that it's just about how you get there. The end justify the means, and if you screw up (and you will) you bend in the wind and change. The entire system becomes one of careful measurement and continuous improvement. E.g. Science.
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