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Nvidia Is Giving Up On the Cryptocurrency Mining Market (latimes.com)
"Nvidia's nine-month crypto gold rush is over," reports the Los Angeles Times. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
"Our core platforms exceeded our expectations, even as crypto largely disappeared," founder and Chief Executive Jensen Huang said Thursday on a conference call. "We're projecting no cryptomining going forward...." Nvidia said it had expected about $100 million in sales of chips bought by currency miners in the fiscal second quarter. Instead, the total was $18 million in the period, and that revenue is likely to disappear entirely in future quarters, the company said.
Investors are expressing their concern at the sudden collapse of what had looked like a billion-dollar business. Three months ago, Nvidia said it generated $289 million in sales from cryptocurrency miners, but warned that demand was declining rapidly and might fall by as much as two-thirds. Even that prediction was too optimistic.
Investors are expressing their concern at the sudden collapse of what had looked like a billion-dollar business. Three months ago, Nvidia said it generated $289 million in sales from cryptocurrency miners, but warned that demand was declining rapidly and might fall by as much as two-thirds. Even that prediction was too optimistic.
Finite currencies have their own problems. They are subject to deflation, and wild price swings. There is a reason all major governments moved away from a gold standard.
GPU production did not substantially increase. Both AMD and Nvidia looked at cryptocoins, realized they were almost certainly a bubble that could pop at any time, and accordingly made no long-term investments to increase production. They pretty much maxed out their contracts with chip foundries (neither make their own chips - Nvidia uses TSMC and Samsung, AMD uses GlobalFoundries and TSMC), but they could never keep up with such an absurd demand spike with existing infrastructure.
Further, the GPUs are hardly useless now. They're already starting to appear on the secondhand market, and be snatched up by gamers. I myself am contemplating getting a second card, if they get cheap enough. The really useless mining hardware are the ASICs - which are pretty tailor-made for the purpose of mining, although I suspect the Bitcoin ASICs might be able to be repurposed to brute-force SHA-256 passwords.
And finally, the headline is a bit inaccurate. Nvidia isn't "giving up". They're just letting shareholders know not to expect another quarter of massive sales volume, because they expect the remaining crypto miners to mostly buy ASICs, not general-purpose cards. (And the glut of used cards is probably going to hurt at least their low-end sales for a year or two - given a choice between this year's $200 card, and last year's $800 card, used, for $200, lots of people will pick the latter.)
There are dozens of other human activities which produce nothing but greenhouse gases.
Unlike gamers who make their GPUs go through 0-100% use cycles, with temperatures ranging from 18 to 100C, most miners, on the the other hand, reduce voltage by default (this greatly increases efficiency) and keep their GPUs constantly loaded, under constant moderate temperatures (below 70C) which does not affect the GPU core lifespan in any significant way. Also mining rigs are usually open and well-ventilated, unlike gamers' PCs which are filled with dust and operate under extreme temperatures.
Or they might be resold.
NVIDIA has never stopped R&D and they did not allocate any significant additional resources to producing cards meant for miners.
People waste money and resources on far more negative things.
Not only has millions of tonnes of greenhouses gases been produced due to mining
Where did THAT come from?
, it has also produced millions of graphics cards that are now useless due to being fried alive by mining
Citation needed. This is simply false. It's the typical case of incomplete information being blown completely out of proportion and twisted to carry someone's agenda.
While a graphics card used 24/7 would indeed carry a higher risk of becoming defective (by the way, this is the only correct information being flung around like poo by cryptohaters), there isn't much talk about everything else which counterbalances this risk.
The vast majority of miners take better care of their cards than regular gamers. The mining cards are undervolted and have power limits set. They are also better cooled than their gaming counterparts, located in open cases and with plenty airflow around them. I suggest researching this topic a bit before vomiting nonsense, but I guess it's simpler to vomit nonsense, isn't it? Fuck being objective.
, which will now be in a third world waste dump now as they are too hard to recycle.
What you fail to mention is that a GPU is much easier to recycle than, say, a mobile phone or a tablet, or a laptop, or a TV for that matter. A GPU's cooling solution has two main components: Aluminium and plastic. Both can be easily separated and melted. What remains is a 200-grams PCB which is flat and has components that can easily be separated.
meanwhile bona fide users of graphics cards have had their supplies disrupted, had their prices more than doubled and have had to wait an extra year for new hardare to come out because nvidia was too busy making mining cards to do r&d. Anyone who made “money” from mining should have it seized under environmental protection laws.
Again, you're either misinformed or carry an agenda.
nVidia wasn't the main perpetrator here. They clearly mentioned, more than once, that they can and would ramp up chip production if needed. The issue was integrators (Gigabyte, Asus, MSI and the like) were reluctant to boost chip orders and build many cards, out of fear they're going to be left with huge overstocks. Price jacking happened solely at third party sellers and was boosted by Vnand prices going up like crazy. For THAT you gotta blame Apple, they're buying about 20% of ALL vNand production every year. Guess what they put it in? Yeah, that phone you're carrying.
As I kept saying for quite some time now, it's easier to talk out of your ass and fling misinformation around like poo.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)