Nvidia intentionally crippling GPUs

[zombie67]

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/geforce-cmp/

"We’re limiting the hash rate of GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs so they’re less desirable to miners and launching NVIDIA CMP for professional mining."

1) I wonder if the FW will recognize BOINC tasks as "mining"?

2) The whole premise is crap. They say they are doing it to preserve supply for gamers, and will offer an equivalent card for mining. But the supply of GPU chips is still fixed. So they put that supply toward mining GPUs, and the gamers still don't have supply.

3) I wonder if they will push that crippling FW to other models, and potentially retroactively cripple the cards we already purchased?

[DrPop]

I just saw this too. Made me wonder...is it only a software crippling, or are they skimping on hardware inside as well? And I agree this is nuts - what part of "mining" would be any different than compute work in a lab or BOINC, or etc? Hmm...

[zombie67]

The only difference is that the mining cards don't have any video-out connectors. So they could actually work for BOINC too, I think.

[denim]

Maybe I need to sell my Nvidia stock while I am way up if this is what's going on.

[John P. Myers]

I just saw this too. Made me wonder...is it only a software crippling, or are they skimping on hardware inside as well? And I agree this is nuts - what part of "mining" would be any different than compute work in a lab or BOINC, or etc? Hmm...

Purely software crippling
Screenshot_20210219-162514_Chrome.jpg

[John P. Myers]

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/02/18/geforce-cmp/

1) I wonder if the FW will recognize BOINC tasks as "mining"?

I wonder that too. No specifics yet on how it's being done so it could end up hurting productivity/data processing as well.

2) The whole premise is crap. They say they are doing it to preserve supply for gamers, and will offer an equivalent card for mining. But the supply of GPU chips is still fixed. So they put that supply toward mining GPUs, and the gamers still don't have supply.

This. Nvidia's whole premise here is absolute garbage as usual and is only meant to fool complete idiots, which happens to be a large portion of the world's population, lucky for them.

3) I wonder if they will push that crippling FW to other models, and potentially retroactively cripple the cards we already purchased?

They do plan to cripple other models as well, but it cannot be done retroactively since a small change has to be made to the hardware for the software to work. If you've already got something besides a 3060, you're fine.

3060's that currently exist are already affected, even when using an older driver. This shows it's more of a BIOS/firmware crippling

[John P. Myers]

So far it's looking like ETH mining is the only thing affected. Tom's Hardware showed how you can still profitably mine other currencies with a 3060, proving Nvidia accomplished absolutely nothing. BOINC should be safe, at least

[MindCrime]

ive seen conflicting reports that this has been cracked on eth. whats the real story? nvidia still jerking us around?

[DrPop]

Yeah, I just saw a thing about how they already cracked it. Crazy. Why did they even bother?