News 700,000 GPUs Shipped to Miners in the First Quarter of 2021

VforV

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I "love" the bias in this article:
AMD doesn't have any problems with consumers mining on its RDNA 2 (Big Navi) graphics cards
Despite both chipmaker's efforts — or non-efforts in AMD's case

How it makes nvidia look good like the savior of gaming, when in fact is the opposite... pffft.

Why doesn't the author mention that RDNA 2 is was designed to be good at gaming and has native low mining performance (about half) vs Ampere which is a miners dream come true?

Why doesn't the author say that AMD made efforts from the design phase to not worry after, while nvidia is trying to appear to "care for gamers" and save face, thus making "efforts" now (LOL?) when in fact they are the ones that sold/sell GPUs directly to miners and gave miners drivers to unlock their own so called limited hashrate cards (3060)?

Why doesn't the author blame nvidia for the CMP cards, but instead makes them seen as a positive? When in fact they are mocking us gamers even more, because that silicon could have been used for more RTX cards, so that everyone has a chance (theoretically) to buy them? *(also more GPUs available = lower prices...)

This kind of "journalism" disgusts me... urinalists indeed.
 

AtrociKitty

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Those would be accounted for based on historical data. As the article mentioned they were calculating based on the difference from baseline. There's no way to know how accurate their calculation is, but the numbers mentioned are their guesstimate.
Their report doesn't detail much, beyond admitting less precision due to current part shortages. I'd go a step further, and suggest four non-crypto factors that would make any historical model poor at best:
  1. New GPUs with large generational leap in performance
  2. Part and supply chain weakness across the entire industry
  3. Sudden pandemic demand spike for gaming computers
  4. Influx of spendable cash from stimulus and large unemployment increases
 

spongiemaster

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Their report doesn't detail much, beyond admitting less precision due to current part shortages. I'd go a step further, and suggest four non-crypto factors that would make any historical model poor at best:
  1. New GPUs with large generational leap in performance
  2. Part and supply chain weakness across the entire industry
  3. Sudden pandemic demand spike for gaming computers
  4. Influx of spendable cash from stimulus and large unemployment increases
While those did happen, it's not clear what if any impact any of them had on the calculation JPR did or if JPR factored them into their calculations. I'm not sure #2 had any affect at all on the market share of cards sold to miners vs gamers.
 
I "love" the bias in this article:

How it makes nvidia look good like the savior of gaming, when in fact is the opposite... pffft.

Why doesn't the author mention that RDNA 2 is was designed to be good at gaming and has native low mining performance (about half) vs Ampere which is a miners dream come true?

Why doesn't the author say that AMD made efforts from the design phase to not worry after, while nvidia is trying to appear to "care for gamers" and save face, thus making "efforts" now (LOL?) when in fact they are the ones that sold/sell GPUs directly to miners and gave miners drivers to unlock their own so called limited hashrate cards (3060)?

Why doesn't the author blame nvidia for the CMP cards, but instead makes them seen as a positive? When in fact they are mocking us gamers even more, because that silicon could have been used for more RTX cards, so that everyone has a chance (theoretically) to buy them? *(also more GPUs available = lower prices...)

This kind of "journalism" disgusts me... urinalists indeed.
Thankfully, your post is completely without bias, right? When you read the following, you immediately assumed we were praising Nvidia: "Nvidia, on the other hand, has launched its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) line that's dedicated to Ethereum and cryptocurrency mining, and at the same time implemented an anti-mining limiter on most of its GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) graphics cards." We're not. We're stating facts. Nvidia did both of those things. AMD did exactly what we say it did (which is that it didn't attempt to limit mining performance).

The whole basis of your anti-Nvidia complaints takes as an a priori assumption that Nvidia intentionally boosted mining performance for the Ampere launch, when we know that wasn't the case. In all the presentations Nvidia did at the Ampere launch, cryptocurrency wasn't mentioned once. Not. One. Single. Time. Do you know why? Because in August/September of 2020, no one was really looking at mining as a major concern, just like in the summer of 2017 people weren't really worried about mining. The exact same thing applies to AMD at RDNA2's launch: No one talked about mining performance as a reason for the Infinity Cache. In fact, I don't even think people were sure Infinity Cache wouldn't help mining! In the right set of circumstances, a 128MB L3 cache could have been a major boost (not necessarily for Ethereum, but certainly for other algorithms).

Why did AMD do the Infinity Cache? Because it was, relatively speaking, easier than making more cores and more features in those cores. A big cache consumes relatively little energy, and with the right workloads can impart a big speedup. It was a reasonably clever way to close the performance gap between RDNA1 and Ampere, without trying to match what AMD expected Nvidia to do with RT and DLSS. Was it elegant, though? I don't think so. I don't consider large caches an elegant solution in most cases, because there will always be workloads where the cache isn't large enough and thus doesn't provide as much of a benefit.

Anyway, Nvidia is absolutely profiteering off mining, and so is AMD -- just perhaps not as much as Nvidia. Nvidia is able to do things like CMP, LHR, etc. in part simply because they control 80% of the market. That's not good, or bad; it simply is what things look like. Nvidia did G-Sync because it could, same with RT and DLSS. AMD counters with alternatives that, of necessity, have to work with all GPUs rather than being limited to AMD hardware. If AMD controlled 80% of the GPU market, you can rest assured it would start behaving more like Nvidia -- we even have evidence of this, as AMD bumped up prices as soon as it started to get closer to Nvidia's performance and features.

For the record:
  1. CMP: We don't like it, as best-case it's a GPU that could have gone into a non-CMP piece of hardware. Right now, even older Turing GPUs would be better than no GPUs for a lot of PC gamers. So far, CMP is exclusively (I believe) Turing and Volta GPUs, but CMP will likely have Ampere GPUs at some point that don't implement LHR. Nvidia is trying to have its cake and eat it too.
  2. LHR: It's reactionary, only targets one algorithm (Ethash/Dagger-Hashimoto), and is only useful until/unless it gets cracked. Nvidia 'accidentally' (we don't know if it was truly an accident or not) gave away the keys to full hashrate 3060 with the old driver. So far, 3080 Ti, 3070 Ti, and all the revamped existing RTX 30-series GPUs with LHR implemented haven't be broken. That doesn't mean they'll never be broken.
  3. Last: I don't believe for an instant that Nvidia's reported crypto sales are remotely close to reality. I think Nvidia counts CMP sales as crypto, and then everything else "must have gone to gamers" (wink wink, nudge nudge). Neither do I believe AMD isn't trying to make money from miners. In early 2019, AMD had great GPU profits, but in its earnings stated it expected profits to drop "due to falling demand from cryptocurrency miners." Both AMD and Nvidia are almost certainly dealing directly with large-scale miners. So are all their AIB partners.
This story, meanwhile, was from a reputable source (JPR) suggesting at least one quarter of all GPUs sold in Q1'21 went to miners -- and of course Nvidia made proportionately a lot more from miners than AMD, since it sold far more discrete GPUs. You can try to put bias into all of this if you want, but that's more likely to use your own bias rather than facts.
 
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spongiemaster

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Direct from JPR:
The rest of that paragraph explaining what they're talking about doesn't really clear it up for me. They're talking about the parts shortage bringing scalpers into the current market, which isn't entirely true and I still don't see how that has any impact on who is buying the cards. During the last mining bubble in 2017, there was no industry wide parts shortage, it was mining demand on its own. The end result was still demand outstripping supply, which brought scalpers into the market then. It doesn't matter that there's a parts shortage now, mining demand on its own still would have exceeded supply and brought scalpers into the market. And since mining demand is practically infinite, any other bottleneck in the system won't have any affect on price, unless it somehow pushes prices above what miners would be willing to pay based on projected mining returns.
 

VforV

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Thankfully, your post is completely without bias, right? When you read the following, you immediately assumed we were praising Nvidia: "Nvidia, on the other hand, has launched its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) line that's dedicated to Ethereum and cryptocurrency mining, and at the same time implemented an anti-mining limiter on most of its GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) graphics cards." We're not. We're stating facts. Nvidia did both of those things. AMD did exactly what we say it did (which is that it didn't attempt to limit mining performance).

The whole basis of your anti-Nvidia complaints takes as an a priori assumption that Nvidia intentionally boosted mining performance for the Ampere launch, when we know that wasn't the case. In all the presentations Nvidia did at the Ampere launch, cryptocurrency wasn't mentioned once. Not. One. Single. Time. Do you know why? Because in August/September of 2020, no one was really looking at mining as a major concern, just like in the summer of 2017 people weren't really worried about mining. The exact same thing applies to AMD at RDNA2's launch: No one talked about mining performance as a reason for the Infinity Cache. In fact, I don't even think people were sure Infinity Cache wouldn't help mining! In the right set of circumstances, a 128MB L3 cache could have been a major boost (not necessarily for Ethereum, but certainly for other algorithms).

Why did AMD do the Infinity Cache? Because it was, relatively speaking, easier than making more cores and more features in those cores. A big cache consumes relatively little energy, and with the right workloads can impart a big speedup. It was a reasonably clever way to close the performance gap between RDNA1 and Ampere, without trying to match what AMD expected Nvidia to do with RT and DLSS. Was it elegant, though? I don't think so. I don't consider large caches an elegant solution in most cases, because there will always be workloads where the cache isn't large enough and thus doesn't provide as much of a benefit.

Anyway, Nvidia is absolutely profiteering off mining, and so is AMD -- just perhaps not as much as Nvidia. Nvidia is able to do things like CMP, LHR, etc. in part simply because they control 80% of the market. That's not good, or bad; it simply is what things look like. Nvidia did G-Sync because it could, same with RT and DLSS. AMD counters with alternatives that, of necessity, have to work with all GPUs rather than being limited to AMD hardware. If AMD controlled 80% of the GPU market, you can rest assured it would start behaving more like Nvidia -- we even have evidence of this, as AMD bumped up prices as soon as it started to get closer to Nvidia's performance and features.

For the record:
  1. CMP: We don't like it, as best-case it's a GPU that could have gone into a non-CMP piece of hardware. Right now, even older Turing GPUs would be better than no GPUs for a lot of PC gamers. So far, CMP is exclusively (I believe) Turing and Volta GPUs, but CMP will likely have Ampere GPUs at some point that don't implement LHR. Nvidia is trying to have its cake and eat it too.
  2. LHR: It's reactionary, only targets one algorithm (Ethash/Dagger-Hashimoto), and is only useful until/unless it gets cracked. Nvidia 'accidentally' (we don't know if it was truly an accident or not) gave away the keys to full hashrate 3060 with the old driver. So far, 3080 Ti, 3070 Ti, and all the revamped existing RTX 30-series GPUs with LHR implemented haven't be broken. That doesn't mean they'll never be broken.
  3. Last: I don't believe for an instant that Nvidia's reported crypto sales are remotely close to reality. I think Nvidia counts CMP sales as crypto, and then everything else "must have gone to gamers" (wink wink, nudge nudge). Neither do I believe AMD isn't trying to make money from miners. In early 2019, AMD had great GPU profits, but in its earnings stated it expected profits to drop "due to falling demand from cryptocurrency miners." Both AMD and Nvidia are almost certainly dealing directly with large-scale miners. So are all their AIB partners.
This story, meanwhile, was from a reputable source (JPR) suggesting at least one quarter of all GPUs sold in Q1'21 went to miners -- and of course Nvidia made proportionately a lot more from miners than AMD, since it sold far more discrete GPUs. You can try to put bias into all of this if you want, but that's more likely to use your own bias rather than facts.
I agree with mostly everything you said here and if it was not intentional bias, then it was subjective bias (as in personal preference of the author) or worse sloppy reporting, not stating the obvious issues with nvidia and only pointing AMD's flaws. I don't know which is the case, one of those.

The only other thing I want to say is this: if you think nvidia (and Jensen which is a master in its class) did not knew in advance or predict - about the crypto boom, then you are naive.

AMD made a specific gaming GPU with Navi 2x cards, nothing more. Nvidia made a general purpose beast of a GPU with Ampere, to be good at everything (from gaming to professional workloads and AI), including mining. Jensen seen the other mining booms before and he did not want to lose this new opportunity at all, but ride the wave like a boss. And like a boss he does it indeed...

The bottom line is AMD made a GPU for gamers only, nvidia made Ampere intentionally good for mining too.
 

dan1991Ro

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"Cryptocurrency miners aren't the only reason for the drastic inflation in graphics card pricing. The pandemic also played a big role in this situation since it forced many factories to temporarily shut down and interrupting supply chains in the process. It's been known that graphics card components, such as GDDR6 memory chips, voltage regulators, capacitors, and other parts, have also gone up in price since the start of the pandemic. Jon Peddie Research measured an increase of up to 70% early in the year."

The miners arent the only reason,just the major cause.Like 90 percent of the price increase is the miners,its not "the shortage".Dont blame everything on the pandemic pls.
 

Droidfreak

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Are there also any estimations on how much scammers have made (and what percentage actually faced criminal charges)? Would be interesting to see the numbers. I keep seeing new (as well es established, but obviously hacked) Amazon and eBay accounts selling "GPUs" at anywhere 100-150% MSRP, usually they are banned quite fast, but they keep popping up on a daily basis. Wonder how many dumb folks falling for that are around there 😃
 

dennphill

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I "love" the bias in this article:



How it makes nvidia look good like the savior of gaming, when in fact is the opposite... pffft.

Why doesn't the author mention that RDNA 2 is was designed to be good at gaming and has native low mining performance (about half) vs Ampere which is a miners dream come true?

Why doesn't the author say that AMD made efforts from the design phase to not worry after, while nvidia is trying to appear to "care for gamers" and save face, thus making "efforts" now (LOL?) when in fact they are the ones that sold/sell GPUs directly to miners and gave miners drivers to unlock their own so called limited hashrate cards (3060)?

Why doesn't the author blame nvidia for the CMP cards, but instead makes them seen as a positive? When in fact they are mocking us gamers even more, because that silicon could have been used for more RTX cards, so that everyone has a chance (theoretically) to buy them? *(also more GPUs available = lower prices...)

This kind of "journalism" disgusts me... urinalists indeed.
Lousy article with not much substantiation or back-up data. I am one of those enthusiasts impacted by this miners and scalpers situation that the AIBs and NVIDIAS are responsible for. Will NEVER again support NVIDIA with a product purchase. Never again buy from NewEgg - themselves 'scalping' - and so on. Actually, I just purchased an AMD card at an atrocious amount...so that solves MY problem...but I am totally disgusted by the industy and the manufactures, and AIBs, and mostly all the vendors for allowing this to continue in the 'grab for the bucks!' Shame on them all. Shame on Tom's for this poorly written article, too.
 
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jkflipflop98

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I hope when this crypto crash happens, it happens in an instant.

I also hope most gamers are smart enough to not buy a second-hand clapped out mining card off one of these jerks. Make them eat the cost of those suckers.
 

NeoMorpheus

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I "love" the bias in this article:



How it makes nvidia look good like the savior of gaming, when in fact is the opposite... pffft.

Why doesn't the author mention that RDNA 2 is was designed to be good at gaming and has native low mining performance (about half) vs Ampere which is a miners dream come true?

Why doesn't the author say that AMD made efforts from the design phase to not worry after, while nvidia is trying to appear to "care for gamers" and save face, thus making "efforts" now (LOL?) when in fact they are the ones that sold/sell GPUs directly to miners and gave miners drivers to unlock their own so called limited hashrate cards (3060)?

Why doesn't the author blame nvidia for the CMP cards, but instead makes them seen as a positive? When in fact they are mocking us gamers even more, because that silicon could have been used for more RTX cards, so that everyone has a chance (theoretically) to buy them? *(also more GPUs available = lower prices...)

This kind of "journalism" disgusts me... urinalists indeed.
The problem is, Intel has shown the way (paying/bribing for exclusives and for reviews) and since nvidia is as evil as Intel, I am simply not surprised about stupid articles or reviews that are really paid for by them.

Perfect example, Anantech, LTT and Dell are deep in intel pockets.

Nvidia is simply doing the same. Hell, I am willing to say that nvidia sold their GPUs directly to miners at a premium and then pretended that they cared about the gaming market.
 
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I agree with mostly everything you said here and if it was not intentional bias, then it was subjective bias (as in personal preference of the author) or worse sloppy reporting, not stating the obvious issues with nvidia and only pointing AMD's flaws. I don't know which is the case, one of those.

The only other thing I want to say is this: if you think nvidia (and Jensen which is a master in its class) did not knew in advance or predict - about the crypto boom, then you are naive.

AMD made a specific gaming GPU with Navi 2x cards, nothing more. Nvidia made a general purpose beast of a GPU with Ampere, to be good at everything (from gaming to professional workloads and AI), including mining. Jensen seen the other mining booms before and he did not want to lose this new opportunity at all, but ride the wave like a boss. And like a boss he does it indeed...

The bottom line is AMD made a GPU for gamers only, nvidia made Ampere intentionally good for mining too.
I absolutely think Nvidia / Jensen (who didn't design the cards!) failed to predict the mining boom. Do you know why? Because there was a massive shortage of parts before mining even took off, and mining only made things worse. Now Nvidia is trying to correct as quickly as possible, but like everyone else, it can't keep up with demand. If Jensen had actually predicted the mining boom, he wouldn't have reduced (or basically kept at a similar level to the Turing launch) the wafer and chip orders for the Ampere launch. But demand was forecast around March 2020, right as the pandemic was picking up speed, and instead of doubling down on the Ampere orders, Nvidia held back. It wasn't sure people would be out shopping for new GPUs in August, never mind December 2020 through May 2021.

If you're naive enough to think anyone like Jensen would bet the farm on cryptocurrency mining, that's your business, but while Nvidia profits from mining it's still not seen as a long-term solution. Why does Ampere mine faster than Turing? Simple: More cores and more memory bandwidth. Why does it have more cores and more memory bandwidth? Simple: That makes it faster for games. RTX 3080 is about 30% faster than RTX 2080 Ti in games, and up to 50% faster in Ethereum hashing. But it's not because the GPU was designed for Ethereum hashing; that's simply a side effect. It's designed for gaming and compute and AI, which also happens to make it useful for hashing. It's 50% faster at Ethash because it has more bandwidth, better memory controllers, and more compute.

AMD's RX 6800 XT is also 35-45% faster than RX 5700 XT. That's because it has more compute and a massive L3 cache that optimizes memory bandwidth utilization. Was this designed purely for gaming? Hardly. AMD's RDNA architecture also does very well in compute, it just doesn't have the raw memory bandwidth that Ethash happens to like. There are many general compute algorithms where AMD's RDNA architecture outperforms Nvidia's Turing/Ampere architectures.
"Cryptocurrency miners aren't the only reason for the drastic inflation in graphics card pricing. The pandemic also played a big role in this situation since it forced many factories to temporarily shut down and interrupting supply chains in the process. It's been known that graphics card components, such as GDDR6 memory chips, voltage regulators, capacitors, and other parts, have also gone up in price since the start of the pandemic. Jon Peddie Research measured an increase of up to 70% early in the year."

The miners arent the only reason,just the major cause.Like 90 percent of the price increase is the miners,its not "the shortage".Dont blame everything on the pandemic pls.
Do you remember what things were like at the launch of the RTX 3080/3090? No one was talking about mining in August/September/October/November last year. And yet you couldn't buy the cards, because there was a shortage. That shortage 100% was not caused by miners, it was caused by the pandemic. Nvidia took a conservative approach with its estimates of how many wafers and chips to order, plus GDDR6X and everything else. If it had doubled its orders in March, it still would have sold everything! But back in March 2020, things were far less certain. RTX 3080 was being bought and scalped on eBay for $1200 or more right at launch, and RTX 3090 was going for $2000 and up. Mining in December 2020 through the present pushed prices even higher, yes, but without mining we'd still be looking at $1200-$1500 RTX 3090 and $2000+ RTX 3090.
 

VforV

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I absolutely think Nvidia / Jensen (who didn't design the cards!) failed to predict the mining boom. Do you know why? Because there was a massive shortage of parts before mining even took off, and mining only made things worse. Now Nvidia is trying to correct as quickly as possible, but like everyone else, it can't keep up with demand. If Jensen had actually predicted the mining boom, he wouldn't have reduced (or basically kept at a similar level to the Turing launch) the wafer and chip orders for the Ampere launch. But demand was forecast around March 2020, right as the pandemic was picking up speed, and instead of doubling down on the Ampere orders, Nvidia held back. It wasn't sure people would be out shopping for new GPUs in August, never mind December 2020 through May 2021.

If you're naive enough to think anyone like Jensen would bet the farm on cryptocurrency mining, that's your business, but while Nvidia profits from mining it's still not seen as a long-term solution. Why does Ampere mine faster than Turing? Simple: More cores and more memory bandwidth. Why does it have more cores and more memory bandwidth? Simple: That makes it faster for games. RTX 3080 is about 30% faster than RTX 2080 Ti in games, and up to 50% faster in Ethereum hashing. But it's not because the GPU was designed for Ethereum hashing; that's simply a side effect. It's designed for gaming and compute and AI, which also happens to make it useful for hashing. It's 50% faster at Ethash because it has more bandwidth, better memory controllers, and more compute.

AMD's RX 6800 XT is also 35-45% faster than RX 5700 XT. That's because it has more compute and a massive L3 cache that optimizes memory bandwidth utilization. Was this designed purely for gaming? Hardly. AMD's RDNA architecture also does very well in compute, it just doesn't have the raw memory bandwidth that Ethash happens to like. There are many general compute algorithms where AMD's RDNA architecture outperforms Nvidia's Turing/Ampere architectures.

Do you remember what things were like at the launch of the RTX 3080/3090? No one was talking about mining in August/September/October/November last year. And yet you couldn't buy the cards, because there was a shortage. That shortage 100% was not caused by miners, it was caused by the pandemic. Nvidia took a conservative approach with its estimates of how many wafers and chips to order, plus GDDR6X and everything else. If it had doubled its orders in March, it still would have sold everything! But back in March 2020, things were far less certain. RTX 3080 was being bought and scalped on eBay for $1200 or more right at launch, and RTX 3090 was going for $2000 and up. Mining in December 2020 through the present pushed prices even higher, yes, but without mining we'd still be looking at $1200-$1500 RTX 3090 and $2000+ RTX 3090.
I agreed with your last post, but I don't agree with this one. So let's just leave it at that...

As you can see by the other posts above from other people, I'm not the only one sharing this sentiment about both nvidia and this article. There is really a s*** ton of evidence stacked vs nvidia only in the last 2 years that proves how slimy, deceiving and immeasurably greedy they are. No amount of positive media PR, fanboying or all the excuses in the word can erase that evidence. Period.

I have nothing more to say, so feel free to convince others who disagree with you. Facts are stronger than opinions for me and nvidia destroyed itself with years of negative facts.
 

russell_john

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Miners aren't going to be buying near as many in 3Q because right now a RTX 3080 will only net you a profit of $6 a day so it's going to take a long time just to break even
 

russell_john

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I absolutely think Nvidia / Jensen (who didn't design the cards!) failed to predict the mining boom. Do you know why? Because there was a massive shortage of parts before mining even took off, and mining only made things worse. Now Nvidia is trying to correct as quickly as possible, but like everyone else, it can't keep up with demand. If Jensen had actually predicted the mining boom, he wouldn't have reduced (or basically kept at a similar level to the Turing launch) the wafer and chip orders for the Ampere launch. But demand was forecast around March 2020, right as the pandemic was picking up speed, and instead of doubling down on the Ampere orders, Nvidia held back. It wasn't sure people would be out shopping for new GPUs in August, never mind December 2020 through May 2021.

If you're naive enough to think anyone like Jensen would bet the farm on cryptocurrency mining, that's your business, but while Nvidia profits from mining it's still not seen as a long-term solution. Why does Ampere mine faster than Turing? Simple: More cores and more memory bandwidth. Why does it have more cores and more memory bandwidth? Simple: That makes it faster for games. RTX 3080 is about 30% faster than RTX 2080 Ti in games, and up to 50% faster in Ethereum hashing. But it's not because the GPU was designed for Ethereum hashing; that's simply a side effect. It's designed for gaming and compute and AI, which also happens to make it useful for hashing. It's 50% faster at Ethash because it has more bandwidth, better memory controllers, and more compute.

AMD's RX 6800 XT is also 35-45% faster than RX 5700 XT. That's because it has more compute and a massive L3 cache that optimizes memory bandwidth utilization. Was this designed purely for gaming? Hardly. AMD's RDNA architecture also does very well in compute, it just doesn't have the raw memory bandwidth that Ethash happens to like. There are many general compute algorithms where AMD's RDNA architecture outperforms Nvidia's Turing/Ampere architectures.

Do you remember what things were like at the launch of the RTX 3080/3090? No one was talking about mining in August/September/October/November last year. And yet you couldn't buy the cards, because there was a shortage. That shortage 100% was not caused by miners, it was caused by the pandemic. Nvidia took a conservative approach with its estimates of how many wafers and chips to order, plus GDDR6X and everything else. If it had doubled its orders in March, it still would have sold everything! But back in March 2020, things were far less certain. RTX 3080 was being bought and scalped on eBay for $1200 or more right at launch, and RTX 3090 was going for $2000 and up. Mining in December 2020 through the present pushed prices even higher, yes, but without mining we'd still be looking at $1200-$1500 RTX 3090 and $2000+ RTX 3090.

Nvidia wasn't the only one who took a conservative approach so did AMD. They too predicted a big falloff in sales because of the pandemic in their end of 1st Q 2020 stockholder report ..... Most consumers (and consumer based media) also seem to miss the fact that because everyone was working from home that commercial servers and cloud servers where also buying up everything TSMC could provide and high margin Enterprise Grade devices are always going to take precedent over low margin Consumer Grade devices. For instance Nvidia's A100 "GPU" is 7 nm EUV and made at TSMC and they too were selling like hotcakes. Ditto for AMD's Epyc CPUs which ironically is what everyone was pairing with the Nvidia A100 based boards for cloud servers and supercomputers for Covid research
 
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husker

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In the short run... limited supplies and high cost thanks in part to crypto mining. In the long run... GPU makers have more sales, profits and money for R&D which leads to more advanced GPU technology in the future. In a free market based economy, supply and demand issues will eventually be worked out: A booming sales ecosystem is a good thing for all - if you are willing to look at the big picture.
 
I agreed with your last post, but I don't agree with this one. So let's just leave it at that...

As you can see by the other posts above from other people, I'm not the only one sharing this sentiment about both nvidia and this article. There is really a s*** ton of evidence stacked vs nvidia only in the last 2 years that proves how slimy, deceiving and immeasurably greedy they are. No amount of positive media PR, fanboying or all the excuses in the word can erase that evidence. Period.

I have nothing more to say, so feel free to convince others who disagree with you. Facts are stronger than opinions for me and nvidia destroyed itself with years of negative facts.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re disagreeing with. Im also not trying to “convince” you Nvidia is great or whatever. Nvidia is greedy — it absolutely is! I just really don’t think Nvidia (or AMD) was building its next-Gen architecture around mining. Faster mining was merely a side effect of the design and components. Architectures are planned years in advance, and given the volatility of crypto, you don’t want to stake the farm on having that drive sales.

Now Nvidia released a slightly more expensive to manufacture (than 3080) RTX 3080 Ti and increased the price by 71%. It’s a really bad look, no matter how you slice it. Profiteering at its worst. 3070 Ti was a bit better, but street prices are still a joke.

And while we’re at it: Ray tracing in games still isn’t a big enough jump in visuals to justify the performance hit. I also really hope AMD’s FSR can basically match DLSS on image quality with much wider compatibility and lower performance overhead. DLSS is cool, but it feels very much like a brute force computational approach that could ultimately be matched with a custom algorithm. A DLSS alternative that works with all DX12 compatible GPUs, including Intel, and provides comparable image quality would be awesome. Whether it will actually do that remains to be seen — literally.

Take care!
 
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COLGeek

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I’m honestly not sure what you’re disagreeing with. Im also not trying to “convince” you Nvidia is great or whatever. Nvidia is greedy — it absolutely is! I just really don’t think Nvidia (or AMD) was building its next-Gen architecture around mining. Faster mining was merely a side effect of the design and components. Architectures are planned years in advance, and given the volatility of crypto, you don’t want to stake the farm on having that drive sales.

Now Nvidia released a slightly more expensive to manufacture (than 3080) RTX 3080 Ti and increased the price by 71%. It’s a really bad look, no matter how you slice it. Profiteering at its worst. 3070 Ti was a bit better, but street prices are still a joke.

And while we’re at it: Ray tracing in games still isn’t a big enough jump in visuals to justify the performance hit. I also really hope AMD’s FSR can basically match DLSS on image quality with much wider compatibility and lower performance overhead. DLSS is cool, but it feels very much like a brute force computational approach that could ultimately be matched with a custom algorithm. A DLSS alternative that works with all DX12 compatible GPUs, including Intel, and provides comparable image quality would be awesome. Whether it will actually do that remains to be seen — literally.

Take care!
Well said. This captures the tone of our current tech reality well.
 
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