Nvidia Unlikely To Unveil 2018 Graphics Cards At GDC, GTC

[TJ Hooker]

DESKTOP CRYPTO WILL BURST. 100%.
Whether it's a dedicated architecture, ASIC, or simply lack of demand for various reasons that are complicated mining will cease or drop so low it doesn't matter.

Where there's money to be made people will find ways to make it. There's a more efficient way to do things including the existing GPU farms and as they get more competitive things on desktop will fade.

Plenty of popular crypto algorithms are ASIC resistant. That, combined with the large upfront costs of developing an ASIC, as well the fact that the future demand for such an ASIC would be uncertain due to the volatile crypto market and the fact that ether is planning on going to proof of stake (eliminating mining), makes it less likely that an ASIC will be developed for some algorithms.

Unless the crypto market itself collapses, I can't see mining with consumer GPUs disappearing in the near future.

Edit: What is going on with the site lately? Here I am replying to a post and my comment ends up above the one I'm replying too...

 

[King_V]

Edit: What is going on with the site lately? Here I am replying to a post and my comment ends up above the one I'm replying too...

That's been happening to me every once in a while as well.

 

[kyotokid]

heck I guess we will just have to do with 10x series for now, I bought my card for near msrp using this tracker https://www.blockchainrigs.io/tracker

...Well Nvidia is sold out in their store. The 'Notify Me" button has been changed to "Out Of Stock". Received an email yesterday claiming there would be 1070s and 1070 Ti's available this morning (03/23) but most likely miners (or their bots) jumped on that before I could get on their site as there is nothing now.

I pretty much have given up on ever getting a decent GPU card with enough memory to handle GPU rendering for my 3D scenes. 4 GB is bare minimum (and that's usually good only for a portrait or simple vignette, not an expansive scene with multiple characters, props, and effects).

However there may be light at the end of this tunnel in another way as Otoy is now in beta testing of Octane 4 which will be available by subscription (20$ per month including access to all programme plugins as well as an AI denoiser). It will also support AMD GPUs (Mac) as well as Intel integrated graphics. Octane employs what is called Out Of Core rendering whereby only the the excess texture load that exceeds VRAM is sent to the CPU/system memory while geometry remains on the GPU. This makes that 4 GB card I have much more useful and it's still much faster than Iray in pure CPU render mode.

 

[InvalidError]

Edit: What is going on with the site lately? Here I am replying to a post and my comment ends up above the one I'm replying too...

That's been happening to me every once in a while as well.

It may have something to do with how people are double-posting due to site lag when posting and one of the doubled-up posts gets deleted. Photon boy has one such double-posts two posts above me here (one of them has been "deleted" and only visible by mods) but if you click the reply link on the post that is still visible, you get a 404. If you click a reply link that isn't broken, both of his posts disappear from the reply page.

I've noticed many other similarly broken double-posts. It seems like when the double-posts get deleted, the posts aren't getting marked correctly. Could also be that one mod deletes one double, another deletes the other, then one of them gets un-deleted and that one ends up with incorrect markings.

In any case, something weird is going on and needs to get fixed.

 

[bricefleckenstein]

Nvidia isn't big in cryptocoin mining - probably less than 3 million cards sold to miners in all of 2017 out of 30+ million total sales and MOST OF THOSE during the crazy AMD pricing in Spring 2017, when the high-end Polaris cards briefly got into 1070 and bottom-end 1080 pricing range.
AMD on the other hand may have sold as high as HALF of it's 2017 discrete cards to miners, though more likely ballpark a third.
Miners are NOT the cause of the recent Nvidia card shortage.

 

[King_V]

Nvidia isn't big in cryptocoin mining - probably less than 3 million cards sold to miners in all of 2017 out of 30+ million total sales and MOST OF THOSE during the crazy AMD pricing in Spring 2017, when the high-end Polaris cards briefly got into 1070 and bottom-end 1080 pricing range.
AMD on the other hand may have sold as high as HALF of it's 2017 discrete cards to miners, though more likely ballpark a third.
Miners are NOT the cause of the recent Nvidia card shortage.

This seems extraordinarily implausible. Where do you get those numbers from?

 

[InvalidError]

This seems extraordinarily implausible. Where do you get those numbers from?

Some market analysts announced that they downgraded AMD and Nvidia stocks on the basis that 20% of AMD and 10% of Nvidia GPU sales were going to crypto-mining. AMD however countered that crypto-mining accounted for less than 10% of its sales as far as it knows.

So if AMD's claim is true, which it had better be to avoid liability with the SEC and investors, then crypto-mining is still a pretty small slice of the total GPU sales pie chart and you can't dump all the blame on a minority of sales on either side of the AMD-Nvidia divide. Crypto-mining is only one GPU/memory sink among many others that are contributing to shortages.

Also, there is a blank wafer shortage which is causing production slowdowns for everything, not just GPUs and RAM.

 

[Karadjgne]

The smart crypto miners don't care about resale as much as you think. The smart crypto miners kept all their rigs, and waited. Several years ago crypto-mining took off like a bandit, stayed strong for a while, then seemingly overnight, vanished. Only to resurface a few years later stronger than ever. Guess who got the jump on the gun and made bank at the very beginning of the resurgence. The smart crypto miners.

And it's going to happen again, just a matter of time. All gamers can really do is wait and watch. Then when mining dies crash, buy the biggest, strongest gpu they can afford, wait for the mining to surface and crash again, then upgrade, again. It's the only way a gamer will buy a $600 card for $600.

As far as Amd claims on 10% sales, I've no doubt that's true. Between laptops, tablets, phones, consoles, Walmart ibuypower specials, HP/Dell types and every other place Amd can toss in a gpu, especially the low end or specialized stuff like FirePro's etc, of course miner gpus are limited when you consider most sales are the 570/480/580 lines and the few oddball high end 200/300 series.

 

[bricefleckenstein]

The numbers I generated are based on the increase in Ethereum hashrate throughout 2017, divided by the appx 28 Megahash/s a single RX 470/570/480/580 can generate, and presume that most Ethereum uses AMD cards since they are far lower cost per hash than anything Nvidia except for a VERY BRIEF period during the Spring when AMD cards got into the same price range as the 1070 (which is about a 30-31 Mhash card), for the AMD side.
I then added about 30% to account for other coins usage of AMD cards on stuff like Ethereum Classic.
If anything, this figure is a little LOW as some cards used on Ethereum are LOWER hashrate and it would take more of them to account for the increase in total network hashrate - specifically including some Nvidia 1060 cards that manage around 22 Mhash but for a while were priced enough lower than high-end Polaris cards to make them competative on hash/$.

For the Nvidia side, I took the total hashrate increase through 2017 for ZCash, divided by the appx. 450 sol/s a GTX 1070 can generate, and then doubled that to account for the many other MUCH SMALLER coins that work better on Nvidia than on AMD and the small number of Nvidia cards that would have ended up mining Ethereum/Ethereum Classic and such (mostly 1060 and possibly a few 1070).

The AMD sales figure I came up with might be on the LOW side, but I have definitely not OVERSTATED it.
The Nvidia figure might be a LITTLE low, but not a lot so.

That "3 million" figure the "research group" came up with for ALL GPUs sold to miners in 2017 is WAY on the low side - Ethereum hashrate growth ALONE needed well over DOUBLE that figure.

Also note that I was specifically talking "discrete GPUs", not ALL GPUs - which ARE tracked separately and have been reported separately in a few locations.
If you include their iGPU sales on their A10 A8 A6 A12 and such, the the iGPUs in their CONSOLE sales, it likely would be less than 10% of ALL of their GPU sales.
The figure that stuck in my mind though was "about 50 million total discrete GPU sales in 2017" for AMD and Nvidia combined - with the biggest "by quarter" numbers being in 4'th quarter (Christmas sales season) and 2'nd quarter (the initial HUGE cryptocoin price surge that triggered the huge mass inflow of "quick profit" types into cyptocoin mining last year.

 

[InvalidError]

That "3 million" figure the "research group" came up with for ALL GPUs sold to miners in 2017 is WAY on the low side - Ethereum hashrate growth ALONE needed well over DOUBLE that figure.

Ethereum ASIC miner manufacturers announced their products over the past few months, some are even taking orders now. If they're shipping now or soon, they must have been running their development rigs on earlier ASIC iterations for quite a while longer. A good chunk of the excess hash rate growth could come from large-scale "testing" prior to commercialization. Bitmain itself runs multiple crypto-mining farms with thousands of their own machines each and it wouldn't make much sense for them to start selling to competitors before they're done filling their own farms.

 

[bricefleckenstein]

No Ethereum ASIC has been ANNOUNCED to date - so far they are all RUMORED.
With that said, the rumors about the Bitmain one are pretty consistent in saying "sometime in the next 2 months or so it will be released", and Bitmain has a long history of not announcing a new product more than a couple days before they're ready to sell it, unless someone else "scoops" them.
Odds are though that the count of "testing" rigs are small - 2-digit or LOW 3-digit is the norm - and I don't anticipate that an ASIC for Ethereum will be more then 3-4 time as efficient as current GPU mining DUE TO THE VERY LARGE AMOUNT OF RAM REQUIRED just to be able to store the DAG flie that is a requirement to run the algorithm.
I also doubt that they had a significant number of rigs in use in 2017, if they're only going to be releasing in late 2Q 2018 they probably started their testing early in 1Q.

I'm quite aware of their Hashnest cloud-mining operation (that soaks up many or most of their miners in "their own farms") among other aspects of Bitmain and that they've run their own farms for quite a while now.
They made more money 'till recently though from selling every miner they could make then turning THAT income around into more chips for more miners to sell, but their recent sales slowdown on the S9 and L3+ seems to have decided them to start pushing for a more "wide" base of ASIC miner sales, to the point they have swamped several algorithms with "small" participation levels.
They haven't managed that on SHA256 or Scrypt yet, but the recent price drops have hammered profitability to the point even LARGE farm operations with SUPER cheap electric are slowing growth or have stopped adding miners.

The only thing an Ethereum ASIC will do at this point is "bring the second GPU mining apocalypse a few months to a year sooner" than Ethereum going full POS would have caused.