Nvidia and Mining: questions, answers and some doubts

Nvidia and the love-hate for mining: questions, answers and some doubts

When yesterday Nvidia informed us of his intervention to bring order to a video card market that has been torn by one for too long shortage lasting due to multiple factors, we exclaimed “better late than never!“.

Read also: CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor), Nvidia’s solution to save GeForces from miners

In summary, on the one hand the US company has worked to make the GeForce RTX 3060 arriving on February 25th unappetizing to miners, castrating its performance via software with the calculations involved in mining Ethereum and fine. At the same time, aware of the hefty profits that the mining market ensures, she decided to create one line of cards dedicated to this task and called her – with little imagination – CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor).

Why right now?

But let’s go back to our exclamation. First we asked ourselves: why right now and not, for example, last December? By chatting among ourselves, we have put on the plate a hypothesis that we want to share with you. Beyond the technical side, which certainly hides some difficulties and takes some time (Nvidia knows how to throttle GeForce GPUs, has been doing this for years with FP64 calculations), and putting aside reasons of simple profit, the thesis that Nvidia is remained at the window, burned by what happened in the past.

If you remember well, a few years ago (at the time of the GeForce GTX 1000 Pascal), the cryptocurrency market saw another surge and the video cards of that time ended up being looted by miners. To answer the question, Nvidia strongly increased production. For a while it’s fine, but when the “bubble” deflates (due to the change in the algorithms of some cryptocurrencies) on the market remained tons of Pascal video cards, most notably the GTX 1060. This created (economic) problems for Nvidia with partners and resellers, but above all forced it to postpone the release of the RTX 2060, in order to give the sector time to dispose of its stocks.

For this we can deduce that Nvidia, before announcing this compromise formula, is taking the time to study a strategy that somehow did not leave her uncovered should the cryptocurrency market suddenly collapse. With the CMP line, Nvidia has greater control over demand and consequently over production capacity, and at the same time does not risk flooding the sector with millions of RTX 3000 that could exceed the actual demand.

Why limit the hash rate only on the RTX 3060?

In the past few hours Nvidia had generically indicated the introduction a “software limiter” capable of halving the hash rate on the GeForce RTX 3060 and making using the card to mine not convenient. A few hours have passed, and now we have a better picture of the situation: it is a block affecting firmware and drivers, as stated su Twitter by Bryan del Rizzo, head of global PR for GeForce products.

Not therefore a driver-only or firmware-only intervention, at least officially. In this video, a Youtuber has demonstrated the decrease in performance of the RTX 3060 in mining (from 41.5 MH / s to 26-24 MH / s), even without using drivers compatible with the new card (which has already been around for a few weeks). So it seems that drivers aren’t that essential after all.

Nvidia, at the moment, he did not clarify what to do with the future production of the cards already presented (RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, etc.), but pointed out that it has no intention of limiting the performance of GPUs already sold. therefore it is possible that Nvidia will also apply the technology to models already presented but produced in the future, by installing an ad hoc firmware and changing the Device ID of the product. We will see, without forgetting that this “action against mining” could also be extended to notebooks, which have also ended up in the crosshairs of miners. Another detail revealed that this limiter will not only work on Windows, but Linux as well, and this is important news since more Linux is used for mining than Windows.

The circumventable limiter?

“Made the law, found the deception” says a proverb, but our experience also tells us that anything made by man always has a weak point. Nvidia seems to think differently and to the site PC Gamer stated that “the software cannot be hacked to remove the filter “. We would not like to be faced with the classic famous words …

Restrict Ethereum Only?

Speaking of the software countermeasure inserted in the new card, Nvidia specifically mentioned Ethereum. What about other cryptocurrencies? Here is the company’s response: “Ethereum currently has the highest yield among GPU mineable coins and thus probably the main driver of GPU demand in mining. Other algorithms do not contribute significantly to GPU demand and this state of things cannot change rapidly due to the network effects within a given cryptocurrency. The speed limiter applies to anything using Dagger Hashimoto or Ethash-like algorithms“.

The new CMP range for GPU mining drener from the GeForce series?

Nvidia stated that the new CMP range will not impact its ability to produce gaming cards. “Chips used for CMP may not meet GeForce product specifications and do not affect the overall capacity or availability of GeForce cards“said a spokesperson for Nvidia.

At the moment Nvidia has released only a table with some data on the specifications and performance of the new range of mining products, without going into detail. It is assumed to be GPU Ampere with defects such as not to make them useful to end up on one of the different GeForce models presented so far. something that has been done in the past and is still being applied, so there would be nothing wrong with that.

There are those who think otherwise. Excluding an ad hoc project that is clearly not compatible with either timing or commercial considerations, some believe that the CMP family is based on a mix of Turing and Ampere GPUs.

What performance does the CMP range offer for mining?

The table below, compiled by Anandtech, allows you to understand the potential of the new Nvidia CMP solutions compared to GeForce:

As can be seen, the interest of miners in these new products will be largely linked to prices, because in terms of efficiency, gaming GPUs seem more attractive.

More GeForce cards for everyone? Calm down!

Finally, we want appease easy enthusiasm. The first thing to remember that mining represents PART of the shortage problem, not THE problem. The situation is the result of multiple factors that we have already dealt with in the past and certainly the GeForce RTX 3060 will not be very available at launch, so we do not expect a drastic change in the situation overnight.

Even if Nvidia were to solve the mining problem, by diverting the request to the CMP range, that of the scalper who buy new products in bulk via automated bots to create shortages and resell them at higher prices. a scourge that companies are facing, but countermeasures are not yet fully adequate.

There are also some unknowns on which there is still no clarity, some of which transpire in the previous points. The only certainty Nvidia is making an attempt to fix a dramatic situation, and at the same time scoring an excellent marketing move (who knows if the competition will do the same …). however simply too early to say whether this will be effective.

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