This is interesting. I hadn’t realized that demand for them has been driven by cryptocurrency miners, not gamers.
15 thoughts on “Graphics Cards”
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This is interesting. I hadn’t realized that demand for them has been driven by cryptocurrency miners, not gamers.
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That isn’t news to me. However, even with GPU acceleration the mining of Bitcoin keys has long passed the point of positive return vis-a-vis cost of GPU hardware. I suppose each time a new cyber currency is proposed there’ll be a run on the market until the compute horizon is crossed…
VR has also been driving a lot of upgrades on the gamer side. I had to buy a new GPU for my VR headset, otherwise I’d still be using the one from 2012.
Probably nowhere near as much as the compute engine market, though. We use GPUs for signal processing in some systems where we’d previously have used DSPs.
Graphics chips can also be used for AI.
Yeah, and there’s basically zero demand for that, market-wise.
Not compared to flavor-of-the-week cryptocurrency mining by borderline fools*.
(* Total crapshoot on returns, after all.)
Oh there is quite a lot of demand of GPUs for AI. But the thing is the demand is on server farms in companies like Google with hundreds of thousands of nodes each. Rather than user PCs.
It is used in machine translation and data mining (like image search) and other applications.
Google seems to have its own custom chips … or use specific targeted machine-learning GPUs like the K80.
Don’t think Google’s buying all the Fancy Gamer GPUs; they can order custom stuff tailored to their needs for maximum output per cost.
(What I mean is, “yes, anyone doing AI wants fancy hardware and it can totally be a GPU – but it’s not what’s driving shortages”.)
Local computer store had the most amazing price tag by their graphics cards:
qty 1: $399
qty 2: $399
qty 3+ $10,000
My son said right away it was to keep miners from buying them out all at once.
So buy 2 and sell 2 for $600. Repeat as often as you can.
I thought that was over and done with now that custom ASICs were all the rage.
As the article says, this comes back with different crytpocurrencies. Presumably the ASICs for Bitcoin don’t work with Etherium, for example.
Yeah GPUs are commonly used for cryptomining and neural network AIs right now. Increasingly also in automotive because of the push towards autonomous driving vehicles. It has been good for NVIDIA stock owners that’s for sure.
Still once a cryptocurrency becomes popular, like what happened for Bitcoin, someone will design an ASIC which can mine that currency with a lot less electricity. So it is only good in the initial stages of a cryptocurrency. This is one factor why I think Bitcoin is such a terrible idea. The cost to mine new coins grows exponentially and deflation is built-in into the system. Which means it is self-limiting. It is even worse than going back to the gold standard.
Yeah unlike Space mining where you might stumble onto an asteroid of near pure gold, mining relatively prime numbers, maybe not so much….
But if you did find clumps along the number space somehow, that be a pretty big deal as well….
Bitcoin is a terrible idea because the block chain is a fundamental flaw. All other cryptocurrency seems to have the same flaw. Some math person needs to rethink this because we do need a good solution.
Speaking of data mining…
Recently read about: 1 / 998,001
Produces 3 digit sequential numbers to the right of the decimal starting with 000, 001, 002 … up to but not including 998….