AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload

My understanding is that Nvidia's move was universally condemned.

AMD's just taking advantage of Nvidia's blunder.

Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards

If it means people who only want to play games can actually but one for less than the price of a car, sure.

Hardware manufacturers have imposed weird arbitrary feature limits on things forever. It's how they segment out valuable markets. Even in graphics you get output limits to protect workstation cards. Nothing new.

Broadly speaking, the issue is that cryptocurrencies drive up demand for GPUs, and that makes them less available/affordable for gamers. If there was a crypto-crippled GPU then it would be exempt from that particular demand.

It's been a pretty standard procedure for chip companies to sell CPUs locked from doing specific tasks, whether that's binning, burning fuses to disable functionality etc. It's much cheaper to make 1 design that does everything and segment your market using arbitrary restrictions than to design lots of chips. It's only the totally bone-headed way Nvidia decided to target this that is new.

> It's not like AMD is above artificially limiting the performance of certain workloads when it suits them, they do it with CAD applications unless you pay the workstation tax.

I'm curious about that, do you have an example? I only know of nvidia consumer drivers giving you abysmal performance if you try to use fixed function pipeline line or wireframe rendering with opengl. Or at least they did a couple of years ago. As soon as you used shaders to render the same lines everything got super fast. I always suspected it's their way to force users of CAD systems to buy their pricey professional cards. No game would use opengl line rendering without shaders or if any game did in the long gone past it's probably so old and the line count so low that it would be still fine with the artificial slowdown.

There's a lot of different crypto algorithms. Some will work better on AMD, some on Nvidia, some regardless of memory and some dependant on large cache. A miner will benchmark their card against the popular algos and choose the most profitable one. Which is one of the main complaints when Nvidia limited ETH algos, that miners would just switch to ZHash with a percentage or two less profitability and thus it would do nothing about the shortage while possibly triggering false-positives for gamers.

I'd like to see them trying to beat M1 rather than chase the GPU game. Apart from gaming these GPUs have little use in day to day computing. Maybe you encode a video once in a while, but it does not make huge difference whether it will encode in 10 or 5 minutes.

Multiple reasons. It wouldn't look good on nVidia if they were to raise prices too much. Between being known as a company that doesn't have enough supply/is too popular sounds much better than a company that price gouges their customers.

Gamers are also perceived as being loyal to a given brand, which is always good to ensure a certain level of demand and interest for their future products. If they can't buy a given product, they hardly can be loyal to that particular brand.

Miners are more rational actors, and will pay as much as needed to secure as much supply as they possibly can, as long as they can turn a profit. If the price of cryptocurrency is high, so is the price that miners are willing to pay.

While this sounds good for nvidia, miners will also dump unprofitable cards on the used market, therefore competing against new products from nvidia. If the price of cryptocurrency crashes, as it has done before, then there might be tens of thousands of used GPUs all flooding the market at a certain time. As these would be priced to sell, and the miners have likely turned a profit on the card already, any amount of money that they can get on selling the cards is just pure profit.

Nvidia probably doesn't want to have this sword dangling above their heads. It would be pretty bad for them to announce a new series of GPUs at the same time that the cryptocurrency market crashes, as they'd have to compete against used GPUs at fire sale prices.

I assume you mean "aren't".

The reason this happens is because AMD/Nvidia can't sell for $X to person A and $X*10 to person B depending on how much they want something (there are some caveats here, such as being able to price discriminate consumers and enterprises, but some distinction must exist within the product for that). As such, if they price all their items at $X*10, they run the risk of not being able to sell their stock - a risk they are taking for no reason, since they already priced in the profit they wanted at $X.

Additionally, the appearance of scarcity actually works in their favor, since it keeps up demand.

It's the same reason why you can't get a COVID vaccine for $1000: fear of reputation problems.

Tesla is doing supply/demand based pricing though, so I think NVIDIA could get away with it as well as long as it gets the communication right.

I wonder how much cross-pollination there is between the discrete GPU space and AMD's iGPUs.

They're probably selling a dozen Playstation or Xbox APUs for every one 6700XT dGPU. But by building a better dGPU today, they have the technology to make a better APU when it comes to bid out the PS6 and Xbox Series Q, or for the next generation Ryzen "G" APUs.

Nvidia makes majority of their money from consumer GPU sales. Yes, their compute datacenter cards have been their marketing focus (they call themselves an AI company now) but it is still about 60/40 revenue split in favor of consumer GPU sales. So your statement "NVidia makes more money off of data center cards." is false.

Source: https://www.investopedia.com/how-nvidia-makes-money-4799532 https://s22.q4cdn.com/364334381/files/doc_downloads/2021/03/...

It is true that in some quarters, their datcenter revenue is more than 50% but that is because many consumers buy around christmas in Q4, and overall consumer GPUs still make up 60% of revenue.

It is not just PC gaming, it is also all the developers of these games, a lot of artists, architects, mechanical engineers who do CAD models etc. etc. They primarily buy the GeForce or Quadro graphics cards. Oh and of course, miners buy these cards too but even when mining declined consumer sales were still >50% of their revenue.

Datacenter sales are usually custom solutions, but they have also been focusing on their DGX boxes. I work at a competitor of Nvidia in the datacenter space, so I know this quite well. They do have 100% of the datacenter market right now (this will change - but that is an opinion) but that does not mean majority of their revenue comes from the datacenter.

Now as far as growth is concerned, that comes primarily from the datacenter. Thats why I guess their marketing focus on being an AI company. But their product is not an AI chip. It is a large vector unit designed for rendering frames and pushing pixels, no matter how much they try to repurpose it (which they have done quite well evidently).

People also realise you don't need a GPU to play the game of your own life, so people chase real life points rather than flipping bits with their imagination.