[the-enterprise]

(1) Many gamers are miners in their spare time!

(2) Big Mining operations actually write their own drivers

(3) Huge Mining operations even use custom boards

(4) I heard that that Nvidia has been selling silicon directly to the big boys (https://wccftech.com/nvidia-allegedly-sold-175-million-worth...)

(5) With this action I expect its only the little guys getting removed from the game here (1) a huge benefit for the big players (2)(3) benefitting the corporations biggest customers (4)

[TomVDB]

> (2) Big Mining operations actually write their own drivers

Strong claims require strong evidence.

[qqii]

Mining operations are obviously quite secretive about any edge they have againstb their competitors but its not much of a stretch when there are stories like this one: https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-publically-endorsing-gpu-m...

[mywittyname]

This doesn't seem that far fetched. Especially since miners don't need to produce full-featured drivers.

[TomVDB]

When GPUs are know to use signed firmware, when open source coders need to ask for signed firmware to make even a minimal feature open source GPU driver work, and when there’s no evidence at all that high performance custom made mining-only drivers exist, then that seems very far fetched to me.

[the-enterprise]

Not so much a new driver, but here is an example of drivers being patched for mining. https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch

[TomVDB]

Indeed. Not a new driver at all.

What this tells me is that they just didn’t care enough to lock this down hard.

[lima]

The objective seems to be to stop miners from buying up consumer GPUs. Nvidia added a separate product line for mining.

[the-enterprise]

The point made is this will stop mass consumers mining, any restriction will likely be quickly bypassed by those technical enough to bypass it.

This is a great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg__YdXbRtI

[wmf]

If both those product lines use the same dies, mining is still taking GPUs away from gamers.

[_carbyau_]

Assuming binning is simply making use of chips that fail display output tests but are otherwise fine, then I see no issue here. These are chips not being used by gamers anyway.

I am curious though whether they could be used as "second cards" for systems so that I can speed up Blender render times...