[jagger27]

This is sort of what Nvidia did with the cards they sold directly to miners. At the end of the day they're still GPUs (albeit without display outputs) so they could in theory be repurposed for work that actually benefits society.

In practice that would never happen because by the time miners are done with the cards they'd be too out of date for machine learning or other general compute workloads, and useless for budget gamers because of the lack of display outputs. It's really a shame how much power and silicon is being wasted on cryptomining.

[greyhair]

But pure ASICs get rid of even more of the GPU than just the output stage. A pure ASIC to cover the fundamental calculations in hardware with just a CPU to feed them data and pull results is the most efficient.

Think of something as direct as a cell phone modem. The batteries last as long as they do because a ton of the low level modem behavior is done in accelerator blocks direct in hardware, and the DSPs just route data between the blocks and manage the higher level protocols.

[jagger27]

I don't disagree, I'm just saying that Nvidia literally shipped normal Ampere cards directly to miners. Ethereum is tricky to build purpose built ASICs for.

[_carbyau_]

I was wondering whether they could be useful for render farms.

But as you say, whether they'd be useful for rendering once their crypto-life is over is debatable.

Compute power is compute power. Everyone in the world wants more for their task.