Nvidia LHR Lock Officially Cracked Bringing Full Crypto Mining Speeds

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2022/05/07/nvidia-lhr-lock-officially-cracked-bringing-full-crypto-mining-speeds/

by LopRabbit • 4 years ago

88 108 4 years ago

forbes.com

galkk• 4 years ago

Could it be a result of nvidia leak?

skunkworker• 4 years ago

That's what the comments on /r/nvidia are thinking.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/uke679/latest_niceh...

But apparently does not apply to the 3080 12gb and 3050 as they have a different LHR lock.

7speter3• 4 years ago

Does the 3050 have a lhr lock or is it just useless at mining?

prox• 4 years ago

What will this do for graphics cards prices? They were just coming down.

arcticbull• 4 years ago

Nothing for now, crypto isn't exactly crushing it. Hopefully that continues and we can put this episode behind us.

7speter3• 4 years ago

Prices have stalled for about a month for the midrange at least… might be vendors watching where eth goes (it’s been stuck between 2700and 3k) and the Hong Kong shutdown…

pjerem2• 4 years ago

Could it create a gap between NVidia and AMD GPU prices ?

It could be a win-win for both of the actors and for gamers (not for humanity’s future but at least we could have some games)

Moru2• 4 years ago

Can forget about only fans cooling your rig though, if ambient temperatures will be around 50 C there won't be enough cold air to cool your GPU I'm affraid :-)

porker• 4 years ago

I'm hoping not much, because after two years relying on my aged iGPU I am so ready to get back to a beefier graphics card.

MrBuddyCasino2• 4 years ago

The next generation of graphics cards is around the corner, with a pretty substantial performance improvement expected. Only buy a card now if you really, really have to - everyone else should just wait until Ada etc. Intel's new lineup that is launching right now might also relieve some pressure from the market, at least in the low-end.

torginus2• 4 years ago

If history's any record, this will be another paper launch, meaning unless you are extremely good at snatching up the limited stock, you won't get your hands on a next-gen GPU for a good while.

WithinReason3• 4 years ago

AMD doesn't have a limiter and they have been falling in tandem:

https://www.3dcenter.org/dateien/abbildungen/AMD-nVidia-Reta...

Correlation with ETH price (in yellow) was high previously but now it's low

torginus2• 4 years ago

Afaik the best predictor for ETH hashrate is memory bandwidth. AMD's latest generation of GPUs actually employs a large on-die cache combined with slower memory compared to the 5000 series (and the NVIDIA 30 series), resulting in a naturally lower hashrate.

pjerem2• 4 years ago

When you think about it : a company selling computing power deliberately restrain its product’s computing power just to avoid running out-of-stock because somehow people discovered they can sell some database entry created by wasting the most precious and vital resource we can gather in limited supply (energy) from sources that are changing our only planet to a cooking oven.

What a time to be alive.

I’m really amazed at how we as a species are so impressively intelligent but also so mindblowingly dumb at the same time.

But I’m not surprised : if you look at our species history : we were and are always just fighting our own stupidity.

DSingularity2• 4 years ago

What a cynical take.

gjvc• 4 years ago

Accurate, though.

xvector7• 4 years ago

Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does.

The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.

Crypto miners are just easy to hate because it's an excellent opportunity for people to point the finger at someone else without introspecting on the fact that they are no better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

sascha_sl5• 4 years ago

Ah yeah sure, people running warehouses full of GPUs and reviving local coal power plants for their energy supply are doing less harm than than someone eating too much beef.

Unlike meat consumption, mining doesn't map neatly onto the entire population. It's a rich few that can even buy this much compute power.

Bitcoin is 137 TW/h/yr

Etherium is 112 TW/h/yr

(thanks for pointing out me messing up units)

Those are both mid sized countries by now.

gman83• 4 years ago

Our overconsumption of meat is idiotic, yes. Not sure what that has to do with the merits of crypto, sounds like whataboutism.

sailingparrot2• 4 years ago

The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.

Yes, the feeding habits of 7 billions people produces more CO2 than a virtual casino that benefits... millions? How is that surprising, and how can you try to paint that as worse?

And even though we should do more to change dietary habits of people who can, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything else where we can until this is done. This is classic useless whataboutism.

Also, we don't get a trustless financial system out of cryptos. We get the utopia of one.

Crypto miners are not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the fucked-up things that humanity does.

Crypto miners use as much energy as Norway. It's responsible for 78 million tons of CO2 per year, as much as 15M cars. [1]

Yearly emissions for all of humanity is at around 36B tons of CO2. So mining is 1/500th of all our emissions.

Since one drop is 0.05mL, your "ocean" is about half of a shot glass, or 5 teaspoons.

Or, the other way around, if our emissions are all of our oceans, then mining emissions are 70% of the mediterranean. So much for "not even a drop".

[1] https://energycommerce.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/pal...

Bancakes5• 4 years ago

Food chains are a natural occurrence. It's the default way and if your disagreement with that is a biological maladaptation. But if you're only vegan for health reasons, that's respectable.

There is no sufferosphere, the supposed suffering is intangible. These farm animals were born to eat, reproduce, and be eaten - they had no higher purpose, and without humans wouldn't exist in the first place.

EdwardDiego5• 4 years ago

Great whataboutism. Or evangelical veganism, whatever your poison, really.

phatfish2• 4 years ago

So is it safe to assume you are a vegan who grows all their own food to minimise your impact on CO2 emissions, while you participate in the "trustless financial system"?

Otherwise you are a hypocrite.

Personally I will not participate in the "trustless financial system" AND try to eat less meat.

imtringued4• 4 years ago

The average person causes far more harm and literally millions of times more pain and suffering through their dietary choices alone than crypto miners ever could [1]. And we don't even get a trustless financial system out of it.

I'm pretty sure the humans that developed those trustless financial systems made dietary choices that you would disapprove of. What am I even talking about? They are probably gods in your eyes and therefore allowed to break your arbitrary rules.

blibble• 4 years ago

how is it trustless?

instead of policy being decided by elected representatives it's now decided by a few rando developers on github and mining pool cabals

hardly an improvement

fxtentacle• 4 years ago

I have reached the same conclusion by walking around.

On the one hand, our species has invented and built e-scooters which have GPS and an internet connection, a digital screen and 50km of range, which is an impressive energy and technology density for what used to be a children's toy.

On the other hand, the insight that parking them on the bicycle lane is dangerous has evaded most of our species so far.

Moru2• 4 years ago

And the companies renting them out as a business claims it's a green movement while they are replacing the whole fleet every two months because they break down.

IMTDb• 4 years ago

It hasn't evaded anyone. People just don't care. Parking e-scooters on bike lanes is dangerous for you, but convenient for me.

The general lack of regulations and the total of $0 spent on enforcing them, leads to e-scooters drivers acting simultaneously like car, bikes, and pedestrian depending on what's most convenient.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

most precious and vital resource we can gather in limited supply (energy)

???

What leads one to this opinion? The problem with energy isn't that there isn't enough of it but we're not exploiting enough of it. I want a personal fusion reactor, not a tax on existing.

Why does viscerally hating cryptobros lead people to wanting to kneecap humanity forever, huddling around solar-powered heaters in winter, eating impossible soy products?

erk__5• 4 years ago

I think the issue here is not how we could gather energy, but how it is done currently. A lot of crypto mining runs on limited resources such as gas or oil. If we had limitless power this would not be an issue of course, but that is a dream scenario

imtringued4• 4 years ago

I want a personal fusion reactor, not a tax on existing.

Good, now enjoy the rest of your life fully aware that you will always be paying that tax every single year through the process known as "aging".

cafard• 4 years ago

"He used also to say that when he saw physicians, philosophers and pilots at their work, he deemed man the most intelligent of all animals ; but when again he saw interpreters of dreams and diviners and those who attended to them, or those who were puffed up with conceit of wealth, he thought no animal more silly."

The life of Diogenes in Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius*, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

IshKebab• 4 years ago

It's not to avoid running out of stock; it's so that crypto miners have to buy a more expensive card. Same reason they don't allow gaming GPUs to be used in AI datacentres.

It's called "price differentiation".

bob10293• 4 years ago

I've given up all hope that more GPU is the answer to more fun.

These days I spend my free time at a cabin in the woods, hand crafting a software rasterizer in protest of all of this bullshit.

Developers still don't realize how powerful that CPU is. Especially now in 2022... We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s? Just do some linear extrapolation with those figures.

tetris11• 4 years ago

I still marvel at how powerful pure JavaScript in the browser is. I'm not even talking EMCAScript with its classes and other syntactic junk, just pure JS free of any bells and whistles or bloated frameworks or opinionated design strategies.

Its ability to manipulate the DOM, including SVGs, in real-time, fully-introspectable, just blows my mind away.

bob10293• 4 years ago

You can also get a canvas to draw like butter these days. Gaming monitor refresh rate territory. With proper use of requestAnimationFrame I see 144 fps on my PC.

jhanschoo• 4 years ago

We were playing quake on a single thread with clock rates measured in hundreds of megahertz. How much faster is an AMD Rome system compared to the best you could buy in the mid 90s?

Modern games are also have much more detail in their textures, many more particles, and much higher screen resolution; not to mention physics and visual effects. No. of transistors may have risen exponentially, but aspects of games have increased exponentially and quadratically as well.

bob10293• 4 years ago

Agreed - but again, fun certainly has not increased by these same rates.

Let's try this a different way:

Is it possible there is some gameplay concept that is so engaging that even technical caveats like a 640x480 resolution would not severely impact the enjoyment of most players?

What is the actual limit of this stuff if you flip the equation around? How much janky bullshit can a substantial portion of your target market put up with for the sake of fun in 2022?

thunkshift1• 4 years ago

Perfectly timed news release.. just when their stock is taking a massive beating

Nvidia LHR Lock Officially Cracked Bringing Full Crypto Mining Speeds

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