Thursday, February 15th 2018
NVIDIA Turing is a Crypto-mining Chip Jen-Hsun Huang Made to Save PC Gaming
When Reuters reported Turing as NVIDIA's next gaming graphics card, we knew something was off about it. Something like that would break many of NVIDIA's naming conventions. It now turns out that Turing, named after British scientist Alan Turing, who is credited with leading a team of mathematicians that broke the Nazi "Enigma" cryptography, is a crypto-mining and blockchain compute accelerator. It is being designed to be compact, efficient, and ready for large-scale deployment by amateur miners and crypto-mining firms alike, in a quasi-industrial scale.
NVIDIA Turing could be manufactured at a low-enough cost against GeForce-branded products, and in high-enough scales, to help bring down their prices, and save the PC gaming ecosystem. It could have an ASIC-like disruptive impact on the graphics card market, which could make mining with graphics cards less viable, in turn, lowering graphics card prices. With performance-segment and high-end graphics cards seeing 200-400% price inflation in the wake of crypto-currency mining wave, PC gaming is threatened as gamers are lured to the still-affordable new-generation console ecosystems, led by premium consoles such as the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X. There's no word on which GPU architecture Turing will be based on ("Pascal" or "Volta"). NVIDIA is expected to launch its entire family of next-generation GeForce GTX 2000-series "Volta" graphics cards in 2018.
Source:
DigitalTrends
NVIDIA Turing could be manufactured at a low-enough cost against GeForce-branded products, and in high-enough scales, to help bring down their prices, and save the PC gaming ecosystem. It could have an ASIC-like disruptive impact on the graphics card market, which could make mining with graphics cards less viable, in turn, lowering graphics card prices. With performance-segment and high-end graphics cards seeing 200-400% price inflation in the wake of crypto-currency mining wave, PC gaming is threatened as gamers are lured to the still-affordable new-generation console ecosystems, led by premium consoles such as the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X. There's no word on which GPU architecture Turing will be based on ("Pascal" or "Volta"). NVIDIA is expected to launch its entire family of next-generation GeForce GTX 2000-series "Volta" graphics cards in 2018.
124 Comments on NVIDIA Turing is a Crypto-mining Chip Jen-Hsun Huang Made to Save PC Gaming
This is as ridiculous as to say somebody exploits Wall Street fund managers. They calculate expenditure/income to extreme, and you want to cash-grab them?
1) all gpus are sold out for x2 price right now (so no waffers and fab resources are avalible for you gamer to get at this point).
2) nvidia and amd are making money of it right now.
3) more miners enter the game - more difficulty rises and less money miners get.
so how exaclty these news are bad for gamers? gamers wont get cards, because nvidia will use existing waffers to produce miner cards?
answer - gamersdoes notand wont get any gpu anyway - nor 2 year old gtx 1070 nor potential new gtx 20XX if this situation in mining does not collpase or market will be flooded with more powerfull rigs that can increase difficulty significantly, and Jen-Hsuns pockets will be filled with miners cahs anyway. So look at this at the bight side, if this architecture is more optimized for mining, and it hits the mining market - then dificulty will rise and mining will be less profitable with existing rigs, even when Jen-Hsuns used up all your waffers in the process and filled his pockets - still you will get second hand cards then - because those millions of existing mining rigs will hit ebay and compete with each oter.
Wonder if nvidia is the one behind TSMCs custom cryptoasic order, samsung has some crypto manufacturing asic deals too. But knowing close relationship between nvidia and tsmc, the former is safe bet.
My idea would be to include a display-port or HDMI port as normal. But to have a lower hard limit on voltage. Miners typically always under-volt their mining cards.
For example if I mine on my own 1080Ti it will draw up to 336 watts at only 0.9v. (it does 1999Mhz at 0.9v)
Even at stock the voltage would actually be 1.06v which would put power draw up to nearly 500 watts. Which would soon kill a card if left mining at that current/voltage throughput continuously.
By limiting voltage (at hard level) to lower than that of the GeForce counterparts, it would deter gamers from buying them initially.
But would still offer a cheap Ebay bargain for a gamer that doesn't care about overclocking and who doesn't mind their card being effectively "down-tuned" compared to a regular card. This would enable resale of the card as people would love to snap up a bargain on a down-tuned variant. Moreoever they'd have the peace of mind knowing that although the card has been used for mining, voltage has always been kept low. In other words the card will have been "broken in" gently.
This also wouldn't affect mining performance because no miner who is trying to turn a profit (while paying electric) is running their card at stock voltages. And certainly isn't overclocking.
I estimate my card is probably actually most efficient at about 0.8 to 0.85v
See Asus GP106 model without any outputs here: www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/MINING-P106-6G/gallery/
Pascal mining news from 2017: hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/106795-nvidia-pascal-gpu-cryptocurrency-mining-solution-pictured/
This is really just NVidia ramping up (current Pascal and next-gen) die production for those mining cards. They had their chance to "save" the gamers for a while now, but they didn't fearing the volatility of the crypto-coins just like Steam did. What changed is that the crypto-coins didn't burst, so analysts and investors are putting pressure on NVidia because they are 10x bigger than the competitor. If you piece NVidia news together for the last 6 months, it's very cohesive and centered around the dynamics of crypto -- particularly BTC.
All what is here are good topics, and they point less to be for aiding the gaming community.
You're still going to have the moderate-sized miners that have a garage full of rack mining systems at home that have invested $50k+. But it would definitely kill off small scale mining, and those are really the people paying 200%+ premiums for video cards thinking they'll get rich quick. Large-scale miners aren't the ones paying $500 for a 1060 or 580, or $1500 for a 1080ti, they are buying in bulk (even by the pallet) at close to MSRP. So making small-scale mining unprofitable would definitely bring prices down for the gaming masses.
As others said, there is really nothing to cheer about ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
nVidia has shown they are very committed to the deep learning and AI sector, which has amazing long term potential and benefits across hundreds of use cases.
Crypto currency and mining on GPUs could be gone just as fast as their prices rise and fall, it's a very volatile. If it is true that releasing a mining card on a mass scale will drastically ramp up difficulty to mine on a GPU, why would they base an entire business model on something that will essentially create its own demise? (as in, the more people buy these cards> the more people will mine> the more difficult mining gets> the less return/value/reason there is to mining>the less people will buy the cards).
Because of this I would be shocked if this ends up being a mining specific card. But you never know, maybe it will be. Maybe they just want to cash in while the getting is great, and throw a bone to gamers. This is why I am not the head of nVidia I guess. All I can say is if it is a mining card, they need to disable mining on the GeForce brand completely, just as they have disabled the use of the GeForce brand in datacenters.