NVIDIA Turing is a Crypto-mining Chip Jen-Hsun Huang Made to Save PC Gaming

[btarunr]

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.



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[cucker tarlson]

They're making dedicated gaming cards, dedicated mining cards, dedicated AI cards, dedicated prosumer cards whatever the hell that means, dedicated self driving car chips and tegra.
Interesting to see whether this card changes things. It might but time will tell, it's a good move from nvidia.

 

[xkm1948]

If this turns out true I would be so happy

 

[Fabio]

this will be useless. When all the mining cards are gone, miner start buying geforce, and if profittable, maybe less profittlable, they ll buu them all. No mattere how many cards there will be

 

[cucker tarlson]

I wonder if this means any delays for next gen geforce cards. They're making Volta and now this one, probably in ridiculous amounts. TSMC will have their hands full.

This will only be useless if supply can't meet demand. Miners will swallow it and burp, then be back to buying geforce again. If they can saturate the market tho, it means a lot of good things for gaming card prices.

 

[btarunr]

What if (big what if) Volta-based GeForce cards have artificially-crippled blockchain performance from their drivers/CUDA_CL?

 

[cucker tarlson]

What if (big what if) Volta-based GeForce cards have artificially-crippled blockchain performance from their drivers/CUDA_CL?

Some mining nut will come up with an un-crippled driver.
It has to be done at HW level.

 

[RejZoR]

Casual miners won't buy dedicated mining cards because they can't be sold as a gaming card later. And all these idiots think they'll make easy money with mining and then sell whole rigs for 50k bucks. It'll just never work unless they are absolutely forced to do it via locked BIOS and driver restrictions. At this point I don't care if hardcore overclockers are punished for it, bigger things are at stake than hardcore overclockers having their access to BIOS and GPU.

 

[dj-electric]

What if (big what if) Volta-based GeForce cards have artificially-crippled blockchain performance from their drivers/CUDA_CL?

Only HW level will stop mining. People use open-source drivers on linux mining rigs that are out of nvidia's control

 

[techy1]

if this is true - I love him and his wierd leather jacket

 

[cadaveca]

I only have one question... what fab line is going to make these chips so that they actually have an impact on supply? Fab time is a limited resource.

 

[techy1]

for spectics thinking that "casual miners"* will not switch to this and continiue to use theior gpus as they used to - if this Turning has significantly increased price/performance - there will be NO choice for miners - dificulty will skyrocket in a heart beat. old systems wont cover electricity costs - no matter how you feel about them and miners will have to decomplect their rigs and sell as fast (and low priced) as possible! just like with bitcoin happened when ASIC's hit the market - done with gpu mining for ever - like it or not! and that is a good news for all of us (not miners). and if this Turning has significantly increased performance/watt - then this will be a good news for planet too.
_____
* - what ever that term is these days - a guy with just two gtx 1070s? or a guy just 3 rigs of 8 cards (each)?

 

[Fabio]

for spectics thinking that "casual miners"* will not switch to this and continiue to use theior gpus as they used to - if this Turning has significantly increased price/performance - there will be NO choice for miners - dificulty will skyrocket in a heart beat. old systems wont cover electricity costs - no matter how you feel about them and miners will have to decomplect their rigs and sell as fast (and low priced) as possible! just like with bitcoin happened when ASIC's hit the market - done with gpu mining for ever - like it or not! and that is a good news for all of us (not miners). and if this Turning has significantly increased performance/watt - then this will be a good news for planet too.
_____
* - what ever that term is these days - a guy with just two gtx 1070s? or a guy just 3 rigs of 8 cards (each)?

the only good news for the planet is a fast reaction of the governments to definitely knock down the crypto plague, along with the mining

 

[evernessince]

So either I'm missing something or there's not many details here. I'm looking for release dates. This don't mean much if it's launched 2 years from now and the coin bubble has popped.

 

[the54thvoid]

Casual miners haven't been the villains of GPU price inflation. It's semi-pro miners, looking to make a constant and moderate income. Buying 2 cards to mine is casual. Buying 8, requiring mobo modding or a bespoke mining set up with risers etc, that's the start. The real culprits though are even more industrial.
Hobby miners were never to blame. It was the investors and then the gold rush. These cards, if true, would help.

 

[Upgrayedd]

So either I'm missing something or there's not many details here. I'm looking for release dates. This don't mean much if it's launched 2 years from now and the coin bubble has popped.

It's all still speculation. Nobody knows really. Don't know why this got put as factual news. One of the sourced articles said April 12th. Reuters vaguely mentions Turing as a gaming chip. Crypto carrying this train hard af.

 

[TheGuruStud]

Little Huang is blowing smoke up your bungholes. It's another attempt at inflated prices for something specialty that excels at nothing and has no resale value.

How much you wanna bet it's Pascal with only compute and minimal amount of fast ram?

 

[ZoneDymo]

This just seems pointless to me

 

[dj-electric]

Little Huang is blowing smoke up your bungholes. It's another attempt at inflated prices for something specialty that excels at nothing and has no resale value.

How much you wanna bet it's Pascal with only compute and minimal amount of fast ram?

And that's not fine because?

 

[Xzibit]

It's all still speculation. Nobody knows really. Don't know why this got put as factual news. One of the sourced articles said April 12th. Reuters vaguely mentions Turing as a gaming chip. Crypto carrying this train hard af.

Almost every techsite says the same thing verbatim and using the Feb 9 Reuters report. Almost like a presser went out and every ones reporting the same thing in 1-2 days span

The new GPU gaming chip, code named Turing, is expected to be unveiled next month.

Nvidia GTC is scheduled next month March 26-29. Nvidia is calling it "AI & Deep Learning Conference"

Maybe the name got lost in translation and Turing = To Ring, in more moneys!!!

We can all hope for something like a GTX 2080 Founders Turing Edition

 

[TheGuruStud]

And that's not fine because?

Probably b/c it will be priced too high and it's still using RAM needed for gaming cards... It's a cash grab or at attempt. Time will tell.

 

[Aldain]

Dear site..

What is with the messianic titile in the topic? Yeah Nvidia CEO is making this card to save pc gaming and not ot make profit from it . You made a topic based on a rumor from Reuters and made it into a puff piece.. Are you CNN and WCCFTECH all in one?

 

[LemmingOverlord]

Uhm, maybe this is a dumb questoin, but why would a crypto-mining ASIC-like piece of silicon be based on Volta or Pascal?

 

[Fluffmeister]

Smart business, well played Nvidia.

Another bumper year for you.

 

[john_]

If this turns out true I would be so happy

Nvidia will be happier, making a gazillion of dollars. But it could bring prices for ALL graphics cards down, which would be great.