Chipmakers Nvidia, AMD Ride Cryptocurrency Wave -- For Now (bloomberg.com) 57
During California's Gold Rush, it was often the sellers of pickaxes and shovels who made the most money. In the frenzy to get rich quick from cryptocurrencies, some investors are calling computer chipmakers the modern-day equivalent. From a report: Shares of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have gained at least 14 percent since the beginning of June, spurred in part by about a 10-fold boom from April to June in a market, known as ethereum, for a currency that can be used to buy computing power over the internet. What's the link between ethereum and these Silicon Valley chipmakers? It lies in the really powerful graphics processors, designed to make computer games more realistic, that are also needed to gain access to encrypted digital currencies. Nvidia and AMD have rallied in the last month and a half even as investors have ignored chip stocks leaving the benchmark Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index up about 1 percent. Nvidia has gained 14 percent and AMD rallied 27 percent. While some of that has come from optimism around new products for other markets, analysts are projecting that sales related to cryptocurrencies will result in a spike in revenue for both companies. Even so, investors shouldn't bank on a lasting impact from the cryptocurrency boom, said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "This has happened before," Rasgon said. "It lasted about a quarter." [...] Like bitcoin, ethereum is an attempt by an online community to create an economy that doesn't rely on government-backed currencies. Unlike bitcoin, it's focused solely on offering decentralized computing and storage services. Those seeking to use these services -- and speculators looking for a quick profit by creating and then selling ether -- have seized on graphics cards, which excel at performing multiple simple calculations in parallel, as a faster way to claim the blocks of code that act as the currency of the ethereum market. Demand from ethereum miners has created temporary shortages of some of the graphics cards, according to analysts, who cite sold-out products at online retailers. Estimates of additional sales from this demand run as high as $875 million, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves. That would roughly equal AMD's total sales from graphics chips last year, or half of Nvidia's quarterly sales of those components. But Steves and other analysts are also quick to warn that the market opportunity could fizzle out.
Power companies love this shit too (Score:4, Insightful)
What's not to love about people intentionally burning as much electricity as they can to get nothing useful done?
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Yeah, the power companies love the NSA.
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FWIW my GTX 1080 uses 100-105W while mining ETH. The whole machine uses 260W instead of roughly 170W while idle.
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"You must be running that on a laptop"
No, we underclock and undervolt it. Some (very few, i'm probably one of a couple dozen) even go so far as to flash modified firmware on their cards for more control over power usage.
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ETH mining only uses 58% GPU power on my machine, with no underclocking or undervolting. The bottleneck is in the memory controller, for some reason Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm is not efficient on 1080. Some say it's the GDDR5X architecture, however on the 1080 Ti it works very well.
Yes, the 1070 goes all the way to the maximum, and has a much better hashrate. The 1080 does 20-21 Mhashes, up to 25 with overclocked memory.
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170W when idle is either really bad design or your PC is setup wrong, for comparison my laptop is running a trade bot and it's only consuming 5w.
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It's a beast of a PC.
i7 6800K Broadwell overclocked to 4.3 GHz, a GTX 1080, watercooling loop with 2x D5 pumps in series and 2x 360mm 60mm thickness EK-XE360 radiators, with the assortment of fans, HDDs, SSDs and whatnot (Aquaero, Farbwerk, etc). 170W includes other hardware such as router, external HDD and the power charge tower which is used to charge family's phones, tablets, etc. But those usually take around 15-20W of power.
Monitors' power draw is calculated separately. About 30W each but when I am not
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If you can come up with a better distributed protocol for a distributed ledger where none of the parties trust one another, let's hear it. The current state of the art for that kind of thing consumes a lot of power, but not more than other less trustworthy systems.
FWIW, Proof of stake [wikipedia.org] (vs proof of work) is the leading candidate for such a protocol. However, the wart on Proof of stake systems is they need complicated protocols to establish consensus in the face of adversaries that want to fork the chain (since there is nothing like work/energy limiting an adversary working on multiple forks).
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I wouldn't call that a leading candidate, unless I wanted to push an altcoin based on PoS.
Well, Ethereum (what you might dismiss as an "alt-coin") is making good progress on it's Proof Of Stake system called Casper. An implementation of this called RocketPool [rocketpool.net] is now in the alpha testing stage.
FWIW, that's my definition of "leading candidate". What's your definition of "altcoin"?
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"If you can come up with a better distributed protocol for a distributed ledger where none of the parties trust one another, let's hear it."
Pen and paper ledger, multiple witnesses (with recording) and very public announcements.
Worked fine when we learned the problems of permission-less distributed databases in the 70s.
Here we are, almost 60 years later, and obviously database geeks still have not learned the lesson.
When nobody can trust anybody, then the only answer is multiple witnesses with a record ther
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"Papermate's Erasermate brand of erasable ink pens eliminates your security."
This person has obviously never heard of triplicate carbon-copy paper.
Ethereum bubble may be bursting. (Score:5, Informative)
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Awesome. I can't wait to pick up some cheap GPUs to add to my TensorFlow machines.
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" it's possible these GPUs have had non-standard firmware flashed"
Very few of us actually have that capability to modify and successfully flash modified firmware over. Most people just undervolt and underclock (and one guy went so far as to remove some of the physical RAM from the board because it was bad instead of going for RMA since the function isn't memory-bound more than it is bandwidth-bound.)
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except that it's still profitable to mine Ethereum. GPU prices haven't come down yet
Re: Ethereum bubble may be bursting. (Score:2)
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Solar cells don't work forever.
Jumping Bubbles! (Score:1)
Weapons of 'war' (Score:1)
unsustainable (Score:3, Interesting)
AFAIK, all cryptocurrencies are not scalable. You have to verify all transactions against an ever-growing blockchain which contains all transactions. Race type collisions will become more and more frequent with more people in the system. Eventually, it will come to a grinding halt, or people will move on to other things. Maybe there's a solution, but it doesn't exist yet. The founders certainly know that it can't last, so it's basically a Ponzi scheme.
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"AFAIK, all cryptocurrencies are not scalable."
Correct, we ran into this problem already in the 70s with permission-less distributed databases. Apparently nobody bothered to learn that exponential data inputs * logarithmic growth = utterly fucking unsustainable.
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We don't need unlimited scaling, but we'd like something that could at least scale to a fraction of the size of VISA.
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Fed-imposed stealth taxes are sustainable?
Taking people's money based on their political views to fund the DC millionaires club is sustainable?
Getting everyone dependent on the government is sustainable?
This, as the Crypto market crashes hard (Score:1)
AMD and nVidia both resisted these calls for the longest time, because they know what most smart investors know: that crypto is a fad that will come and go.
Even as the recent runup has all but completely evaporated, hashpower is leaving the blockchains in droves, and there is already a glut of very lightly used GPUs being sold on ebay and craigslist at huge losses.
I saw GTX 1070s on our local craigslist for $300 this morning, and there were literally dozens of them in that price range, when they were sellin
In order to sell more you have to make more. (Score:1)
I don't think they have increased production of GPUs by too much, which is why we see inflated prices - production hasn't met demand. This happened during the last coin bubble was well. AMD made hardly anymore money than normal, because they weren't able to crank up production.
Bloomberg has no clue. (Score:1)
Press word salad, insert stock market prediction re company X's stock will be skyrocketing/plummeting because of some random sentence heard at the local bar, but taken out of context. Regardless in it goes, then word salad on various computer terms that have little bearing on what the particular item is for.
Press word salad and Exit together. Print that sucker.