Any news on the nVidia front?

[Mousepotato]

Has anybody heard anything about the new nVidia cards?  Are they any good at hashing?  At the very least I hope they seriously undercut the top end 79XXs so that AMD is forced to lower their prices to remain competitive

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[Joshwaa]

Has anybody heard anything about the new nVidia cards?  Are they any good at hashing?  At the very least I hope they seriously undercut the top end 79XXs so that AMD is forced to lower their prices to remain competitive

I hope Green Team does become competitive on the mining. It would be nice to have competition to drive down the prices.

Anyone wanna buy some GTX580's or GTX570's?

[jwzguy]

I'm guessing gaming performance will have 100x more impact than mining performance on market pricing.

[Mousepotato]

I'm guessing gaming performance will have 100x more impact than mining performance on market pricing.

I don't think either has any relation to market pricing.  That's set by the bean-counters.  AMD's competing models have more influence on nVidia pricing (and vise versa) than anything else.

[jwzguy]

I'm guessing gaming performance will have 100x more impact than mining performance on market pricing.

I don't think either has any relation to market pricing.  That's set by the bean-counters.  AMD's competing models have more influence on nVidia pricing (and vise versa) than anything else.

That's what I'm saying. But the competition will be judged on gaming performance, not mining performance.

[Joshwaa]

I'm guessing gaming performance will have 100x more impact than mining performance on market pricing.

I don't think either has any relation to market pricing.  That's set by the bean-counters.  AMD's competing models have more influence on nVidia pricing (and vise versa) than anything else.

That's what I'm saying. But the competition will be judged on gaming performance, not mining performance.

Yes and no. Gaming yes is far superior to mining needs at the moment. But I guarantee that AMD would feel something if the amount of people buying there cards for mining was cut in half.

Take Sapphire and AMD for instance do you think Sapphire would have bought as many old 58xx series GPU chips from AMD to release in the last six months if it were not for mining. I have average buying 2.25 NEW AMD cards per month since last August. If there was no mining I would have never made those purchases I would have stuck with my GTX580's and GTX570's and been content.

[jwzguy]

Yes and no. Gaming yes is far superior to mining needs at the moment. But I guarantee that AMD would feel something if the amount of people buying there cards for mining was cut in half.

Take Sapphire and AMD for instance do you think Sapphire would have bought as many old 58xx series GPU chips from AMD to release in the last six months if it were not for mining. I have average buying 2.25 NEW AMD cards per month since last August. If there was no mining I would have never made those purchases I would have stuck with my GTX580's and GTX570's and been content.

I think you've overestimated the size of the mining community. We're a drop of water in the ocean compared to cards bought for gaming.

I do hope we eventually matter enough to AMD so that they'll spend a few hours and fix their drivers, though.

[Mousepotato]

I think you've overestimated the size of the mining community. We're a drop of water in the ocean compared to cards bought for gaming.

I do hope we eventually matter enough to AMD so that they'll spend a few hours and fix their drivers, though.

I think you underestimate the number of cards bought for mining, and the number of cards that were bought for gaming which also happen to be used for mining.  Otherwise AMD wouldn't have put us miners as a bullet item in their product announcement if we were just a drop in the ocean: http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/DESKTOP/GRAPHICS/7000/7950/Pages/radeon-7950.aspx (5th bullet down).

[jwzguy]

I saw that, but it costs them very little to add us into a bullet point. If we were a driving market force they would fix their drivers. Obviously we're not.

[m3sSh3aD]

O yes, Thank you Sapphire

Nvidia use a architecture similar to the new CGN AMD use (well, same idea, not similar) so don't expect anything from green team.

You can do a hell of alot of folding @ home with those gtx570/580's lol. Big, Hot and slow if you ask me. I can't think of 1 reason to buy an Nvidia card these days. They've shot themselves in the foot too many times. Bit like sony's big headed attitude thats just cost them $2.9 BILLION in the last... wait for it..... QUARTER! Keep that up and $11 BILLION A YEAR! No company can afford lose money at that rate.

Im secretly hoping for a melt down of the whole financial infrastructure and fiat currencies anyways. It's the chaos theory. Everything gotta be destroyed before you can grow and prosper and move forward truly. A revolution. Big corporations kill new idea's and stop new idea's making any ground. Be it Intel, IBM, SONY, M$, General Motors, Proctor & Gamble, Kingfisher (own B&Q/SCREWFIX), Shell, BP, Monsanto and lets not forget the main culprit, BANKS or any other huge oath, There just slowing progression down. But then they have a lot invested in what they do. When a new tech can totally eradicate there business they will do whatever it takes to stay in control.

Sorry, went way off topic there, Nvidia GTX 6xx will not do anything for them in the SHA-256 so it's basically a no, they will be rubbish IMO. But this is all my opinion and who the F**K am i ha ha

BTW, AMD make a killing from us miners. People are always expanding and as said, We dont buy 1-2 cards, we buy 10/20... 100 at a time. If they release a 'special' card just for mining they would make a killing on it. Re-sale value is lost though if they do that. TBH a 7970 built on VLIW4/VLIW5 not CGN would be amazing

[DeathAndTaxes]

I saw that, but it costs them very little to add us into a bullet point. If we were a driving market force they would fix their drivers. Obviously we're not.

This.  In Q4 2010 AMD sold 7.5 million discrete GPUs (physical cards). 7.5 million discrete GPU in one QUARTER.  When you include laptop GPUs, integrated GPU, and GPUs on CPU (APU) it is more like 60 million units annually.

The Bitcoin network is ~9 TH.  Even if we exclude all NVidia cards, botnets, CPU miners, and FPGAs that is only 20,000 to 50,000 "average" GPUs. Tens of thousands vs 60 million.  Say the network grew 1000% (90TH) we still represent <1% of units sold.

The next Nvidia card could simply not mine (not mine slowly I mean not mine at all - 0.000 MH/s) and if it has good game performance it will force AMD to lower prices.  Neither company has enough "fanboyz" to keep them moving product that is not competitive.  If NVidia release a card which is 15% faster than the 7970 at the same price then AMD will cut price to keep sales.  If NVidia's gaming performance is lackluster then AMD will keep prices as high as they feel the market can bear.  Only when they start moving less units will they cut price.  Capitalism at its finest.

I love Bitcoin but I think some people massively overestimate (by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude) the influence the network has at this point.

[jake262144]

I love Bitcoin but I think some people massively overestimate (by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude) the influence the network has at this point.

Thank God for some common sense here. I laughed out loud reading We are important! AMD acknowledges Mining!
As if a marketing bullet point costs AMD anything...
Thanks for driving the point home with some real-world numbers, DAT.

[Mousepotato]

This.  In Q4 2010 AMD sold 7.5 million discrete GPUs (physical cards). 7.5 million discrete GPU in one QUARTER.  When you include laptop GPUs, integrated GPU, and GPUs on CPU (APU) it is more like 60 million units annually.

The Bitcoin network is ~9 TH.  Even if we exclude all NVidia cards, botnets, CPU miners, and FPGAs that is only 20,000 to 50,000 "average" GPUs. Tens of thousands vs 60 million.  Say the network grew 1000% (90TH) we still represent <1% of units sold.

I dunno, DaT.  I think there's some confusion in those big numbers.  Nobody really mines on laptops or with integrated GPUs in any significant numbers or hash rates, so we can discount the additional 60 million units (although it does make for a sensational number!).  Furthermore, I think you're lumping together AMD's commercial and business units to arrive at that 7.5 million figure.  For the sake of simplicity let's just say it's 50/50 for the ratio of consumer to business units.  So that further pares the number down to 3.75 million.  Now out of the 3.75 million discrete cards (a pool where most miners reside in), how many of those are considered gaming cards?  I'm talking about 57XX, 58XX, and 5970 cards where a large portion of network hashing power comes from.  I'm guessing maybe 10% of those 3.75 million consumer cards were actually 57xx/58XX/5970s.  But let's be generous and call it 30%... That's still 1.125 million 57XX, 58XX and 5970 units.

If your estimation of 20k-50k units are correct for the number of miners, we can go with the lower end of the scale to discount the non-57XX/58XX/5970 cards.  Doing a quick number crunch that comes out to 1.78% of all of ATI's gaming GPUs being bought up for mining.  That's quite a significant number and anything but a "drop in the ocean".

[jake262144]

I dunno, DaT...

One thing you seem to have overlooked:
I'm not even going to blast your 50/50 comsumer-to-business gpu ratio for lack of precise data and lack of motivation to dig up the correct numbers (consumer market is much larger - if less lucrative - than business market), you've come up with 1.78%.
Fine, except you're measuring the whole population of miner GPUs (some of them quite old) against a single quarter's worth od AMD's GPU production.

If you want to make a valid apples-to-apples comparison, sum up a couple of year's worth of 57xx..79xx cards production and measure that against the meager 20k..50k of units being employed for mining purposes, like that:

I'll accept your estimate of 1.125 million high-end GPUs per quarter. Assuming the production levels per each quarter has been constant over last two years, I arrive at 9 million GPUs made over last two years.
For simplicity's sake let's replace the 20k..50k range with an average of 37.5k devices, ok?

37500 is 0.4% of that 9 million GPUs but the bad news doesn't stop here.
I should take into consideration the number of high-end GPUs originally purchased for applications as trivial as gaming and re-purposed for mining later on.
Shall we assume another wildly inaccurate 50-50 ratio yet again?
Uh-oh, we seem to have dropped down to a meager 0.2%

A drop in the ocean it is.

[jwzguy]

Sorry, we're nowhere near 1%. For one thing, your 3.75 estimate is only for ONE sales quarter. The network power represents all the cards bought for the last couple of years, and includes a (albeit small) chunk of FPGA miners and CPU botnets.

But even in that extremely inflated case, if 99% of the cards are bought to game, gaming performance will obviously be what is used to determine how well the card is competing with nVidia. I can't see how you'd ever expect nVidia mining performance to drive the price down.

I can't say I really want things to be different, either. Although I would dearly love the attention/support from AMD, by the time mining equipment makes up a significant chunk of the GPU sales, bedroom mining operations will probably be forced out by larger interests. And that's only if FPGA mining hasn't completely taken over.

[Mousepotato]

Yes, I realize the numbers we're throwing around here aren't very precise.  One quarter worth of sales, sure.  9TH worth of hashing power at the moment, down from around 16TH earlier last year.

Wait a sec, I just realized something: None of this is relevant to anything.  I'm still wanting news about Fermi.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I dunno, DaT.  I think there's some confusion in those big numbers.  Nobody really mines on laptops or with integrated GPUs in any significant numbers or hash rates, so we can discount the additional 60 million units (although it does make for a sensational number!).

Well AMD doesn't really care.  All that matters is how much product is sold.  How useful that product is for Bitcoin is kinda irrelevant.

  Furthermore, I think you're lumping together AMD's commercial and business units to arrive at that 7.5 million figure.  For the sake of simplicity let's just say it's 50/50 for the ratio of consumer to business units.  So that further pares the number down to 3.75 million.  Now out of the 3.75 million discrete cards (a pool where most miners reside in), how many of those are considered gaming cards?  I'm talking about 57XX, 58XX, and 5970 cards where a large portion of network hashing power comes from.  I'm guessing maybe 10% of those 3.75 million consumer cards were actually 57xx/58XX/5970s.  But let's be generous and call it 30%... That's still 1.125 million 57XX, 58XX and 5970 units.

Very few business machines use discrete GPU.  Removing them is kinda silly like above ultimately they all add to AMD revenue.  Still even if you say 75% of AMD discrete cards are used by consumers and 50% of them would be considered gamer cards (not many people buy discrete cards that are less powerful than a 5700 they would simply buy integrated graphics).

Even though I find the distinction useless i will concede the point for the sake of argument but with slightly more plausible numbers.  7.5*0.75*0.5 = ~2.8 million cards.

If your estimation of 20k-50k units are correct for the number of miners, we can go with the lower end of the scale to discount the non-57XX/58XX/5970 cards.  Doing a quick number crunch that comes out to 1.78% of all of ATI's gaming GPUs being bought up for mining.  That's quite a significant number and anything but a "drop in the ocean".

Except that was 1 QUARTER of sales.   You don't think every card in the Bitcoin network has been bought in the last 2.9 months do you.  So 2.8 million discrete, consumer, gamer cards (as dubious as those distinctions are) per quarter * 5 quarters = 14 million "discrete, consumer, gamer" cards sold since GPU mining became public. 

So if we split the difference of the 20K to 50K and say 35K.  Then 35K vs 14 million = <0.2%.  IF the network was 5x as large we still wouldn't be 1% of the dubious "discrete, consumer, gamer" market.  Within 2-3 years FPGA will largely replace GPU mining just as GPU mining replaced CPU mining.  So at best we are a sub <1% blip for a couple of years and then gone.

I would call that a drop in the ocean.

[Joshwaa]

Mouse and DaT are yall laywers? You should probably look into it if not. lol yall are good.

[deslok]

We're likely six Weeks from new news on Kepler mouse look towards march/April for a launch

[rjk]

We're likely six Weeks from new news on Kepler mouse look towards march/April for a launch

woot