Soon: GPU's for Mining - and Big Data
I
saw this yesterday, and bumped into it again so I thought I should share.
https://news.bitcoin.com/amd-and-nvidia-enter-into-the-graphic-card-for-mining-business/
AMD's stock has been surging on the back of the rise in demand for GPUs for mining. With all the altcoins going moon-wise lately it's quite profitable to mine them, I have been doing this myself to a delightful result, two rigs with two cards each making about 400 euros a month, cost about 2500 euros, and I haven't got down to tweaking or riser cards and external power yet.
One thing that I would like to suggest to these video card makers is they think about making them USB3 based self-contained modules and power supplies specifically designed for powering them, or at least make them in PCI and PCI-Express 1x sockets. External modules would be more practical I think, especially if they had a way to be stacked or lined up in rows.
This won't last forever, as a slow creep of PoS mechanisms for controlling issuance rates that is even looming possibly over Ethereum. For the moment, AMD cards are the best for mining Ethereum, but Nvidia cards do very well with Zerocash, Monero and Lbry.
It's not just mining though...
I also would suggest that even if the demand for these chips for PoW mining diminishes, they will start to become demanded as database search accelerators. Graphic cards have very fast memory, which makes walking very large tables very quick, current first generation database accelerators are already showing from 5-100x improvement in this function.
Having tinkered quite a bit with Steem's RPC database system, I can say that in my opinion, it will be vital as the application of distribution of media content becomes a bigger part of blockchain tech, that this kind of more complex database system and AI enhanced database systems will also require an order of magnitude more search capability and more locally to where it is being used, so I am going to predict that these headless video cards are not just going to be for mining, this is just what will drive their sales at first, when there is peer to peer database service systems (like the one I am designing), this will enable hosting of applications locally while allowing them to synchronise rapidly globally.
You can see yourself at Nvidia's compute acceleration site that 'big data' is a major target, it is only a matter of time before these devices become standard parts of data centers, and Byzantine Fault Tolerant database replication systems are very important now - when you look at Amazon or Facebook or Twitter - behind these are massive distributed database systems with nodes all over the world.
Did you check out VIVAcoins info on worker nodes ... interesting stuff going on these days !
Good post ! btw
I'm pretty sure the guys designing Viva have been reading a lot of my stuff :) The guy who started it, in fact, has been a follower of my blog since October last year or so... :) When it's steem-engining... etc
at william banks ? lol good work man, ya GPUs are bad ass there will be stand alones soon i believe ... like server racks, like why not ?, lol its time ! imho
keep up the good work bro !
Or just look at golem
A lot of the gold behind GPU compute is the half-precision style of computation that will be tailored to fit the needs of machine learning.
Machine learning and graph databases are the two near future hot items with GPU compute, indeed. There will be a way to continue to monetise these things for some time yet.
Even with some small architectural changes - the GPU compute structure is very attractive to machine learning.
Great points. I had just wrote a post about this very topic. AMD has cornered the market on these for the time being and their inventory has been basically completely exhausted, so it looks like they will benefit in the long run.
As long as crypto prices continue to rise (or at the very least don't crash too heavily) it looks like this will be a booming niche for years to come. And with NVIDIA also jumping in, they could both ride the coattails of cryptos to the tune of many billions of dollars in sales.
And based on what you said, since these chips will still be useful even after they are not usable for mining, this gives these additional long term value.
Yup, I'm thinking towards this, maybe in 2-3 years time there will be database services along similar lines as the file hosting services with Storj and Maidsafe - 'mining' by replicating a database and providing query services. Note that this is basically an 'Application'. The interface exposes access to the database according to the interface design, any application is nothing without the back-end database of some kind.
What do you think about Gigawatt's business model? Taking all of the heavy lifting out of mining, which will theoretically expand the market of people mining (and thus increase GPU sales) by a great deal? This could also be a boon to these database services you mention.
I am not familiar with Gigawatt... I use Nicehash, which works very well, letting me do other things than think about which crypto is the most profitable at any given time.
It is cloud mining...