Good News NVidia Miners! NVidia has Moved to Block Companies From Buying-Up Consumer GPU Hardware for Data Center Use
From The Register
Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers – forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips.Read more: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/The chip-design giant updated its GeForce and Titan software licensing in the past few days, adding a new clause that reads: “No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.”
In other words, if you wanted to bung a bunch of GeForce GPUs into a server box and use them to accelerate math-heavy software – such as machine learning, simulations and analytics – then, well, you can't without breaking your licensing agreement with Nvidia. Unless you're doing trendy blockchain stuff.
A copy of the license in the Google cache, dated December 31, 2017, shows no mention of the data center ban. Open the page today, and, oh look, data center use is verboten.
To be precise, the controversial end-user license agreement (EULA) terms cover the drivers for Nvidia's GeForce GTX and Titan graphics cards. However, without Nvidia's proprietary drivers, you can't unlock the full potential of the hardware, so Nv has you over a barrel.
It's not just a blow for people building their own servers and data centers, it's a blow for any computer manufacturer – such as HPE or Dell – that hoped to flog GPU-accelerated servers, using GTX or Titan hardware, much cheaper than Nvidia charges for, say, its expensive DGX family of GPU-accelerated servers. A DGX-1 with Tesla V100 chips costs about $150,000 from Nvidia. A GeForce or Titan-powered box would cost much less albeit with much less processing power.
The high-end GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards – aimed at gamers rather than deep-learning data scientists – uses Nv's Pascal architecture, and only costs $699 (~£514) a pop. Meanwhile, the latest Tesla V100 card that's flogged to data centers costs over $9,000 (~£6,620).
Hopefully this move will help ease the shortage that miners are currently facing. Also there is an exemption in this NVidia license change specifically to protect cryptocurrency processing. That's right! They left in an exemption just for us. I like that NVidia made this move to help cryptocurrency miners and gamers out. I'm glad I decided to build an NVidia rig over AMD. After my last GPUs arrive and I get everything assembled I'll make to take some photos and make a post.
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I have always wanted to build a miner but haven’t found the time.
More mining for all!
Thanks for sharing!
This is what business is all about. it is a big time investment in crytocurrency. As for the miners, their challenges will be a thing of the past.
Please do! I’m interested in building a miner rig myself, thanks for the info!!
Surely this will drive prices of them back down a bit, right?
This is not the case anymore, they're going $800+. Just got one for $900 because it was the cheapest in stock.
As someone that just jumped on purchasing 2 of those and 2 of the non Ti. I really hope we can get some supply back. I'm sure video gamers wish they would block crypto miners though.
I bought it as an upgrade to my current gaming build and am recycling my current GPU for mining. It gives me around 30mh/s alone on Ethereum (according to claymore dual miner). I plan on just using gently used pieces to build a mining rig until I can buy better equipment for mining.
You should try mining an equihash coin like Zcash or Bitcoin gold if you have NVidia hardware. You literally have the best equihash device on the planet right now and everything I've seen says the most profitable coins for your hardware are equihash.
I wish. I don't think the hash rate is actually true. I have amd hardware and google tells me my hash rate should be lower than what it is.
Sorry, I read that wrong I thought you had an NVidia 1080 Ti. My bad.
I bought one last night and am waiting for it to arrive, yeah. But I don't really plan on mining with it; mining with my current gpu which will be put into a mining rig.
thanks your post! have a nice day
Its a great new @contentjunkie thanks for sharing Upvote and feel proud to follow you and wish you a great year ahead.
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Thank goodness. I've been itching to make another mining rig, I just posted my last DIY one if anyone's looking for inspiration now that cards are going to be available.
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