How will Ampere scale on laptops?

I wouldn't mind buying an entire system to get the GPU then just turn around and sell it with my 2070 in it if I knew I could turn it around quickly without spending that much over MSRP for the 3080. It sounds like all the shipping alone would end up costing a ton. But the good part is the warranties are usually transferrable.

 

True, if they restrict the number purchases per shipping address then that makes the queue harder to abuse. I'm still worried your distopian GPU ID idea will need to be implemented if the madness continues much longer!

 

Based on my very limited market research, I'm worried that the GPU surge pricing is already baked into systems, so the benefit would be buying from a reputable source vs an ebay scalper, the downside would be dealing with all the overhead.

 

Yeah inn just going to wait it out, I'm getting along just fine. It's the computer gaming version of GAS.

 

It's kind of interesting that according to UL TS score list a 115w 3080m beats a full 150w 2080Sm, not by much though. If you click on the card it gives the TDP for the selected card but how can that apply to the 80/150 boost included cards? Man what a shipshow trying to use these benchs for making a buying decision. Again it's so dishonest to just put 30xx laptop as a card name, even with the wattage they don't seem to break out whether it includes the boost or not. If they do how accurate is it anyways? Marketing boost vs reality boost?

Also according to the chart the 3080 desktop card is 55.7% more UL perf rating than the 3080 "laptop" card, that's terrible! 17698 vs 11360. 3070 and 3070m are 41.5% difference. 3060m vs 3060ti 39.9%, I'd expect the 3060m/3060 the closest you'll get to similar UL perf rating score guessing 30% which is even worse than the 2060m/2060 discrepancy of 21.5%. So it's opposite this gen, in Turing the higher end cards were closer but in Ampere it's the lower tier that are closer to mobile/desktop parity.

https://benchmarks.ul.com/compare/b...RE&reverseOrder=true&types=MOBILE&minRating=0

 

Almost as if the TDPs went insane for higher end desktop Amperes...

 

Thank goodness. I love it. Pulling 1000W with my shunt-modded 2080 Ti in Time Spy and 3DMark 11 and 700-800W with the 3090 Kingpin is wonderful. It's unfortunate that laptop GPUs have to be constrained by such pathetically thin and light form factors to avoid bursting into flames. Under the circumstances, the massive disparity between mobile and desktop parts should be fully expected, and should come as no surprise to anyone. To think that they could be any closer to the same level of performance is simply ludicrous. There is no reason that desktop GPU owners should be held back to keep laptop jockeys from feeling slighted. If they don't like it, then they should give up the sick fetish for thin and light trash. There is no functional capacity for show-stopping performance to occur on a thin and light turdbook. Anyone that thinks otherwise is living in a fantasy world. They lack the cooling, circuitry and power handling capabilities to achieve performance parity.

 

I don't think anyone really expected desktop GA102 level performance in a laptop as that's just absurd and unprecedented not to mention physically impossible. But desktop GA104 (RTX 3070) level performance was perfectly feasible in a laptop if they had allowed the 3080M to have 200W. With Ampere already being a meh efficiency improvement, they shot themselves in the foot by limiting the top mobile GPU to just 150W. It looks like Pascal will forever remain the golden generation for mobile GPUs achieving performance parity with their desktop namesake.

 

Well pascal was very very close in the UL rating scheme. No one thinks top level ampere power is in a laptop(bakertroll notwithstanding) BUT don't call it the same name and sell it as such with 50% less performance, that's the point here.

 

Laptops have become a paradigm of homogenous and universal mediocrity, hindered by the lowest common denominators in the industry. When you consider most of the latest and greatest garbage uses an AC adapter just barely large enough to handle a castrated 150W GPU, the notion that things are improving in the mobile space is truly a figment of the imagination, ironically, caused by a lack of imagination. The demented obsession with trying to offer the thinnest and lightest abortion possible, continuing to push the envelop each generation, raises serious questions about the ability of an average consumer to think rationally. We see a similar degree of irrational and insane thought processes in many areas of daily life. It is illogical to expect greatness when everyone is frantically racing to find the bottom.

Yes, spot on. They do it because they know the sheeple will wrongly assume parity. They will believe it is a duck because they are told it is a duck, and argue that it is a duck, without stopping to see if it walks like a duck or quacks like a duck. Dishonest people taking advantage of stupid people seems to be status quo. Those that fall outside of those two buckets are normal, and today normal means exceptional. That's really sad.

He has a degree in rocket science, so he must be right. Follow the science.

Yes, it's a duck. It has wings and it's yellow. Why isn't that guy wearing a mask? Call 911.

 

Exactly it's an example of the deceptive name game that most won't notice. Even most reviews don't break out the exact details of the gpu so it's even harder to figure it out. Laptops are just a completely different beast even more so now making the case for totally separate naming very strong. It would even be better if they kept the same effed up naming convention of mq/mp and even the super moniker. UL even has 1060 3gb/5gb and 6gb as separate cards in the desktop ratings, apparently memory is enough but not tgp?

 

The miners will always find its way to get hold on cards before the gamers. Either via nvidia themself or their AIB partners.

Btw. Nvidia cripple 3060 cards and give the miners more love. Why would the miners jump on the new from Nvidia? No gamers will buy the miners cards when the Crypto race slow down. And the miners need to get rid of their cards when the race is over. Who want buy used cards only useful for mining?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/nvidia-thread.806608/page-264#post-11079375

And don't be surprised if Nvidia find its ways to block out all possibilities for using vBios with higher TGP from other notebook models on a more crippled gaminbook. They have the proper tools if needed and the notebook OEMs ask them kindly for it.

ZOTAC GeForce RTX 3060 showed off by crypto miner on YouTube; hash rate limitations may be linked to the BIOS, not just to software drivers notebookcheck.net

 

Yeah someone made a comment that miners won't even buy those cards because of the limitations and and the corresponding resale penalty.
Edit: Oh I see you said that too, I read that I think on vc this morning lol

 

If a miner won't buy a 3060 GPU, then I find myself wondering why most gamers should want one. As the owner of a 2060, it's fairly easy to identify why I wouldn't be in a hurry to waste my money on a 3060. There is a difference between adequate and awesome. Adequate will get the job done, but some folks eschew mediocrity.

 

Debatable depending on where you're coming from, from a 2060 nah,but no ones getting any of them anyways, who aren't hooked up or buying a whole system. It kind of amazes me that people would wait months to buy a card though, no offense meant it's just not something I'd find important enough to wait that long for. I'm assuming they had to give cc info, no thanks.

 

The only people that will affect are gamers who mine to earn an extra buck. Mining farms won't be affected at all since they never update the vbioses or drivers. And having seen the crazy mining communities in chinese and russian forums you bet they will have a custom mining driver and vbios ready in a week.

 

The 3060 will sell like hotcakes due to pricing alone. Not everyone can spend even $330 on a video card, and if you're playing at 1080p a 3060 is probably fine for the average gamer. If they can keep those out of the hands of miners there will be a lot of happy 3060 owners.

 

I'm thinking the miners will find a way, profit is a strong motivator. This isn't to say I don't agree, I do, right down the line. I'm just not hopeful regarding a happy outcome.

In other news whatever we may think lots of buyers seen to be impressed with the Eluktronics offerings, about half of them are sold out. I've been considering the Prometheus model although it's not ideal. Getting an itchy trigger finger and that one is still in stock.

 

The 3060 is being marketed to 1060 owners. Ampere in general is the "course correction" to get Pascal owners to finally buy new cards.

You who upgrade to every single generation are just maniacs. Wait, I've upgraded three straight generations myself....

 

"And one book titled, This Sort of Thing Really is my Bag Baby, signed by Austin Powers." lol

To the thread... I've just got off the phone with Eluktronics; there will probably be no Ultra (their DTR) due to limited parts. Left me wondering if the lack of DTR's is partly due to supply constraints with AMD and Nvidia: As in the goods are going into the better moving laptops for now? Could also be the mother ship isn't supplying the cases and other parts. That he didn't rule it out does point toward a few likely suspects.

 

Tapeout for modular mobile GPU's takes longer than BGA as there is no reference design. Think of it as similar to how founder's edition is typically available at launch. Engineering and manufacturing resources are also usually prioritized for higher projected profit products, so those tend to be first to market. I would not worry about it. Marketing folks tend to want everyone buying everything immediately so they will not announce until shortly before it is available, or at least until a review is ready so it can get some good press for a pre-order or such.

 

Yeah, prioritizing is what I was thinking, it could be the're simply putting limited goods into the most profitable channels The usual marketing speak is that something is discontinued and won't be in stock when you ask these types of questions: To me it seems unusual that they and two others are saying something might be available later: Then you've got the so called Osborne effect and people that would have been buying waiting for something that isn't coming. As you said though, it's hard to convert sales and marketing talk into plain ol English, you always wonder if you're inferring something that wasn't there.

 

How can they bypass the the encryption without the key? And how many of you have modified the vBios for etc Turing mobile and then try flash it back? I don't talk about cross-flashing of firmware. See... Can you mod the vBios and lets say give it +300W TGP, unlimited voltage and avoid the Clock-block 3.0 for 2080 Mobile? Can you do the same for the desktop cards? Nope. Next nail in the coffin... Stop all sorts of cross flashing of firmware for Mobile graphics.

Nvidia will make it harder and harder being a gamer/oc’er. Crippling cards to stop you from mining with your own cards or tweaking/mod same cards is darn disgusting!

NVIDIA Says Its Hard To Crack GeForce GPU Mining Hash Rate Limiter, Current Ampere & Turing GPUs Remain Unaffected But Future Gaming Graphics Cards Likely To Get Similar Treatment

Nvidia: RTX 3060 vBIOS Prevents Removal of Hash Rate Limiter
If A Workaround Comes, It Will Be Too Late
Well, theoretically, that should be possible, but in practice, it might be more difficult than you'd think. Since Nvidia's Turing GPUs, the vBIOS comes encrypted, and as such it's not possible to read it out, modify it, and reload it onto the GPU -- the only way people have been able to modify the vBIOS on Nvidia's recent GPUs is by finding a different BIOS and loading it -- but they haven't strictly modified the existing vBIOS.

Despite Nvidia's Anti-Mining Lock, RTX 3060 Can Still Earn Up To $7 a Day Mining

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/nvidia-thread.806608/page-264#post-11079677

 

I wonder how it distinguishes between mining and games.

Will these blocks affect gaming at all?
What if miners make their programs indistinguishable from games to the software?

 

Yeah, def an evil and stupid idea that will cost them money and market share. They should just implement a global rationing system, something along the lines of EVGA queueing but enforced for all OEMs/AIBs.

 

Its just a marketing stunt. Doesn't affect miners at all since they have so many other currencies to mine other than ethereum.

 

Bit of a pain to Quote on mobile. Lol

Yea, I see what it is and like ultimately you cant really block it with out nerfing performance in other applications.

It's a bit of a moot point honestly because afaik crypto is some weird non official thing. There is nothing stopping them from rewriting the back end to bypass restrictions.

A global restriction might work. But the problem is miners would just go after the middlemen instead of retail.

 

nVidia can't win. This is probably the only real step that has any chance of realistically succeeding they could take to try to get more cards into the hands of gamers due to all the complaints and now people complain about that.

Mining has to be an edge case among gamers, I even pay attention to the markets including crypto and I don't mine on the side.. I would imagine people not paying attention aren't mining at all. How many of you enthusiasts here are actually mining? Take less than 1% of that number and there's how many normal consumers that just jam a new card into a case and fire up games are mining.

 

"Normal people" don't buy eye-wateringly expensive gaming PCs and laptops. They don't game or game on consoles.

 

3060 is going to be pretty mainstream I would imagine for desktops.

Edit: I'm not arguing the entire situation doesn't suck for gamers, but this is the only thing they can do. It's pretty bold they took this step. You could also argue that it's a logical evolution of Quadro vs GeForce.

 

It would perhaps make sense for them to offer specialised compute cards that would outperform gaming cards and so make them much more desirable to miners than graphics cards (not clear the new offerings are fit for that purpose), but crippling gaming cards via drivers and spyware in any way is just evil and clearly lowers the value of the card overall. The correct solution is to control distribution and raise prices to dampen demand during the shortages.

 

That pricing is already happening in the market. Miners are willing to pay more than gamers are. nVidia would have to wrest control of the entire supply chain of cards from AIBs to make any queue system happen, I don't see AIBs being down with that. It's a no-win unless the cards just can't mine or just make it difficult to mine. The only realistic thing nVidia can do is this or nothing. They know anything else is just empty words or symbolism.

 

Clearly the prices are not high enough, since there is still no availability. Would also be good to know what's happening on manufacturing capability side of things. The blame is put squarely on miners, but it could just as well be a matter of big issues on the manufacturing side affecting broader semiconductor industry (as reported in the media), as well as demand for GPU power from other sectors. Most comments on this going around are probably based on intuition rather than good quality data, or any reasonable data at all.

 

As I (poorly) understand it, Quadro is aimed at CAD/3D modelling people, because for some reason geforce cards are inadequate. I am not sure why a 3090 wouldn't serve this sector.

Imagine this nonsense started happening on the CPU side: you'd have a CPU that is only allowed to execute games, another CPU for general productivity, another CPU for scientific applications (all the more professional applications attracting heavy premium, with no real underlying HW difference). Pure evil. Onwards AMD!!

 

That's what I mean, they kind of created a divide mostly based on driver stability and features in that case. But it's a separate SKU that didn't have much difference, but for professionals it was huge and it came with some intrinsic guarantees and support.

 

Quadro cards have specific drivers that are optimized and certified for CAD and other professional applications.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Of course. Why wouldn't the same drivers work with Geforce HW though? Oh, that's right - so Nvidia can charge a massive premium for Quadro.

 

Disgusting business practice. The underlying HW is pretty much the same - they should just charge for the professional driver if was that huge for some.

 

AMD literally does the exact same thing with its FirePro/Radeon WX line of GPUs so you can save your righteous indignation.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Seriously? Wow, 2 players and both participate in the scheme. Who knew? That totally makes it right.

 

Ask any professional and they will take those support guarantees and additional time and money spent on driver development any day. I pay for a lot of software for engineering and development reasons that I could probably get for free but I need the guarantee that comes with it. That's also why professionals like audio engineers pay extra for their gear from known builders. They need it to work and the need guarantees of support and someone to call when the caca hits the fan.

 

You completely missed my point. The CAD people could still have their premium commercial drivers for what is basically exactly the same underlying hardware.

 

What is stopping nvidia from requiring miners pay for a commercial license to use their drivers?

...if miners had to pay quadro prices regardless of GPU [on top of GPU cost], that should improve supply.

 

Just some live edits while watching..

• Funny thing, he's calling it a "driver thing" which is already debunked.
• Agree with environmental concerns unless they offer a buyback to recycle them? Crypto itself is a HUGE environmental problem. Having our entire financial system consuming energy like this is going to be a huge problem. We need clean energy FAST and TODAY. Govt needs to step in here.
• I would think if the demand concerns were not in play with manufacturing limitations and the pandemic, we never would have seen nVIdia do ANYTHING here.
• "nVidia is a corporation behold to shareholders" - duh, all publicly traded companies are, the reason the red/blue/green team tribalism is so disappointing..
• I would argue nVidia DOES care about the gamers because they do all their marketing for them (see above bullet). It's not altruistic, but they DO CARE and they do see gamers not getting cards as an issue for their long term business. I think Linus is wrong here..
• "unlock the 3060 driver", didn't we already prove it's not a driver lock? Linus seems to have been uninformed here.

 

In practical use I wouldn't go for a quadro, or whatever they are calling it now, for cad purposes, geforce cards were always able to handle 3d cad and cost less. Other quadro uses I don't know though. I don't know that ngreedia offering specialized mining cards would work either since a large factor is the resale to the public later on. The dedicated mining cards would most likely cost more too. It would be funny if big miners offered a monthly plan to mine for you with no promises, kind of a lottery structure. Maybe another type of investment?

 

Yeah, that sounds like a better approach, although I doubt it would achieve much in practice.
Again, the only great solution would be to implement a fair rationing system.

Basically Linus expanded on all the points I have made while adding a few new good ones and wearing a cool beanie. Agreed with that video 100%. This is just adding another insult to the ongoing injury.
Driver/vBIOS - you are nitpicking....

 

The words matter there between Driver/BIOS... it also could be baked into new metal. (I doubt this it's too hard to update, but shrug. We'll need someone to reverse engineer it) But I still expect someone like Linus to not get the terminology incorrect here. He's not some fly by night.

I still have very little doubt if it's only Driver/BIOS that there will be a way around it. It could be the combination of workload happening on the card vs rendering output. The hash calculation most likely utilizes a unique workload pattern that's easy to detect vs ML, gaming or other compute work. A lot has been made of singling out ETH as well and I wonder if it also applies to other crypto hash algos. Calling out just ETH was interesting, maybe I missed reading something and it was just an example.

 

The problem is that same operations could be employed for a host of other applications, there is nothing crypto-specific about hashing. it's just a terrible idea.

 

Yeah I agree there, the first thing I thought, which I've had to deal with many times in other engineering areas, is what are they doing to make sure the method they are using to detect this and throttle it gets tripped up by a false positive. There's no way they didn't think this through though, that would be devastatingly bad and they are NOT stupid from an engineering standpoint. Unless tech doesn't have a seat at the table and their feedback wasn't heeded I don't see how being that risky would be something they would be OK with.

 

It's supposed to be driver/bios/silicon which is why only the new 3060 has it, working backwards would be an uphill battle at best. It doesn't appear they're going to try and make the attempt if their current spin can be believed.

Speaking of spin I've worked for a number of large corporations and sat in now and then in some higher level executive meetings. What corporations say publicly and what they say behind closed doors can be two very different things. When you want to try and understand one you have to look at it from their perspective. Mining has been a massive cash cow for Nvidia and thinking they want it to go away is naive at best. More likely they'd like to make the bad publicity go away and are working toward a profit model that facilitates that end. This is probably where the dedicated mining cards come in because it's three birds with one stone; miners can't crimp consumer supplies, consumers can't buy used mining cards, bad publicity goes away. Now you can make up your own scenario here; I'm not saying this is the case, it's just a quick guess. On the other hand I'd say it's far more likely than Nvidia giving up billions in an altruistic attempt to get some cards out of the mean old miners hands and in into the sweaty palms of gamers. Just as an FYI there is a fair bit of linguistic research into corporate speeches, statements, websites, the lingua franca of the office, etc. Might be interesting to some to look into it but it's digressing to pursue it further here.

What I'd be curious to know is if the 7 bucks per makes brute force a viable option? Ampere isn't going to be scaling for us if the miners just buy more of them...