Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

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Keep in mind, Nvidia does have some genuinely good process mastery around handling encryption intended to keep users from utilizing hardware in ways they don't intend, and creating trusted computing platforms where safety critical systems are concerned.

https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/i...

They've moved from keeping that sort of thing in EEPROM's to burnable fuses from what I understand, and I'm pretty sure what I'm aware of is pretty far behind state of the art.

If they've managed to set up the key management as well as they have and keep things hush-hushed enough to keep the nouveau folks obstructed, this seems either like an uncharacteristically careless mistake, or some seriously well executed malicious compliance from somebody.

Either way. I still find it irritating to the extreme that this type of thing only seems to happen to the detriment of users. Nvidia wins either way. Miners or gamers will buy out their cards.

It is my understanding Nvidia allowed cryptominers to pull up semis and load them up with GPUs in exchange for about a billion dollars.

My guess is this was accidentally on purpose (see also the recent shareholder lawsuit; Nvidia did win that one btw).

> It is my understanding Nvidia allowed cryptominers to pull up semis and load them up with GPUs in exchange for about a billion dollars.

Source?

Never heard such a thing. Partners (MSI, ASUS, etc): absolutely. NVIDIA, I've never heard any evidence they sold directly to miners.

> My guess is this was accidentally on purpose (see also the recent shareholder lawsuit; Nvidia did win that one btw).

I think it's incredibly likely that we see this re-introduced on 3080 Ti or 3080 Super or whatever they call it which is about to be released, as well as with future generations of cards, which strongly argues against this being an "accidentally-on-purpose" thing.

People love to make up conspiracies about NVIDIA but all it takes is someone building a beta driver from a feature branch based on an old build that didn't have the mining brake yet, it's quite probable that this is just an accident. But it's NVIDIA and they're the only company people love to hate more than Apple.

People hate NVIDIA for releasing drivers that broke the mining brake, and they'll hate NVIDIA for reinstating the mining brake in the future. People get mad no matter what NVIDIA does.

I'm assuming they're implying that this "theft" was something else: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/340000-of-nvidia-rtx...

Which is still partners. And that's like, a single container getting lost. $340k is a far cry from billions as well.

I'm assuming he's referring to an RBS article which was mischaracterized by Barrons and then widely broadcast in the tech media... the RBS article looked at hashrate growth since launch and attempted to estimate the number of 30-series GPUs sold (the number they came up with was about 7% of gaming revenue). Barron's then took that number and trumpeted it as NVIDIA selling cards directly to miners when that's not what the original article said at all, they were just estimating how many cards ended up mining from any source, and it was sub-10% regardless.

But of course nobody actually went back and looked at the original article, and because it's NVIDIA everyone is completely willing to give full faith to any claims that make them look bad. Lie goes around the world before the truth has its pants on, etc.

But if there's an article I'm willing to read it.

I was indeed referring to the RBS article, which as you mention was bunk. I read it in passing several months ago. And it was $175 million they estimated, I must've crossed wires with the recent $1B shareholder suit.

Thank you for making me do a little leg work. Perhaps I should have done that in the first place.

Thanks for being open-minded!

Finally dug it up, source methodology from the original RBS article:

https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1332502890104188929/pho...

It's too easy to hate a company like nvidia. Even if you make things up, they're probably guilty of them.

I'll start to like nvidia when they provide anything remotely similar to the AMDGPU+Mesa experience on linux. Until then, hacking optimus and unstable kernel updates are the norm.

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