AI Needs Specialized Processors. Crypto Miners Say They Have Them (bloomberg.com) 23
When the Ethereum blockchain moved away from using a technique for verifying transactions known as proof of work last September, crypto market demand for the specialized processors that performed these calculations disappeared virtually overnight. Companies that used and hosted GPUs, or graphics processing units, saw a key part of their once-booming business vanish against an increasingly difficult backdrop for crypto. But now mining infrastructure companies like Hive Blockchain and Hut 8 Mining are finding opportunities to repurpose their GPU-based equipment for another industry on the precipice of a possible boom: artificial intelligence. From a report: "If you can reapply some of that investment in the GPU mining infrastructure and convert it to new cards and workloads, it makes sense," Hut 8 Chief Executive Officer Jaime Leverton said in an interview. GPUs -- designed to accelerate graphics rendering -- require constant maintenance and physical infrastructure not all users are prepared to provide. As such, Hut 8 and a few other miners have been using the chips to power high-performance computing, or HPC, services for clients across a range of industries. But inroads with the burgeoning and much-hyped AI sector -- which requires huge amounts of computing power -- represent the kind of transformational opportunity miners had been seeking when they originally bought the processors.
In other words... (Score:3)
In other words, they can't cash out. I'm sure they had hoped to be able to sell the cards for over retail after they've been burned up. Too bad the next gen stuff is actually in stock and there are budget (ish) options available.
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They did and are selling the cards second-hand to gamers. That's one big reason for new GPU sales being so low for the last 10 months odd. It has really hurt AMD's and nVidia's bottom lines. Not to mention thoroughly stunted Intel's effort to enter GPU market.
This is purely a marketing exercise to say they're interested in contract "AI" (neural nets) work.
It won't last though. Just like with bitcoin, neural nets will move on to ASICs too. Or at least GPUs will spin off into NN processors with distinctl
Nvidia made tons of useless cards too (Score:3)
Re: Nvidia made tons of useless cards too (Score:2)
Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
The requirements of the mining industry were quite different from those of AI.
The most important factors were, more often than not enough memory to hold the ledger (about 4G), and fast internal memory BW.
The massive memory profiles needed for AI cards were not a concern.
The fast execution needed for AI was not a concern (as a matter of fact, miners who knew undervolted and underclocked their cards).
Bandwidth from/to the cards (i.e. PCIe lanes) were not a concern (the "raisers" industry was predicated on the fact to give only ONE PCIe lane per card).
What are these guys going to do, throw good money after bad for new mobos and stuff?
What are they gonna offer the AI crowd? Nvidia 2xxx series cards (that were more than enough to hold the ledger and do the calculations)?
Give me a break. I whish said miners more losses to come.
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You don't necessarily need huge amounts of memory, pipelining can work depending on the model. PCIe transfer between layers is not ideal, but not necessarily a dealbreaker either. The tokens/Watt is the most likely deal breaker
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more often than not enough memory to hold the ledger
I'm sure you are talking about Ethereum proof-of-work, which didn't use the blockchain/ledger when mining, it used a directed acyclic graph, commonly referred to as a "DAG"
I'm not sure how I feel about this (Score:3)
So we have a massive number of jobs getting killed while we're also going to massively increase the amount of electricity used (leading to more climate change, which'll hurt the people losing their jobs more than most).
If we redistributed wealth from automation to the bottom 99 (instead of to the top [time.com]) I think I'd be Ok with it, but doing like this seems wrong.
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Sounds about right. The corporates can see an easy robotic solution to customer service. And that's probably the best use of such a mimicking tool too. Using "AI" for anything else will just blow stuff up.
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What makes you think AI "devours" energy? Training hardware, sure. But inference hardware? No.
Google it, it does (Score:2)
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Crypto still uses more electricity (Score:3)
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Nice off-topic post in an attempt to steer the discussion towards some agenda-driven rant. Next time try complaining about how much energy is burned every day transporting paper bills while you're at it.
Re: Crypto still uses more electricity (Score:2)
Given that most vehicles have some cash in them, you fail basic logic tests.
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The author isn't entirely wrong. GPU mining is mostly dead now. There's been a few attempts to revive it but it's nowhere near as lucrative as it once was.
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It's the only GPU mined cryptocurrency which mattered, the rest can only afford a fraction of the Watts.
Two great scams that scam great together (Score:2)
And then combine it with marketing and advertising so we can suffer as much as possible, then find everyone responsible and leave their heads on pikes outside the town walls as a warning to those thinking of giving it another try. Disrupt the disruption.
Hey Suck... Prospective Clients (Score:2)
"Sure sure, our special technique for turning shit into gold didn't work out, and some of us are likely facing lengthy prison sentences for stealing (we call it leveraging, haha!) our customers' shit reserves to borrow actual money and pad our on pockets, but on the plus side, we have all this excess toilet paper since our shit has now rotted, so we're looking for any way to hawk it to squeeze a final bit of profit out of our pyramid-shaped sphincters.