I’m guessing they are going to try and raise the prices and create a new market segment. Just as they have separated datacenter GPUs, increased the price massively (coming up to a factor of 10x) and then tried to use a stick to prevent the use of desktop GPUs for datacenter work (eg. the licensing change).
Unfortunately (for their bottom line) it probably won’t work, if the restriction is in the driver then someone like myself (or many other people in HN) will have it patched in a number of hours. If it’s in the firmware it’ll take longer, but it’ll be done. Unless they’ve actually fused out integer units on the consumer cards, that would be bold.
> According to Bryan Del Rizzo, director of global PR for GeForce, more things are working behind the driver.
> According to Mr. Del Rizzo: "It's not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter."
I think it's important to look at as the article does - the other way around, the CMP lineup will be excellent for their bottom line as miners, without competition from gamers and others can buy up cards that won't contribute to the seccond hand market when the mining boom dies down.
As suggested in the article, silicone would have been allocated to mid and low end cards is now allocated to mining only cards that have little resale value and won't hurt their bottom line when they release the 4XXX series.
I can imagine that nowadays you can protect your hardware with encryption chip that unlock firmware with public/private keys. To break it you will have to remove the chip.
Unfortunately (for their bottom line) it probably won’t work, if the restriction is in the driver then someone like myself (or many other people in HN) will have it patched in a number of hours. If it’s in the firmware it’ll take longer, but it’ll be done. Unless they’ve actually fused out integer units on the consumer cards, that would be bold.