Total hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions that's signature to ETH?
It'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks, sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it a hassle.
Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).
ethereum is asic-resistant, not asic-proof. It doesn't mean you can't make ASICs, just that ASICs are <10x as efficient as an equivalent-node GPU, vs millions of times more efficient for bitcoin/etc.
We’ll see a cottage industry of modders. Turning a $300 thing into a $600 thing should be a viable business.
Though I’ve seen some really sketchy mods before… can’t find it at the moment, but one involved taking a dremel to the chip to break an internal pad/link.
They previously did this with the 3060 cards, but accidently released beta drivers that unlocked the countermeasures [1]. I am sure people just start with using those drivers on the 3070/80 cards.
Probably not much of a cat-and-mouse game. Once they can bypass it once, all they have to do is not update. Unless Nvidia is prepared to release new hardware revisions every time.
No new hardware revision needed. Just a new on-card BIOS requiring a newer driver with a more fine-tuned mining detection. Should be trivial for manufacturers.
Hacks that re-enable mining likely won't be showing up on tpb anytime soon! A bypass will be worth quite a bit of money for large miners that can get hold of the cards.
Speculation having thought about this for a few minutes a few weeks ago. Given that a driver update disabled the feature, my guess is that they have certain kernels blacklisted. Really just the anti-virus equivalent of if (e.g.) Nicehash Miner, set throttle. A good way to test this would be to write a new miner and see what perf you can get.
I have the driver with it disabled and would patch diff it against a new one if I had the time, but I'm very busy with work. It would be an interesting problem of binary diffing at scale (dozens of libraries). Very interested if anyone has any insight.
GP's question was about _how_ it detects it has been mining. Does it have a list of processes or executable names of popular mining software? Does it perform some kind of heuristic and detect if the code it is about to execute corresponds to a hashing algorithm? I don't know the answer, I hope someone can explain it to me and GP.
They surmise that there is hardware-enforcement of BIOS\Drivers via some blown eFuses.
Also they imply that nVidia does multiple checks such as whether it's running on a PCIe x1 bus (gamers would typically use x4 or more) and whether it's hooked up to a monitor. It's likely they check for other things too but they would keep it on the down-low.
I've seen HDMI plugs listed on eBay which supposedly "double the hash rate" on 3060. I figured it was some kind of scam but didn't know they were throttled.
I'm curious about how this is implemented.
I'm also somewhat skeptical about GPU makers doing this for compute in general.
