Topic: Why 9-month payoffs are still foolish - page 3. (Read 5576 times)

Angelus' usual theme of crying wolf over difficulty hasn't been holding up so well recently with two decreases in a row... Now he must turn attention towards fearmongering over price drops and speculation on upcoming cards.

As another poster stated, the greatest investments always come with great risk. If you don't have money to risk in BTC then it's a good idea to stay out until you do. If you do have money to blow on it, then follow Angelus' lead (not his rhetoric) and go all out. How do I know he has hypocritically gone all out while subsequently working a part time job fearmongering on mining forums, you ask?

Well, because he has one miner working 5.6 Ghash on Deepbit alone:

This doesnt change the fact, that he is right

This is especialyl true as the manifacturing lines are long planned out and - well - nothing is lost to AMD by just waiting. They will ramp up production of high end chips a notch in due time (when it meets their factory timeline, latest in the 7000 generation) to cater some higher demand from the miners, but THAT IS IT.

Definitely nothing to do more than think "ok, we may sell 50% more of the 7990 than without mining".

I personally lok forward to the 7xxx series - finally a step that is long done on the CPU front. Should take down power usage as well as give a significant performance boost for my other favourite usages.

Other than anecdotal evidence, do you have any numbers to back up your claims? Limited supply of a previous generation GPU line doesn't equal Bitcoin making a huge impact. There's still PLENTY of 68xx and 69xx cards on store shelves.

58xx series cards sell out so quickly not because there's this abundant supply from the manufacturer and people keep snatching them up, it's because manufactures are moving into production of 7xxx and continuing production of 68xx and 69xx cards.

If you want anecdotal evidence that has some technical merit, go stand outside your local computer store and ask people (1) what kind of video card do they have, and (b) if they game or use Bitcoin. I'll let you guess which one will probably beat out the other 10:1.

Don't get me wrong, I *heart* Bitcoin, but just because it's big to this small community (and it is a small community) doesn't mean it's making a dramatic impact on the marketplace. Especially to the point where a manufacturer would change product direction to cater to it.

AMD will improve performance in gaming with the 7xxx series cards. That's for sure. That's their target market.

Nvidia has some good cards for gaming, but they're garbage for mining.

So, as far as mining goes, who knows? No one will know until they're out. They're not designed for mining. Plain and simple.

being a bit big headed here guys  its not will amd do a card for miners, but a Q of will they do one for everyone everywhere who wants a math processor like nvidia tesla....  hell they have sunk a lot of effort in their SDKs so maybe they should sell specialised cards now?!?

Yeah, because this is what happened in the past.

Dude, the WHOLE idea of the 7xxx series for ATI is to offer more power for the same cost. Due to the die shrink the plan is pack more than double the stream processors, at a higher frequency rate on top, into the same silicon.

No, it wont be twice as expensive, and it will an immediate have an impact on the old hardware prices when it is available. They will be a little more expensive, but not massively so.

Thats in 1 quarter for AMD, How many miners again? and you still think mining has an impact? lol wake up son there is a bigger world out there than your back yard....

Speaking as the owner of 2 6990s, I'd like to point out that no matter the power of the 7XXX series cards, the rigs we have still retain value.

For example; lets say the 7XXX series cards come out, and they do have 2* the stream processor count. This should mean they are more expensive than the previous generation (because of these improvements). With the 6990 topping $700, I would find it hard to see anyone other than extreme enthusiasts buying these cards. This is one of the two problems for the new 7XXX series of cards.

With this cost, it's very unlikely most pre-built manufacturers (everyone from ibuypower & newegg types, to HP and DELL) would see these cards as a viable option for their machines.
The second problem is the bulk purchase of the older generation of cards. When a large manufacturer like HP, or DELL etc.. Build a line of computers they buy / order the items in bulk. This means they can only afford to integrate the latest and greatest into their lines very slowly, especially when the cost is so high.

This means for a decent amount of time the old 6XXX series of cards are still the best you can get without huge financing & building it yourself. The effect of this is that I can still sell my computer for a more than reasonable price even after the 7XXX series has been released, because no-one will be able to; afford / get them in a pre-built.

Thanks!  


You have great points, and I agree with almost everything you say. In this current situation, it doesn't make sense for AMD to invest in that type of market. Rationally, it's not something they should do as graduate from university.

The thing is, the current needs of mining are a perfect case of disruption in the chipset market. Everything is set for a low-profile maker to build a good chipset for hashing and take this market. For a multi-million business, it doesn't seems interesting, but it should be a priority to take that market. Right now, we have those FPGA boards, where if enough research is made, could take the place of those GPU. A serious business who could inject a couple thousand of dollars in research for those boards could bring a disruptive product in the Bitcoin mining market.

Yeah, the market isn't that big right now. But a few months ago, the market was inexistant. What mining is going to be next year? The more there is miners, the more the network is secured. And the easier it is to mine, the easier it is to put Bitcoin in the hands of more people. If you can develop an easy miner equipment for the average joe, who's happy to get a few cents of Bitcoin every week to spend online, you're going to see that BTC value jump higher than 30$.

AMD already have a considerable advantage in this market. I just hope they don't diss the Bitcoin market, like those telegrams businesses were laughing at the telephone when it was introduced or like Sony did when it dominated the video game market and completely ignored Nintendo with their Wii.

Anyway, I see this as a perfect opportunity for a chipset manufacturer to introduce itself in an emergeant market with a lot of needs. If AMD isn't able to seize the opportunity, it's too bad for them.

When are you gonna stop discouraging people from mining and/or increasing theu hash rates by bringing online new cards?

Your posts are so predictable and very consistent!

That's because both the 5x and the 6x are on 40nm thingamaboppers.  The 7x are gonna be on 28nm thingamaboppers.  The extra space can/is going to be used for stream processors.

Just like the 6990 has more stream processors than the 5970? Oh, wait, it doesn't.

Nope. All we can do is analyze how previous generations progressed, and extrapolate from there. From the 5000 to 6000 brought about...no change in mining capability. It's highly unlikely the 7000 will be any different. AMD designed it long ago, long before Bitcoin was as big as it is now.

I'll reply to you since you seem the most rational of this bunch, you're assuming that this market is both easily differentiable from the gaming market easily to GPU manufacturers, and and that the market is as expandable as the gaming market, both of which I do not believe are true.

The network is at 13,000,000 MHash/sec, for your numbers to be workable, that means you would need for the mining world to be willing to add another 13Mil MHash/sec at the same pricing point. Unlike gamers, who are happy to throw away their old cards in order to upgrade to newer shinier cards to run newer games, there is no similar incentive for the mining community. In fact, quite the opposite, increasing hash rate means a disincentive to invest further into the market (as people see their profits diminish from new purchases).

Not to mention there is absolutely no competition to AMD. There are only 2 GPU producers right now, because the barrier to entry into such a refined production structure is too high for anyone to reasonably enter right now. Certainly far far higher than $8million. Look at FPGAs/ASICs, why aren't they taking over? You can take already created chips, program them specifically to hash SHA2, with little to no onboard memory, and a power consumption that is almost nil, making them far superior to GPUs. But because the cost to develop such a platform would be in the tens of millions of dollars, it's not attractive enough to anyone to do it. What makes AMD, a company who makes literally billions of dollars off GPU sales more willing to take such a risk on such a paltry return then?

AMD got themselves a completely new market where they own the place at 100%. It was a pure accident, but it is the situation at the moment. If this business is managed correctly, they are probably studying this new market right now.

Sure, you're not going to see "Radeon 7000, only for mining" in store next week, but they are probably working on their marketing research right now. Well, I hope they have a good management. If they ignore this market, some competitors is going to see it and will try to get it.

If the network is at 13 000 000 MHash/s, and let's say that we take the Radeon 6770 sold at around 120$ for 200 MHash/s, you have a new market of around 7.8 millions dollars who just appeared from nowhere. And AMD probably owns 90% of this market right now, a market that appeared just 3 months ago. I really have a hard time that AMD is ignoring completely this market.


We call that taking a risk, and that's usually what business owners does when they start a business. Either you take a risk, either you play safe. Waiting for the risk to become safe is also called "missing an opportunity".

Wrong...

Bitcoin has had a huge impact on availible AMD GPUs..

Plain and simple

ask any local major computer store.. 

I don't know if its true, but I've always heard that 80% of profits come from 20% of customers. Each 'miner' accounts for anywhere from 1-100's 'gamers'.  The mining community may be small people wise, but these people will fight over buying 20x of your highest end card.  The miners who know what their worth is as far as bitcoin goes will set the resale value which is also a huge asset to milk.  A higher resale value means more people will purchase it new because its a sounder investment.

(40 nm /28 nm )^2 = 2.04081633

This is the theoretical maximal gain of the smaller feature size of the 7XXX series cards.

However the practical gain is much smaller for various reasons.

The first and simplest one is that the errors in the silicon do not decrease as much as the feature size so that the chip manufacturer has to cut smaller chips out the waver to reach the optimum yield. This factor is normally around the golden ratio for every feature size enhancement. So we would get the following factor:
2.04081633/phi = 1.26129386

Another factor is that with every generation the manpower required to design the chips increases so later chip generations make less effective use of the available transistors. This will more apparent in the future and it the major counter-effect of moores law. What it means before we would reach the cheapest possible physical transistor the people needed to design chips with them would exceed the mass of the earth.

Without mining 6990's could be had on almost any site. You can talk about the 5xxx series all you want but AMD is aware why they are sold out and its not due to gamers or new system builds. They built enough for that demand. It was the mining that pushed them beyond what they planned or they would have produced more. We may be a small community but many of us hold many of these cards and you divide that up we a large enough community to monitor.

I am still building rigs 9 months or 2 months or 18 months to pay off. What ever. I use my rigs profits to reinvest which I am sure many others do as well. About the only way to counter the difficulty until recently and worst case if this folds I own some decent hardware for resale or for the next big thing or fork that needs hashing power. I also did not even get into this until mid June. I had owned 2x5990 since June of 2010 but did not know about it, looking back sucks as what could have been!!! Anyhow. I work IT as many of you all do. This is fun and I have an excuse to build a new server room, hide from the wife   and play with Linux all while making a $ or two. Don't think many like me are not out there. Of course if this thread is just intended to scare peeps from getting in good luck with that.

I'm fairly certain there are many, many, many more Gamers/Consumers out there using AMD cards for Gaming than people using them for mining. So I don't buy that AMD gives two squirts of piss about Bitcoin mining. For AMD to remain competitive against nVidia, they need to focus on Gaming First, and GPGPU second.

If anything, it'd behoove them to focus on gaming with the 7xxx series so schmucks like us can buy up the remaining backstock of 68xx and 69xx series cards.