The casual customer will still be buying GPUs 10 years from now.
The bulk order GPU miners will stop ordering GPUs the minute mining becomes unprofitable. With proof-of-stake and ASICs on the horizon, this could happen rather abruptly.
When miners are done with GPUs, they're going to unload them on the secondary market. The used GPU market is going to be flooded with GPUs that have been overclocked and run with the demanding synthetic workloads 24/7, which is going to create a high failure rate. This is going to sour a lot of people who buy those used mining cards and experience failures later.
In short: They're gaining goodwill with the long term customers at the expense of the short-term customers. This is fine, because the short-term customers will disappear soon and the long-term customers can consume all of their production anyway.
And it is a pretty common complaint that companies sacrifice long-term interest for short term concerns. It is interesting to see a company apparently intentionally make the opposite decision (and have people still complain).
Isn't this true of any and every decision? There will always be people with different opinions, so when a decision is made, those on the "losing" side of that decision will complain.
Actually GPUs used for mining are typically undervolted to keep power costs down, and by running them 24/7 there is less thermal expansion and contraction so they’re not expected to fail at higher rates than other GPUs.
Source: I used to mine ETH years ago on used AMD GPUs when that was still profitable. From perusing mining forums this is still standard practice. I eventually sold all the GPUs and all of them worked flawlessly.
Doesn't really matter. Running a card 100% 24/7 is still harder on it that gaming a couple hours per day.
GPUs are relatively reliable, but fans less so. The failures are usually an early death of the fan, which can't be replaced without strapping something else to the shroud with zip ties or watercooling it.
Miners aren't usually impacted because the failures happen after several years. It's the downstream buyers who lose out and then associate the brand with premature failure.
This - plus if all the new GPUs are going into ETH miners rather than gaming rigs, what incentive will game developers have to target new features or optimize for them?
This doesn't really make sense to me. What would the "casual customer" do if nvidia didn't introduce this segmentation? Would this completely halt the gaming industry such that 10 years from now no one would even consider buying a GPU? I don't believe that.
Also, if they're able to produce both consumer GPUs and miner GPUs to meet both demands, what's stopping them from doing it now? Is it not worth their while at current prices, so bumping the miner GPU prince by a significant amount would change that? Why not just increases prices as it is? It seems to me that the actual price charged by amd and nvidia isn't that outrageous, it's just that the cards are bought well in advance and possibly scalped later.
The bulk order GPU miners will stop ordering GPUs the minute mining becomes unprofitable. With proof-of-stake and ASICs on the horizon, this could happen rather abruptly.
When miners are done with GPUs, they're going to unload them on the secondary market. The used GPU market is going to be flooded with GPUs that have been overclocked and run with the demanding synthetic workloads 24/7, which is going to create a high failure rate. This is going to sour a lot of people who buy those used mining cards and experience failures later.
In short: They're gaining goodwill with the long term customers at the expense of the short-term customers. This is fine, because the short-term customers will disappear soon and the long-term customers can consume all of their production anyway.