I am 100% in a holding pattern right now. Obviously the advent of GPU plotting and farming is coming soon.
Biggest mistake that chia team could make? If they focus on new GPU hardware, and don’t invest a majority of their time in making use of old GPU hardware.
If the Chia team was smart, then they absolutely would make sure that old hardware is their primary focus. It should be what they are promoting. They should not be promoting the use of new hardware.
Nobody in their right mind needs to plot in 10 minutes or 15 minutes.
I think it’s a strategic failure if they come out with bravado about what a 30 series or 40 series GPU can do for plotting. To me, that defeats the purpose of what Chia was supposed to be all about.
It is very simple for them to do. They should have, should be, putting their efforts into showing how useful they can make a Polaris card for example. I will be extremely disappointed if they come out with a bunch of bragging about how fast a 30 series or 40 series can plot and farm. Big deal. That is not impressive. It’s not impressive to say look at how fast this new hardware can do things. It’s not an achievement in the least. And what it means is that people are buying up new hardware, which means that more hardware has to get manufactured. That simple breakdown, is why it’s a failure for Chia.
Maybe it’s an ego thing. They want to make sure that they’re the fastest. That Mad Max can’t be the top dog for whatever reason. I’m afraid Chia is going to lose sight of what they were supposed to stand for. Reuse is green. Basic math.
well sorry but come on, what did you expect?
You are like pre-emptively ranting about something that hasn’t even happend yet.
An even if it did happen…not so much to do about it. GPU plotting and farming is a reality now and new hardware works better than old hardware. Nothing Chia can do about the fact that a 4080 is faster than a radeon 580
On the bright side I can confirm than my rather ancient i3-6100 can farm c4 plots without breaking a sweat.
Ship’s already left the port I’m afraid, but the PR material tends to focus on node count and that refurbished drive initiative thing they were pushing - I honestly don’t think they really care if it’s proof of coloring with crayons at this point (not bagging on them, it just doesn’t seem to be a primary or even secondary focus). But nothing would delight me more than to see all of those nodes be Raspberry Pi’s and a used drive or two for the plots, but capitalism says more plots or smaller plots means more money, so here we are
Yes, Chia has already talked about GPUs. So please educate yourself before attempting to make a point. It’s so much more productive. Chia said 3060ti is the sweet spot. So they have up until their last video, talked about new GPUs. Nothing about giving old hardware new life. If 30 series is 5 minute plot? Maybe a 1080ti is 30 minutes. We wouldn’t know. What about Polaris? Not even a hint of that.
I personally would never invest in anything new for a coin full of promise and not much else. I suppose spending a lot of time on Polaris or old Nvidia cards is what I’m hoping for. To me it would give this project some credibility. The 18TB hard drive farce has indeed left the barn. But they could spend an equal or even greater amount of time on optimizing old GPUs. That would be a true achievement. But based on what I’ve seen? Wishful thinking.
If they put this to a poll and ask their farmers? Do you want 5 minute plots or the ability to use cheap, older GPUs that can plot in 30 minutes instead? So really the question posed should be, do you want buy a new 30 Series GPU or would you rather be able to use a Polaris or older card that you might have or can buy for <$100.
When this garbage about SSD taking over chia farming for storage stops? That’s step one. The next step would be to show that Chia is green in practice. Not green in BS. That’s brown.
What I see so far? Buy new hard drives, max size. That’s not green. Then with their 2.0 they come out stating this and that about 30 Series GPUs. Again, strike. That’s strike 2 against being green. On top of this of course, GPU anything doesn’t smell like less power usage. It might be in reality, but it’s going down that slippery slope.
Reuse is green. I can keep saying it. If they were a truly green project then they would focus on making old things work. The left arm doesn’t know what the right arm is doing. Impress me. Show me that you will come out with two options for GPUs. One option that will include old generations. I don’t have much faith. Sorry.
Chia achieved reducing power usage by gpu farming and gpu plotting. But this has to be done correctly. We the farmers have to choose appropriate hardware depending on our farms. For a 2pb farm i.e with old plotter using only cpu you would need ( 20 min plots ) around 1 year for plotting . With gpu you can easily plot in 3 minutes which would make farm ready in 2 months. Electricity used to plot is far less with gpu and keep in mind that you have also increased your drive capacity by at least 25% by just using a 3060 for farming . And that is why this time Chia only mentioned the later Gpu series at least for plotting. With older ones plot times are above 20 minutes and less power efficient than the cpu plotters available. For farming even a 100$ bucks gpu is fine for 2pb farm and power needed for it is also less than the drives needed to cover total plot increase by compressing.
Why does Chia Corp have to make a GPU farmer? They do not own the blockchain.
In any case, I have seen them talking about plotting with old gear heaps of times.
In my experience with Gigahorse if you want the ultra fast times we often see, it’s not the GPU delivering that but rather having a sufficient amount of hard drives to write the final plots to simultaneously; the bandwidth to do it, 256GB DDR4 Ram, and having an ultra fast temp drive which will cost as much money or more than the cheap GPU.
Remember, plotting is a tiny part of Chia farming. The FOMO is in our heads about having to plot right now because we might be missing out on a half an XCH as we scramble to GPU plot?
Using a 3060 is the ideal card because it has 12GB of VRAM you can plot and farm with it.
You talking about Polaris cards is really frustrating because there are so few software developers for it. It’s rare to find good Nvidia CUDA developers and unfortunately AMD turned their backs on developers several times over the years and now we are seeing the results in realtime of their decisions. If you want a good example look how AMD dealt with the OBS software community during 2017 - 2020.
It’s important to remember it is more energy efficient to farm with GPU’s. The later model GPU’s are more energy efficient than the older ones. Keep that in mind.
1st, the advent of GPU plotting and farming already came some months ago and is continuing full steam ahaead right now with the GigaPlotter release for Chia some weeks ago. No need to wait in a ‘holding pattern’ Mister Savage! Time for a landing on the right runway.
And Voodoo makes an excellent point! Creating (or financing) a new Blockchain of your dreams is one of a few alternatives open to bring your vision to reality.
By railing against the wall…that is, wishing advances in GPU technology didn’t exist (they do), ease of plotting isn’t important (it is to many), somebody’s else business decisions are wrong (Chia, Inc.), 3rd party Chia ecosystem’s developer creativity and entrepreneurship hurts Chia (it doesn’t), capitalism i.e., selling new stuff in general is bad (not necessarily), human psychology, ego, and competitiveness shouldn’t exist (and good luck stifling those)…you are asking for likely improbable wholistic change to occur.
Nevertheless, it’s always good to have alternative views, such as you like to pontificate on. At the very least, such discourse help us more clearly understand the path ahead, and why we are on that path vs any another path.
So go for it MisterSavage, I’d love to put my sidelined 35 watt i5-6500 uPC back in service with a TrueEco Blockchain !!
I’ve heard of the circular drive initiative and it’s a farce. It’s smoke and mirrors. Big capacity drives coming out of server centers? Really? Chia says you must go big capacity. Last time I checked? I don’t see reduced prices on big capacity enterprise grade hard drives. Gene says it will be a 100% ssd world. Some day. Yes, some day. Sure. Or is it really a sure thing? The drives that farmers have access to, are not the sizes that Chia endorses or promotes. Or sells themselves…
I’m not arguing against the fact that a 3060ti is a great card. Very efficient as well. It’s just that, well, wouldn’t that card be best served as a gaming card which it was designed for?
This is more about Chia providing legitimate alternatives that promote reuse. Dealing with bottlenecks? Why couldn’t someone employ 2 older desktop computer as an alternate solution to one monster computer?
I appreciate the insight into Polaris. Seems like you have a wealth of knowledge.
The only way to know how old you could go is through trial, error and…wait for it…effort on the part of Chia. Does it really matter enough to them to test and develop? They could say leave it to the community to figure it out.
Chia can do whatever it wants. I also see that nobody can argue the point that REUSE = GREEN. We can employ old servers which is great. The advent of GPU plotting and farming gives Chia one more opportunity…to drop the ball once again.
Your responses don’t seem typical of the Chia community.
This blockchain isn’t so farmers can get rich. The actual plotted space is far in excess of what they outlined in their whitepaper as well as the value being twice what their target value is.
Why did you become a farmer?
I don’t see Chia dropping the ball at any time on this journey. The blockchain has an uptime of 100%.
Stop being so angry and expecting Chia corp to do anything to help farmers more than it already has. They don’t own the blockchain, we do.
