Ahh the old "lets make it look like a mistake and release a driver that unlocks the mining restrictions".
Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part? Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way. My opinion is it was a convenient mistake that will sell a lot more cards.
> Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part?
Yes. And I assume we'll see the mining brake return on 3080 Ti / 3080 Super and on 4000 series cards as well.
This looks very much to me like someone built a feature branch on an old version that didn't have the mining brake installed, and then pushed the branch somewhere they shouldn't. I see no reason to doubt that - classic case of Hanlon's Razor in action:
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
> Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way.
Segmenting miners to a different, higher-priced segment makes them more money. You're selling two cards instead of one, on top of increasing your effective production capacity (because the mining cards are on a different, older node that is not bottlenecked as badly).
Maybe I'm old and cynical but does anyone actually think this was an error on NVIDIA part? Their goal is to sell as much GPU as they can, their shareholders wouldn't want it any other way. My opinion is it was a convenient mistake that will sell a lot more cards.