Tuesday, June 6th 2017
NVIDIA, AMD to Launch Mining-Oriented Versions of Their GPUs
You must've heard the news of increasingly tighter supply on AMD's video cards. This is kind of a "hello darkness my old friend" kind of moment, since we've seen this happening before. However, these days, the problem looks to be exacerbated with the increase in digital currencies - it's not just Bitcoin now. Ethereum and Zcash have come in to fill customer's desire for a lower entry, ASIC-resistant mineable cryptocurrency. And with the currencies' exploding pricing, people are once again looking to enter the mining craze - to ride the crypto wave, so to speak. All higher-performance graphics cards since the R200 series are flying off the shelves and second hand markets, and as we speak, virtually all RX 580 models are out of stock on Newegg. And while AMD graphics cards have historically been leagues better than their NVIDIA counterparts in mining environments, recently some specialized miners have surfaced, tailored for the Pascal architecture (more oriented to Zcash, though.)
As a result, demand for AMD graphics cards is straining and suffocating supply, and it could be that NVIDIA will go the same route, should recent optimizations continue. It would seem that both companies understand the strain this puts on general customer who really just want to play a game with their graphics cards, but are finding pricing and availability an insurmountable challenge. Both companies are thus reportedly working on specialized editions of their graphics cards specially geared for cryptocurrency mining. These would apparently eschew any gaming capability, and likely display output connectors as well, which are unneeded for mining farms. NVIDIA is said to be prepping a special edition GeForce GTX 1060 with their GP106-100 GPU, and AMD is rumored to be working on some adaptation of their Polaris graphics cards as well. Sources point towards only 90 days warranty on these NVIDIA GTX 1060 cards, which will also be cheaper than gaming models, and be distributed by add-in board partners.
Sources:
Videocardz, Newegg, Coinbase Market History
57 Comments on NVIDIA, AMD to Launch Mining-Oriented Versions of Their GPUs
This will only be good for AMD, their cards will sell, some will die from people being stupid and they will buy more, the ones that make it past the mining rig will probably be put to use in gaming or other rigs and marketshare will increase, and once people get the idea that AMD is better they will buy more AMD.
As far as the cost to us gamers.... look at all the thread crapping on AMD for the past few years, despite having decent hardware other than their bullshi* CPU architecture before Ryzen. Speaking of which, I wonder how cheap Ryzen CPU's would handle PCIe port expanders to run many GPU's?
Coincidence? I think yes!
www.amazon.com/dp/B00HZ0M9F2/?tag=tec06d-20
Or maybe just plain old artificial segmentation.
Based on nicehash calculator, an RX580 can make 90 euro a month, which is what... 1/8th of average salary in Romania? So investing in few RX580 will significantly increase one's income.
For a US-citizen, this is just 1/36 of income. For them an RX580 would just be a nice addition, but nothing changing his situation significantly...
10-15 years ago I was hugely tempted by stock photography for similar reason: your location doesn't impact the earning (not by much, anyway). Stocks didn't look that great for people from US or UK, but for me it could have been hugely profitable (at least potentially, since I simply didn't have time to get more involved).
Mining has the similar advantages with no issues (since photography is very time-consuming and... you have to learn it in the first place :)).
The catch is that as you can see the pricing of bit currency is incredibly volatile. There's no guarantee it won't drop as fast as it rose. So it's a gamble for sure. Estimates were it would be dried up in 6 months, 18 months ago. Just something to think about before dropping $500 on a 480X thinking you'll get rich. It might work out, or it might already be too late. I do think there's an extreme amount of manipulation in the pricing, leading to the volatility.
Also even if they mine just 10% faster than gaming models (for the same price), it'll make an enormous difference in the long run.
They'll never top these sales numbers anyway
That is all.
:D