Monday, March 1st 2021
NVIDIA 90HX Crypto Mining Processor Based on Ampere GA102-100 GPU
We recently reported that the NVIDIA 30HX and 40HX CMP cards will be based on the Turing TU116 and TU106 processors. This was good news to those hoping for improved graphics card supplies however, according to a recent report the top-end 90HX CMP card will be based on the Ampere GA102-100 GPU also found in the RTX 3080. The report also claims that the 50HX will feature the Turing TU102 GPU found in the RTX 2080 Ti making the 90HX the only card in the series to feature an Ampere design. The 50HX and 90HX cards are expected to launch later this year and will likely restrict GPU supply if the cryptocurrency boom continues.
Source:
VideoCardz
41 Comments on NVIDIA 90HX Crypto Mining Processor Based on Ampere GA102-100 GPU
To be honest, these numbers look odd to me, maybe these dies are limited some way? The 90HX is obviously the 3080, and is unlimited, but what the others really are and perform like is a mystery to me.
Now to compare this with reality when it comes to AMD cards (I don't even want to bother with RTX):
Lowest - $1650
There's no point in discussing "MSRP"
NVIDIA are using Ampere, because they care more about gamers than making money. /s
This is 100% a token-gesture by Nvidia to make it look like they're "tackling the problem" which they are not. They're actively making it worse....
Also, there could be false positives and then there's the whole legal/moral grey area of NVIDIA restricting what you can do with a product that you legally bought.
If the cryptocurrency bubble doesn't burst I believe legislators are going to have to step in from an energy use perspective at some point. I forget when and where I read it but I saw that the electricity wasted on cryptocurrency mining is greater than the entire energy consumption of Denmark, which is a pretty cold country of 6 million people.
I also read that mining, transporting ore, smelting and refining precious metals like gold - despite being hugely damaging to the environment and enormously wasteful - are 3-4x better value than cryptocurrency mining. That's right - crytocurrency mining is 3-4x worse than an already-awful benchmark of environmental damage and wastage. I'm not an eco-hippy but mining is quite literally just wasting terajoules energy for nothing - equivalent to 20,000,000 tons of oil burned a year. Why the hell do I even bother sorting my waste for recycling and switching to energy-saving bulbs? Compared to cryptocurrency mining it's like one man pissing on a country-sized wildfire.
It'll get to the point that cheap electricity will no longer be a government-subsidised utility, and will be sold for profit with the government instead giving rebates/credits to those unable to foot the bill. The way electricity is treated as a non-profit or profit-regulated essential service will stop if consumers are using it to generate free money. That's algorithms for you. Article has "mining" as a topic, that means readers of that page are possibly interested in mining OMFG HAVE SOME MINING ADS.
As for all these stupid extra cards Nvidia is trying to push out to deter mining, this won't help anyone....well, i mean, it'll still help miners. They'll take what they can get and I'm sure they'll circumvent any BIOS restrictions and locks and be back at using these GPUs at their fullest potential.