Thursday, March 18th 2021
AMD Confirms it Won't Block any Workloads on its Graphics Cards - Including Mining
Hot on the heels of NVIDIA's recent Cryptocurrency Mining Processors (CMP) launch and slightly debacled driver-level neutering of popular mining algorithms with their latest GeForce RTX 3060, AMD product manager Nish Neelalojanan confirmed to PC Gamer that AMD's stance is a fundamentally different one: that they won't be the ones to decide what their customers can or can't do with their hardware. His words, precisely, were this: "We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter."
Nish then went on to speak on how AMD - and its current RDNA2 product stack - have been specifically geared and optimized for gaming workloads. There are some architectural choices present in RDNA2 that automatically reduce its utility and performance when it comes to mining, such as its infinity Cache - an architectural choice that aims to increase gaming performance by improving cache hits, at the expense of overall memory bandwidth (the most important metric for actual mining operations).
This is why AMD's latest gaming behemoth RX 6900 XT, for example, offers about the same ~54 MH/s Ethereum mining performance as its older (and much smaller) RDNA-based RX 5700 XT. This is an interesting way to frame the problem, and it does naturally lead to lesser demand for AMD's graphics cards compared to NVIDIA's (the RTX 3090, for example, offers a gargantuan up to 120 MH/s in mining algorithms). This doesn't however mean that AMD isn't working on a CMP-like product line based on older technologies that can sate demand for cryptocurrency mining.
Nish then doubled-down on AMD's commitment to gaming:
"All our optimization, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we've optimized everything for gaming. Clearly, gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it's not going to be ideal for mining workload. That all said, in this market, it's always a fun thing to watch." I beg to differ on that last part, though. It's definitely not fun to watch the state of the market for gaming-related hardware.
Source:
via TechSpot
Nish then went on to speak on how AMD - and its current RDNA2 product stack - have been specifically geared and optimized for gaming workloads. There are some architectural choices present in RDNA2 that automatically reduce its utility and performance when it comes to mining, such as its infinity Cache - an architectural choice that aims to increase gaming performance by improving cache hits, at the expense of overall memory bandwidth (the most important metric for actual mining operations).
Nish then doubled-down on AMD's commitment to gaming:
"All our optimization, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we've optimized everything for gaming. Clearly, gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it's not going to be ideal for mining workload. That all said, in this market, it's always a fun thing to watch." I beg to differ on that last part, though. It's definitely not fun to watch the state of the market for gaming-related hardware.
73 Comments on AMD Confirms it Won't Block any Workloads on its Graphics Cards - Including Mining
There are several other factors to why gpu is so bad in stock. Ø
First of all, there are a shortage of materials to begin with and I know amd gpu manufacturer has also set gpu on hold to free up space for microchip production to car manufacturers. Besides that, there problems with shipping feeds and free space on shipping. Scalpers dosent help either. So all in all, even if amd limited or banned mining on there cards. It would not help much any way.
Did you mean debacled?
I wouldn't mind if all this crap would be permanently disabled by hardware level.
Seems that record time was once again met or beat and sites will are SOLD OUT/OUT OF STOCK within about a 3 second span. Once webpages finally refreshed for me I was greeted with out of stock or sold out....or stock was so low that it only took a handful of buyers to deplete it???