Thursday, September 2nd 2021
NVIDIA Crypto Mining Processor 170HX Card Spotted with 164 MH/s Hash Rate
NVIDIA announced the first four Crypto Mining Processor (CMP) cards earlier this year with performance ranging from 26 MH/s to 86 MH/s. These cards were all based on existing Turing/Ampere silicon and featured board partner-designed cooling systems. NVIDIA appears to have introduced a new flagship model with the passively-cooled 170HX that is based on the NVIDIA A100 accelerator which features a GA100 GPU.
This new model is the first mining card to be designed by NVIDIA and features 4480 CUDA cores paired with 8 GB of HBM2E memory which are both considerably less than what is found in other GA100 based products. NVIDIA has also purposively limited the PCIe interface to Gen 1 x4 to ensure the card cannot be used for tasks outside of cryptocurrency mining. The 170HX has a TDP of 250 W and runs at a base clock of 1140 MHz with a locked-down BIOS that does not allow memory overclocking resulting in a hash rate of 164 MH/s when using the Etash algorithm.
Sources:
Codefordl (Zhihu), @9550pro
This new model is the first mining card to be designed by NVIDIA and features 4480 CUDA cores paired with 8 GB of HBM2E memory which are both considerably less than what is found in other GA100 based products. NVIDIA has also purposively limited the PCIe interface to Gen 1 x4 to ensure the card cannot be used for tasks outside of cryptocurrency mining. The 170HX has a TDP of 250 W and runs at a base clock of 1140 MHz with a locked-down BIOS that does not allow memory overclocking resulting in a hash rate of 164 MH/s when using the Etash algorithm.
52 Comments on NVIDIA Crypto Mining Processor 170HX Card Spotted with 164 MH/s Hash Rate
You still have not shown where TPU is at fault. Right. After the comments from Solaris and Trog, I did a bit of quick reading. The idea I had was that amount of VRAM was eqaully important as the speed of the RAM & GPU. That was my bad..
So take it whichever way you would like. If you just wish me to tell you that "you win", I will happily do so to get you the sleep you so dearly need.
Want to think about that for a few moments?
So look at those pictures again. And tell me how you would cool 250 watt TDP, with size that it has and with a heatsink which is closed from 4 directions.
It is closed from 4 directions because it needs to streamline east-west airflow. I guess I just read the article a bit closer than you, and looked at the pictures a bit closer than you. And here you are standing and trying to tell me to "think for a few moments"? Laughable.
Rack cooling's responsibility is not to extract heat from components inside the chassis. Rack cooling's responsibility is to extract the heat from hot aisle and pump cold air to cool aisle. It is chassis cooling's responsibility to suck in the air from cold aisle, cool internal chassis components and pump hot air into hot aisle.
You will just keep on digging yourself deeper. I have designed datacentres for 15 years of my life. I am an engineer by education.
Now that is trolling...
Now enters the shift to pos, and everything goes tumbling down. Just breaking even on this thing is quite a gamble...
staking is a bit like putting money in the bank and gaining interest from it.. it already goes on..
my mining rewards are going up along with the price of eth.. i expect the price of eth to at least double or treble before the switch over to proof of stake happens..
if this is the case eth mining still has some mileage left in it before the switch over to proof of stake happens some time in 2022..
trog
ps.. i have seen some examples of the gains from staking and compounding crypto.. over ten years or so they are impressive.. crypto is the future i really dont see how it can fail to be.. the days of conventional banking are coming to an end.. like it or not lex.. its gonna happen.. :)
It would have been nice for my ETH farm six months ago but it's specifically targeting ETH with memory bandwidth above anything else, and the problem with that is that ETH is planning (and making reasonable progress towards) becoming a Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency in December, at which point this card will be e-waste.
It's no good for Ravencoin or ERG because it lacks the compute power those coins need. Maybe there are other coins that have requirements for high bandwidth and low compute, but they're neither popular nor currently profitable, so why would anyone risk it?
So, as an ETH-specific card, it's likely to be launched at almost exactly the point in time that mining ETH is supposed to stop, permanently. Now there's a strong chance that ETH will be mineable well into 2022 due to delays in the Proof-of-Stake transition, but as a business model, buying ETH-specific cards like this now is almost guaranteed failure unless the price of these is low (unlikely with HBM2) and ETH's PoS transition is very delayed indeed. Even then, you'd still be better off getting a more balanced card that can more profitably mine other coins once the inevitable end to ETH mining eventually happens.
I should also point out that my 2019-vintage RX5700 farm gets exactly 164MH/s from three cards, using around 330W on the GPUs alone, so whilst this is a decent efficiency at 250W for exactly the same hashrate as old RX5700 cards, it's not really good enough to justify buying single-purpose hardware with no future and no resale value.
To be fair, a lot of ppl sold their farms after the bull run to 18k. Unsure how they felt when BTC went to 60k.
Spoiler alert: It'll never happen, the developers own far too many ETHs still that they do value. Abandoning mining will kill ETH stone dead, zeroing out the developers wallets. They're not that dumb.
Owning ETH favours PoS though, so the developers are the ones trying to make ETH a greener cryptocurrency. Moving away from mining also increases scarcity and stops inflation, so there's a double incentive for the ETH developers/holders to hasten the transition from PoW to PoS since scarcity increases the relative value of any held ETH.
Postponing the PoS transition is what all miners want, me included, but the London fork on 5th Aug is something like step 3 on the 5-step journey to a full PoS transition and its been very well received by the market and shows that the PoS transition roadmap can continue as planned. A lot of us miners were hoping that EIP-1559 would be a bit of a flop and provide more arguments to delay the PoS transition, but it's had the opposite effect and boosted ETH's value by 100% in under 30 days.