NVIDIA Could Reuse Ampere GA100 GPU for CMP HX Cryptomining Series

[AleksandarK]

When NVIDIA introduced its Ampere family of graphics cards, the GPU lineup's first product was the A100 GPU. While not being a GPU used for gaming, the model is designed with compute-heavy workloads in mind. Even NVIDIA says that "NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU delivers unprecedented acceleration at every scale to power the world's highest-performing elastic data centers for AI, data analytics, and HPC." However, it seems like the GA100 SKU, the base of the A100 GPU, could be used for another task that requires heavy computation and could benefit very much from the sheer core count that the biggest Ampere SKU offers.

According to a known leaker @kopite7kimi (Twitter), NVIDIA could repurpose the GA100 GPU SKU and launch it as a part of the CMP HX crypto mining series of graphics cards. As a reminder, the CMP series is specifically designed for the sole purpose of mining cryptocurrency, and CMP products have no video outputs. According to Kopite, the repurposed GPU SKU could be a "mining monster", which is not too hard to believe given the huge core count the SKU has and the fact that it was made for heavy computation workloads. While we do not the exact specifications of the rumored CMP HX SKU, you can check out the A100 GPU specifications here.


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[ZoneDymo]

great, fantastic, more e-waste

 

[henok.gk]

Even miners aren't crazy enough to buy this thing.

 

[HD64G]

And now nVidia will keep all the margins for themselves directly selling that thing to miners and not allowing AIBs to cash out for themselves. Gamers can get 1050Tis for mere $200 after all.

 

[silentbogo]

Is it even serious?
Assuming his 160MH/s claim is true(which is plausible), the price of the card at best is around $10K if you can find it at all at that price, which makes RoI around 2 years if not more (again, assuming that BTC/ETH stays approximately where they are right now). And that's only if you can get one as a regular consumer, since PCIe accelerator variants are as rare as unicorns or purple pandas and even enterprise has to get in line to buy some. Even if we go into a hypothetical situation where you follow Huang's "the more you buy, the more you meme", and get a full-fledged DGX Ampere server, it's $100K minimum, and still around 2 years RoI. With real-world pricing, especially in EU either option will bump RoI to 3+ years.
Even mythical RTX 3090 at scalper pricing makes helluvalot more sense than this.

 

[Chomiq]

Doesn't make sense to me if they can just use multiple 3060's instead.

 

[1d10t]

Milking gamers is so yesteryear.

 

[Tomorrow]

Is it even serious?
Assuming his 160MH/s claim is true(which is plausible), the price of the card at best is around $10K if you can find it at all at that price, which makes RoI around 2 years if not more (again, assuming that BTC/ETH stays approximately where they are right now). And that's only if you can get one as a regular consumer, since PCIe accelerator variants are as rare as unicorns or purple pandas and even enterprise has to get in line to buy some. Even if we go into a hypothetical situation where you follow Huang's "the more you buy, the more you meme", and get a full-fledged DGX Ampere server, it's $100K minimum, and still around 2 years RoI. With real-world pricing, especially in EU either option will bump RoI to 3+ years.
Even mythical RTX 3090 at scalper pricing makes helluvalot more sense than this.

^ This

I find it extremely unlikely that A100 would find it's way to miners. Plus a while back there was a problem with shortage of these chips. This chip is huge. 826 mm² to be exact.
And unlike gaming GPU's where Nvidia could repurpose failed chips with defective SM's, or Tensor/RT cores for mining, the A100 already lacks RT, display and DirectX support.
Even if we're talking about defective A100 dies that would directly affect (lower) it's hash rate. Thus affecting it's already bad ROI.

No to mention that im pretty sure Nvidia has no problem selling every A100 they produce to Enterprise users.
Also 40-80GB of HMB2e would be a colossal waste in terms of mining even if the bandwidth is 600GB/s higher than 3090.

No offence to kopite7kimi but he has been wrong before.

 

[Vya Domus]

Memory bandwidth and latency accounts for most of the performance when running these algorithms, an A100 card could easily break 200 Mh/s I reckon.

Even miners aren't crazy enough to buy this thing.

I see people still don’t who are we up against. You wouldn’t believe the sort of shit I heard back in 2017, people getting in debt as much as they could to buy all the cards they could. I can only imagine what they’re willing to do now. The prospects of making easy money awakens a really vicious and irrational behaviour in people.

 

[R-T-B]

great, fantastic, more e-waste

This was never going to be a gaming card, if that's what you mean.

Even miners aren't crazy enough to buy this thing.

Hah, you really believe that?

The prospects of making easy money awakens a really vicious and irrational behaviour in people.

It's absolutely the same as "gold fever."

Even mythical RTX 3090 at scalper pricing makes helluvalot more sense than this.

A lot of miners are really bad at the RoI equation and just want the biggest card. Something I've observed over the years. Yes, they are stupid and doomed to fail, but they will still spend and are a market segment.

 

[silentbogo]

A lot of miners are really bad at the RoI equation and just want the biggest card.

Cost and RoI is a lesser problem in this situation. Availability is.
Even in US it's hard to get your hands on any PCIe Tesla or Mi card. Unless you are buying a whole package(e.g. prebuilt server plus service) from a specialized distributor (HPE, IBM or directly from NVidia), it won't be easy to even get one card like that. Basically it's like our current situation with 30-series, but all the time and even worse now.
And regarding RoI, it all depends on which miners you are talking about. If it's some Joe with a 20-card farm that makes a couple of grand in passive income - yes, he may splurge on one A100 card and sell it as soon as he's done with it. And even that's stretching the limit of reality, otherwise we would've seen some P100 farms during the first boom (and they were much cheaper than V100 or A100). The only times I've seen those, were curiosity experiments in the cloud, or on loaner hardware.
If it's a large-scale mining operation - RoI, PPD, PPW, space constraints and cooling requirements all come into consideration. Just like in any regular DC.