It looks like cryptocurrency mining is back in craze, as miners are firing up their old mining hardware from 2022 to cash in. Bitcoin is now north of $72,000, and is dragging up the value of several other cryptocurrencies, one such being Qubic (QBIC). Profitability calculators put 24 hours of Qubic mining on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-core processor at around $3, after subtracting energy costs involved in running the chip at its default 170 W TDP. "Zen 4" processors such as the 7950X tend to retain much of their performance with slight underclocking, and reducing their power limits; which is bound to hold or increase profitability, while also prolonging the life of the hardware.

And thus, the inevitable has happened—stocks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X have disappeared overnight across online retail. With the market presence of the 7950X3D and the Intel Core i9-14900K, the 7950X was typically found between $550-600, which would have added great value considering its low input costs. CPU-based cryptocurrency miners, including the QBIC miner, appear to be taking advantage of the AVX-512 instruction set. AMD "Zen 4" microarchitecture supports AVX-512 through its dual-pumped 256-bit FPU, and the upcoming "Zen 5" microarchitecture is rumored to double AVX-512 performance over "Zen 4." Meanwhile, Intel has deprecated what few client-relevant AVX-512 instructions its Core processors had since 12th Gen "Alder Lake," as it reportedly affected sales of Xeon processors. What about the 7950X3D? It's pricier, but mining doesn't benefit from the 3D V-cache, and the chip doesn't sustain the kind of CPU clocks the 7950X manages to do across all its 16 cores. It's only a matter of time before the 7950X3D disappears, too; followed by 12-core models such as the 65 W 7900, the 170 W 7900X, and the 7900X3D.

The latest episode in the whole Terra/LUNA debacle - which saw $40 billion in crypto evaporating in a few hours - showcases that the crypto world doesn't operate within its own locked ecosystem. A court order for the arrest of Terra founder Do Kwon and five others was issued this Wednesday morning, on charges of violating the Capital Markets Act. LUNA fell 36% in the past 24 hours while LUNC (Luna Classic, representing the circulating LUNA tokens before the UST stablecoin's catastrophic depeg from the dollar value) dropped 25%, with much of the price movement coming after news of the warrant was made public on Wednesday morning.

The Terra/LUNA debacle brought about billions in losses across the cryptocurrency ecosystem, with multiple companies in the crypto finance area (from DeFi [Decentralized Finance] through CeFi [Centralized Finance] players such as Celsius Network, Voyager Digital and Three Arrows Capital claiming bankruptcy as their Terra/LUNA investments and reserves trended towards zero value. Accusations have been spread left and right that Terra/LUNA operated like a Ponzi Scheme - it remains to be seen whether that's the interpretation of the South Korea justice system.

VideoCardz has recently published pictures of a rumored AMD BC-160 (Blockchain Compute) mining card designed by XFX China and featuring a Navi 12 GPU. The card supposedly features 8 GB of HBM2 memory along with 2304 Stream Processors however a memory speed of 4 Gbps is also listed which is not currently available casting doubt on the legitimacy of this rumor. We did report on rumors in March that pointed to AMD releasing Navi 10/12 headless cryptocurrency mining cards so this could still be true.

The only existing product featuring the Navi 12 GPU is the Apple-exclusive AMD Radeon Pro 5600M which features 256 more Stream Processors at 2560. The BC-160 card was pictured in a mining cluster where it reached performance levels of 72 Mh/s in Etash with a TGP of 150 W. The card features two 8-pin power connectors and should offer performance around 25% faster than the Navi 10 Radeon RX 5700 XT. We are unsure if this is a real product or how much it might cost so take these rumors with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Intel's VP and GM of Client Graphics Products and Solutions Roger Chandler has recently confirmed in an interview with Gadgets 360 that the companies upcoming Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards will not ship with any software or hardware cryptocurrency mining inhibitors. Roger Chandler didn't rule out the possibility of Intel implementing such a lock in the future simply stating that it is not a priority for the company. Intel SVP and GM of Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Raja Koduri also noted that they cannot guarantee sufficient supply will be available to meet consumer demand. These graphics cards are not expected to be released until Q2 2022 with mobile versions coming earlier in Q1 so we cannot be sure how they will affect availability and pricing for the general GPU market. The full interview which also covers reference board designs, workstation products, and XeSS super-resolution technology can be found at the link below.

Roger ChandlerAs far as like software lockouts and things of that nature, we're not designing this product or building any features at this point that specifically target miners. As far as actions we're taking to avoid or lock them out, it's a product that will be in the market and people will be able to buy it. It's not a priority for us.

The stay-at-home economy remains robust due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, so the sales of gaming products such as game consoles and the demand for related components are being kept at a decent level, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. However, the values of cryptocurrencies have plummeted in the past two months because of active interventions from many governments, with the graphics DRAM market entering into a bearish turn in 3Q21 as a result. While graphics DRAM prices in the spot market will likely show the most severe fluctuations, contract prices of graphics DRAM are expected to increase by 10-15% QoQ in 3Q21 since DRAM suppliers still prioritize the production of server DRAM over other product categories, and the vast majority of graphics DRAM supply is still cornered by major purchasers.

It should be pointed out that, given the highly volatile nature of the graphics DRAM market, it is relatively normal for graphics DRAM prices to reverse course or undergo a more drastic fluctuation compared with other mainstream DRAM products. As such, should the cryptocurrency market remain bearish, and manufacturers of smartphones or PCs reduce their upcoming production volumes in light of the ongoing pandemic and component supply issues, graphics DRAM prices are unlikely to experience further increase in 4Q21. Instead, TrendForce expects prices in 4Q21 to largely hold flat compared to the third quarter.

The Ukrainian Security Service (USS) have recently exposed a large illegal cryptocurrency mining operation in the city of Vinnytsia. The mining farm was illegally connected to the power grid stealing power so efficiency didn't appear to be a major concern. The SSU seized 3800 game consoles, 500 graphics cards, 50 processors, and various documents with information of the operation. This is the first time we have seen the PlayStation 4 being used to mine Cryptocurrency however the idea isn't insane with various older consoles having been programmed to do so. The PlayStation 4 features an AMD GPU with 18 Compute Units and roughly 1.84 TFLOPs of single-precision compute performance while the PlayStation 4 Pro offers 4.2 TFLOPs.

Update Jul 19th: We have learned that these PlayStation 4 consoles were not being used for cryptocurrency mining and instead were part of a FIFA bot farm creating and leveling up accounts that could later be sold.

The Chinese government imposed harsh restrictions on cryptocurrency transactions last month which forced many mining farms to relocate or shut down and sell their equipment. This mass exodus has helped drive graphics card pricing downwards and according to recent reports, the price for RTX 3060 cards has hit a low of 270 USD (1760 yuan). These prices appear to be limited and only available for large purchases in China however as more farms are forced to sell we may see some cards listed for individual or international sale. Gaming laptops with RTX 3060 graphics cards that were purchased for mining farms are also entering the market for ~1000 USD. While the RTX 3060 cards currently represent the best value mining operations are selling a wide variety of NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards. These prices have been falling steadily over the last week so we wouldn't be surprised if they continue to drop.

MSI has recently launched the first NVIDIA Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) 50HX model with the MSI CMP 50HX MINER. The CMP 50HX is the third card in the CMP lineup above the CMP 30HX and CMP 40HX and a step below the flagship as of yet unreleased CMP 90HX. The CMP 50HX was expected to feature nearly identical specifications to the RTX 2080 Ti due to the similar reported mining performance and the fact that 30HX and 40HX models were derived from consumer cards. MSI has revealed that the CMP 50HX does use the TU102 but with only 3584 CUDA core compared to the 4352 cores found with the RTX 2080 Ti, the 50HX also features less memory with only 10 GB GDDR6. These core and memory reductions do come with a small power requirement reduction from 250 W to 225 W however dual 8-pin power connectors are still required. The MSI CMP 50HX card features a blower cooler design with a small plastic window and no display outputs.

Sabrent, which has become one of the go-tos in the world of Chia plotting and farming due to the price/performance/endurance ratio of its Rocket NVMe SSDs, has announced a new series of products specifically developed and marketed towards the Chia plotting crowds. Their new Plotripper SSDs (which drink from a quite obvious reference to AMD's Threadripper) have been designed to endure the harsh writing cycles for Chia plotting. Plotting is the process wherein you calculate the cryptographically-generated plots, and which can incur SSDs on a 1.6 TB write workload per 101 GB plot. The finished plot is then usually offloaded to a slow, capacious storage device (such as an external HDD) where it lays, awaiting for network challenges ad-infinitum. At time of writing, the total storage committed to Chia farming is estimated at 14 Exabytes.

The new Plotripper products are available in a mainstream and a "pro" variant. The mainstream Sabrent Plotripper offers a 10,000 TBW for its 2 TB capacity, which is already one of the highest available in consumer drives (until now). The Pro versions, however, promise 27,000 TBW of endurance for its 1 Tb capacity, and a staggering 54,000 TBW endurance rating for the 2 TB one. No word on pricing as of now, but these are sure to become some of the most sought-after SSDs for anyone planning to enter the Chia "farming" scene - and will definitely be priced accordingly.

The cryptocurrency market is experiencing another major shakedown in pricing, with the overall crypto market valuation dropping by more than a trillion dollars in less than 24 hours. As of time of writing, leading cryptocurrency by market cap Bitcoin has lost more than 30% in value, dropping to $31,000. Ethereum is down by 40% to $2,424, and memecoin Dogecoin has fallen by 45% - one would think a memecoin would have had its value dropped to zero from the instant of its conception, but that's not the world we live in.

As the market tries to staunch the bleeding, major cryptocurrency platforms Coinbase and Binance are down, citing "network congestion" issues stemming from the unexpected volatility. As investors see their attempts to sell neutered by these network congestion issues, this seems like a way to reduce the amount of cryptocurrencies available in the market, which would feed the descending value cycle even more. Whether or not this is the bubble popping, it's yet another foundational shock to the trust that was already achieved by these platforms and the cryptocurrency market as a whole. How this will affect market availability and demand for graphics cards and hardware is anyone's guess, but even if it does, it'll take some time until we see availability in the main and secondary channels.

MSI has recently announced two new CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) 30HX MINER Series cards the MSI CMP 30HX MINER, and MSI CMP 30HX MINER XS. These new cards borrow the coolers from the ARMOR series and VENTUS XS respectively, MSI is one of the first manufacturers to offer multiple versions of a CMP card so it will be interesting to see the differences in performance and pricing given the two cards feature identical specifications. The two cards both feature the TU116-100 GPU with 1408 cores and a base clock of 1530 MHz along with a boost clock of 1785 MHz and 6 GB GDDR6 memory. The cards also lack any display outputs as per all CMP cards and pricing or availability information is not available.

Salad Technologies is inviting PC gamers to help build the world's largest supercomputer with their idle rigs in return for digital rewards, following milestone performance metrics on its distributed computing network. The company is launching a marketplace that will lend the combined processing power of its PC gamer user base to partners' advanced computing tasks. In time, private individuals running Salad's application will compete against multimillion dollar supercomputers.

Since its founding in 2018, Salad has made "Chefs" of more than 250,000 PC gamers, leveraging the idle processing power of their hardware to validate blockchain transactions through an open-source desktop app. While away from the keyboard, Salad users share compute resources to earn rewards value for games, gift cards, and subscriptions from a library of more than 15,000 digital rewards.

A new cryptocurrency going by the name of Chia could bring about a boom in demand for HDD and SSD, which have been kept relatively untouched by the latest mining and supply constraints. However, optimistic predictions of falling prices for NAND (optimistic for consumers, that is) could prove to be erroneous. Apparently, the new cryptocurrency, which saw its whitepaper being published in February 9th and has already led to shortages of high-performance SSDs from China's Jiahe Jinwei.

The cryptocurrency was designed to be mined in SSDs and HDDs, looking to cut on electricity cost from proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and (still) Ethereum. The intention is for the cryptocurrency to have as broad an appeal as possible, by excluding the need for prohibitive investments in either ASICs (for Bitcoin) or GPUs (for Ethereum and other Dagger/Hashimoto-based calculations). It also leverages that which is most widely available and oftentimes left empty of any workload - storage space. Due to this, it's been reported that Chinese miners are already buying HDDs (4 TB through to 18 TB) and SSDs (mainly NVMe solutions) in bulk. This could prevent technologists from ushering in the current trend of falling storage pricing - if demand becomes as crazy as it has become in the GPU space.

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).

NVIDIA's recently-announced CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) products seem to already be hitting the market - at least in some parts of the world. Microless, a retailer in Dubai, listed the cryptocurrency-geared graphics card for $723 - $723 which are equivalent to some 26 MH/s, as per NVIDIA, before any optimizatons have been enacted on the clock/voltage/BIOS level, as more serious miners will undoubtedly do.

The CMP 30HX is a re-released TU116 chip (Turing, sans RT hardware), which powered the likes of the GeForce GTX 1660 Super in NVIDIA's previous generation of graphics cards. The card features a a 1,530 MHz base clock; a 1,785 MHz boost clock; alongside 6 GB of GDDR6 memory that clocks in at 14 Gbps (which actually could soon stop being enough to hold the entire workload completely in memory). Leveraging a 192-bit memory interface, the graphics card supplies a memory bandwidth of up to 336 GB/s. It's also a "headless" GPU, meaning that it has no display outputs that would only add to cost in such a specifically-geared product. It's unclear how representative the pricing from Microless actually is of NVIDIA's MSRP for the 30HX products, but considering current graphics cards' pricing worldwide, this pricing seems to be in line with GeForce offerings capable of achieving the same hash rates, so its ability to concentrate demand from miners compared to other NVIDIA mainstream, GeForce offerings depends solely on the prices that are both set by NVIDIA and practiced by retailers.

MSI recently published an official blog article advertising the cryptocurrency mining potential of their GE76 raider laptop with a mobile RTX 3080 graphics card. The official post appears to have now been removed but has been archived by the Wayback Machine. MSI acknowledges the shortage of graphics cards and proposes that miners look at purchasing their new laptops. MSI shows the earnings potential of their GE76 raider laptop running NiceHash on the Intel Core i9-10980HK processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. The mobile RTX-3080 achieved a hash rate of 52.8 MH/s running the Excavator miner with the DaggerHashimoto algorithm. This performance is slightly above the RTX 2080 Ti but falls significantly short of a desktop RTX 3080 which achieves nearly double at 95.7 MH/s. MSI also noted that they would be publishing a follow-up post with their profitability statistics however this now seems unlikely given that the original post appears to have been taken down.

Last year, we found out that a group of investors has accused NVIDIA that the company has misled its investors by reporting crypto revenue as gaming revenue numbers and making its gaming revenue seem much bigger than it is. The original lawsuit was filed in 2017 and it demanded that NVIDIA should pay one billion US Dollars to investors shall they be proven right. In 2017, cryptocurrency mining was at the same craze it is today, with people buying every possible card that exists and consumers having a hard time upgrading their PCs. Investors in NVIDIA corporation have believed that in 2017, the company has presented its cryptocurrency earning figures as a part of the gaming figures, thus giving misleading information about the company's success in the gaming market.

Today, we have information that NVIDIA has won this lawsuit. On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Haywood Gilliam has dismissed the case and ruled that investors were unable to provide any significant evidence that the company has used such practices and misled investors. By taking this case off the company, NVIDIA will not be paying one billion USD to the accusing investors and the company continues operations as normal.

Back in February, NVIDIA has announced its GPU SKUs dedicated to the cryptocurrency mining task, without any graphics outputs present on the chips. Today, we are getting information that AMD is rumored to introduce its own lineup of graphics cards dedicated to cryptocurrency mining. In the latest patch for AMD Direct Rendering Manager (DRM), a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs, we see the appearance of the Navi 12. This GPU SKU was not used for anything except Apple's Mac devices in a form of Radeon Pro 5600M GPU. However, it seems like the Navi 12 could join forces with Navi 10 GPU SKU and become a part of special "blockchain" GPUs.

Way back in November, popular hardware leaker, KOMACHI, has noted that AMD is preparing three additional Radeon SKUs called Radeon RX 5700XTB, RX 5700B, and RX 5500XTB. The "B" added to the end of each name is denoting the blockchain revision, made specifically for crypto-mining. When it comes to specifications of the upcoming mining-specific AMD GPUs, we know that both use first-generation RDNA architecture and have 2560 Stream Processors (40 Compute Units). Memory configuration for these cards remains unknown, as AMD surely won't be putting HBM2 stacks for mining like it did with Navi 12 GPU. All that remains is to wait and see what AMD announces in the coming months.

This is a big one: NVIDIA has officially announced a new family of products specifically designed to satiate the demand coming from cryptocurrency mining workloads and farms. At the same time, the company has announced that the RTX 3060 launch driver will include software limitations for cryptocurrency mining workloads specifically correlated with Ethereum mining, essentially halving the maximum theoretical hashrate that could be achieved from a purely hardware perspective. The new family of products, termed CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) series, will see its products under the HX branding, and will be available in four different tiers: 30HX, 40HX, 50HX and 90HX. These products will not have any display outputs, and therefore are not applicable for gaming scenarios.

NVIDIA's stance here is that their new product will bring some justice in the overall distribution of its GeForce graphics cards, which are marketed and meant for gaming workloads. The new cryptocurrency-geared series will be distributed by NVIDIA authorized partners in the form of ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and PC Partner (more may be added down the line). There is currently no information on what silicon actually powers these graphics cards; and of course, the success of this enterprise depends on A) the driver restrictions not being limited to the RTX 3060 graphics card - it isn't clear from NVIDIA's press release if other RTX 30-series graphics cards will see the same performance cap. Even if NVIDIA did release those drivers, however, cryptocurrency miners would just opt to, well, not update them. So it is possible that NVIDIA will release a revision of the RTX 3090, RTX 3080, RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti with silicon enhancements that will only work with the latest GeForce drivers - after allowing the channels to move all of their existing, cryptocurrency-enabled stock.

ZOTAC's official Twitter channel has posted an image that promotes the usage of its graphics cards in mining environments. Under the caption "An army of #ZOTACGAMING GPU's hungry for coin!", the company posted an image of a cryptocurrency mining farm populated with its graphics cards. The usage of a gaming hashtag in the post just adds insult to injury, with the picture showcasing at least eight of its GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge graphics cards on mining duties.

Of course, for ZOTAC, its cards being re-purposed for mining isn't a make-it-or-break-it affair: the company makes money selling its products to gamers or miners alike. However, considering how global supply of the latest gaming-branded graphics cards has been constrained ever since the initial RTX 3000-series launch, it seems that this Tweet might have been a misstep on the company. It's bound to attract crosshairs towards a seemingly unjust distribution of graphics cards in the market, with several would-be users of their gaming-branded graphics cards being left out in the cold regarding the primary purpose these graphics cards are developed and marketed for: gaming. The company has in the meantime deleted the Tweet.

Cryptocurrency has in the past few years gained a lot of popularity, mostly fueled by Bitcoin's rapid growth and its massive price increasing over time. Today, Bitcoin, the world's leading cryptocurrency, has managed to make history and broke the record of 50,000 USD. As of now, on February 17th at 07:00 UTC, Bitcoin has reached 50,452.60 USD value. What is driving the price up you must wonder? It is the market adoption of the currency. Tesla Inc. has invested 1.5 billion USD in Bitcoin as it intends to accept it as payment for its products. Next up is Mastercard, which is preparing to support cryptocurrency on its network. In addition to Mastercard, Apple is also preparing its services for cryptocurrency payments. Right now, the market cap of Bitcoin is $935,359,977,182 at the time of writing, just shy of one trillion USD.

An internet cafe in Vietnam has turned to mining cryptocurrency as the pandemic has affected their business. Internet cafes have been ordered to close to limit the spread of COVID-19 forcing the owners to find an alternative use for their computer hardware. The owner of Star Computer computer cafe in Ho Chi Minh city has announced that they will be switching to cryptocurrency mining as the "profits are higher". The cafe is owned by a Vietnamese computer store and has managed to secure a significant number of RTX 3080 GPUs for the mining operations. Star Computer internet cafe has also encouraged other internet cafe owners to contact them about setting up similar operations.

Star Computers (translation)Switching business season, Profits are higher than net business, whoever wants to do, contact me for free.

The value of Ethereum (ETH) has surged over the last few months, improving the profitability for cryptocurrency miners and increasing the demand for hardware. We have seen several stories where miners are recognized as one of the causes of desktop GPU price rises however it now seems gaming laptops will be their next target. The gaming laptops in question feature RTX 30 series GPUs most commonly the RTX 3070, these laptops come at a significant premium over a bare desktop card showing just how insane the situation has become. This will likely exacerbate the already limited supply of RTX 30 series laptops.

Cryptocurrency market capitalization has now hit over $650 Billion, and that is mainly influenced by a single, most wide-spread currency on the network - Bitcoin. The Bitcoin (BTC) is the biggest cryptocurrency available, simply because it was the first one established and well designed. In its history, Bitcoin was priced anywhere from 0.1 cents to tens of thousands of US Dollars. However, in the recent soaring, the cryptocurrency has reached its peak value since it was created. Today, at around 09:14 UTC, the cryptocurrency has reached an astonishing value of 23,441.60 USD, making it a record high value. What is driving the price up and the reason for soaring is unknown, but it is a reflection of the market capitalization of cryptocurrency and its use, so it must mean that the BTC is getting more attention than ever.

New Linux patches seem to point towards a cryptocurrency-focused graphics card from AMD. First spotted by Phoronix, the patches add descriptions for a "navi10 blockchain SKU" - it's a pretty self-describing, well, description. The device ID is reported as 0x731E, and Phoronix says that the major difference between this graphics card and the other Navi 10 offerings in the market (namely RX 5700XT and RX 5700) is the absence of Display Core Next (DCN) and Video Core Next (VCN) engines. Whether these are absent from the silicon, or simply disabled by other means is currently unclear. Their absence, however points towards cards with no graphical outputs, a lapalissian practicality for cryptocurrency-focused graphics mining products.

Phoronix estimates a release of no sooner than early 2021, considering the timing of the patch information on Linux. While the market for GPU-accelerated cryptocurrency mining isn't what it used to be (luckily), there is still a market opportunity to be taken advantage of here - while ASICs have become more commonplace, there are still many GPU-mining alternatives within the realm of crypto. A crypto-focused product might steer users away from gaming-oriented consumer products, thus easing strain on supply for AMD's upcoming RX 6000 series - especially if this Navi 10-based GPU (or should we call it a CHU - Cryptocurrency Hashing Unit?) features some voltage and power adjustments to increase power efficiency on these workloads.