OpenSea, one of the most widely recognized NFT markets in the cryptocurrency world, has slammed into a wall of absence. Namely, the absence of volume: the decentralized marketplace has seen a 99% drop on NFT trading volume in merely 90 days. From its high of $405.75 million on May 1, transactions on Non- Fungible Tokens have petered out to just $5 million throughout the entire month of August.

Reduced volume connects to reduced demand, which has in turn led to reducing floor prices (the lowest available price for a given NFT) for even the most recognized collections: the cheapest Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT can now be had for 72.5 ETH ($104,634 at time of writing). That's a 53% reduction in its ETH price (153.7 ETH) from May 1st. But the drop is even more massive when one takes into account the devaluation of Ethereum itself: On May 1st, the 153.7 ETH asking price for the NFT equaled $434,048 (price has thus tumbled by 76% on a dollar basis). CryptoPunks, another popular Ethereum-based NFT collection, has seen its floor price decline by a less drastic 20%.

Pricing for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards has been evolving positively for the last seven months, experiencing a downtrend that has brought street prices closer to the actual MSRP on the best graphics cards. According to 3D Center's price analysis of the Austrian and German markets, GPU pricing for both AMD and NVIDIA's latest GPUs have reached historical lows - although these lows are still at a premium over MSRP. Anyone looking to buy an AMD graphics card is now looking at an average markup of 12% over MSRP, while NVIDIA cards seem to be holding their inflated values slightly better, and still stand at 119% of MSRP.

The price action comes on the back of months of increasing supply at retailers, alongside reduced demand from Ethereum miners due to falling ETH prices ($2,912.54 at time of writing) and the expectation for Ethereum's passage to Proof of Stake (PoS) through The Merge, which is still slated for later this year. It's also likely that most customers who still haven't bought into the latest generation of GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are waiting for the release of Intel's competing Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs, not to mention AMD's mid-year RX 6*50 refresh and NVIDIA's next-generation graphics solutions. An exploding ETH price might bring GPU prices back up again; but until then, and at the rate prices are seemingly (at least locally) falling, it seems that consumers might finally be able to purchase GPUs at MSRP sometime after May.

Remember that initial Phantom Gaming Evo NFT push from AsRock? It seems that the company was testing the waters amongst its user base - and the industry at large. The company is now seemingly doubling down on NFTs, but in a creative way. The company's latest "Unity Makes Strength: Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition" campaign is bringing community-based design as input towards the final production look of its upcoming Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition motherboard. The final design will then be minted into an NFT.

The company will be accepting submissions for motherboard designs around the motherboard, with users being called to paint it (the canvas is subdivided into 4,309 pixels) at their leisure. Then, AsRock will be taking five random designs among the submissions, and compare them on a per-pixel basis. The dominant color will then be averaged among the designs, and will become the final pixel. The designs can be submitted via AsRock's site from March 7th through March 26th, with participants receiving a sweepstakes code upon submission. Every entrant will be eligible to win the NFT associated with the motherboard's final design, but additional prizes will be offered on day one, 10, and 20 of the campaign. The winner is likely to hold a pretty valuable NFT by the end of it all; ASRock sold the initial allocation of 30 Phantom Gaming Evo NFTs on January 28 th for 0.1 ETH (~$250 at the time) each. With the Z690 PG Riptide NFT Edition being a one-off, however, it's likely it'll fetch for much higher in secondary markets.

BIOSTAR today, announces the iMiner A588X8D2 pre-built mining system. Designed and pre-assembled by BIOSTAR, the new iMiner A588X8D2 system brings plug and play mining capability to the next level. Packed with blockchain-grade high-end hardware, the iMiner A588X8D2 comes with 8 AMD RX580 graphic cards that dish out an ETH hash rate of 232 MH/s (±5%). Powered by Intel's G4900 processor and an 8 Gb DDR4 ram, the system can run Windows, Linux, or HiveOS.

The iMiner A588X8D2 system supports most major cryptocurrencies, such as ETH, ETC, RVN, ERG, Etc, further opening up a viable path for even inexperienced users to start a crypto mining operation without all the hassles of sorting out and assembling the hardware. Furthermore, BIOSTAR guarantees availability in large quantities for any interested parties. It is a great opportunity for mining enthusiasts and professionals to get their hands on professionally assembled mining equipment in bulk.

The leading global motherboard, graphics card, and mini PC manufacturer, ASRock, today announces to join the era of metaverse and support the designer and creator community. ASRock issues the first non-fungible token (NFT), Phantom Gaming EVO on OpenSea, the world's first and largest NFT marketplace. ASRock Phantom Gaming EVO is a crypto art, a short footage of the evolution Phantom Gaming logo. ASRock plans to release 100 pieces of Phantom Gaming EVO. The first 30 pieces are sold on January 28th and priced at 0.1 ETH each.

As digital experiences continue to evolve and attract increasing amounts of people's attention, the launch of the Phantom Gaming EVO leads ASRock to embrace the era of the metaverse. By leveraging the new technology and design, the NFT delivers the next generation collectibles for preservation. This helps ASRock to serve and connect the community closely and extend the digital footprint to the new stage.

XFX started selling the AMD BC-160 cryptocurrency mining card based on the AMD "Navi 12" silicon. The card is available on AliExpress for $2,000. The "Navi 12," if you recall, is an MCM mobile GPU that AMD developed exclusively for the 2019 MacBook Pro. It combined an RDNA-based GPU die with up to 16 GB of HBM2 across a 2048-bit wide interface. Built on the 7 nm node, the GPU die of "Navi 12" on the BC-160 is configured with 36 compute units (2,304 stream processors), and 8 GB of HBM2 across the full 2048-bit memory bus.

The card uses a blower-type cooling solution, and is rated with 150 W of typical board power, with a claimed 69.5 Mh/s (ETH). Drivers are provided for Linux, and mining software supported include Team Red Miner and Phoenix Miner. The card features a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interface, its driver supports systems with up to 12 of these installed. A marketing slide sheds light on the nomenclature AMD is using for its mining cards. The "BC" in BC-160 represents "blockchain compute," the "1" stands for generation, in this case, first generation; and "60" represents hashrate-class with ETH.

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.

Millions of bytes have been written regarding the current GPU market conditions already, which pairs strained logistics channels due to COVID-19 with increased quarantine-fueled demand by gamers - while also throwing in semiconductor manufacturing woes, miners, and scalpers. All in all, it seems that miners and scalpers managed to get their hands on roughly 25% (around 700,000) of distributed current-gen graphics cards during Q1 2021 which, for some reason, seems much lower than the general perception on their impact on this market.

With that said, Reddit user @gregable aggregated daily pricing for GPUs on Ebay and then calculated the GPU's $/hashrate for Ethereum mining. With hashrates remaining steady for graphics cards, this effectively establishes a price trend for GPUs. The news are good, for once: prices are falling, with the average $ cost per MH falling from $26 on May 16th down to $20 as of yesterday. The move is supported mostly by price drops on high hash-rate graphics cards such as the RTX 3090 (a 32% price drop during this period) and RTX 3080/RTX 3070 graphics cards (which dropped by 25%).

TrendForce's latest investigations find considerable discrepancy between prices for graphics DRAM products in the contract market and in the spot market. Quotes for graphics DRAM products continue to rise in the contract market as the severe undersupply situation persists. Furthermore, the supply fulfillment rates for orders from some medium- and small-size clients have been hovering around 30%. This undersupply situation is expected to persist through 3Q21, during which graphics DRAM contract prices are expected to rise by 8-13% QoQ. Regarding the spot market, on the other hand, the value of ETH experienced continued uptrend from the start of 2021 until May, thereby driving up the demand for graphics cards, regardless of them belonging to the newer or older series. At the height of the graphics card boom, spot prices of graphics DRAM products were up to 200% higher than contract prices. Demand from miners for graphics cards are expected to be relatively muted before cryptocurrencies return to their previous bullish trends, and the gap between the spot and contract prices of graphics DRAM products will likely narrow in 3Q21 as a result.

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.

Availability for NVIDIA and AMD's latest graphics cards is dire, to say the least; the average consumer finds their stocks to be spotty, at best, with available cards quickly dropping into oblivion. Scalpers and their associates are part of the problem, as is already well-known; however, another element to this same problem - at least, when it comes to numerous graphics cards finding their way to the same consumers, instead of being available for others - is mining. Because while we are definitely not facing the same shortages as we were back in the day where everyone and their mother wanted to get into mining using our tried and true graphics cards, mining farms are still a reality, and they are making use of NVIDIA (and AMD's) latest graphics cards as well.

Case in point, a mining farm running as many as 78 PNY RTX 3080 graphics cards has surfaced in Las Vegas. This 78-card mining farm was apparently put together with a $100,000 budget (around $1,199 per card, not considering other installation costs). For that money, the mining farm should be capable of around 6,474 MH/s (83 MH/s per RTX 3080), which amounts to a monthly Ethereum production of around 17.3 ETH per month (pricing fluctuates, so we won't give an estimation on dollar value for each ETH). Associated electricity running costs with such a system, including cooling, should pan out around 23.4 kW (with an estimated 300 W of power for each card) at $8.34 per Kw.

Alleged mining benchmarks of NVIDIA's upcoming RTX 3090 graphics card have leaked, and the scenario looks great for non-mining usages. The RTX 3090 is being quoted as achieving 120 MH/s on the ubiquitous Dagger-Hashimoto ETHash protocol. That number in itself is impressive - but not when one considers the cards' 350 W board power. granted, a 100% PL isn't the best scenario for mining - and one would expect no knowledgeable miners to use their graphics cards on the NVIDIA-shipped power-curve spot their graphics cards come in at (nor AMD cards, mind you).

The RTX 3080 may be a better example, as there have been more numerous benchmarks done on that particular GPU. It strikes the best balance in performance and power at around 65% PL (210 W), where it achieves 79.8 MH/s. However, previus-gen AMD RX 5700 XT graphics cards have been shown around 50 MH/s whilst consuming only 110 W (with underclocking and undervoltage), which, paired with that particular graphics card's pricing, makes it a much, much better bet for mining efficiency and return on investment. The point is this: reports of miners gobbling up RTX 3000 series stock are, at least for now, apparently unfounded. And this may mean us regular users of graphics cards can rest assured that we won't have to deal with miner-induced shortages. At least until AMD's Navi flounders (eh) to shore.

Today the Hot Chips program committee officially announced the August conference line-up, posted to hotchips.org. For this first-ever live-streamed Hot Chips Symposium, the program is better than ever!

In a session on deep learning training for data centers, we have a mix of talks from the internet giant Google showcasing their TPUv2 and TPUv3, and a talk from startup Cerebras on their 2nd gen wafer-scale AI solution, as well as ETH Zurich's 4096-core RISC-V based AI chip. And in deep learning inference, we have talks from several of China's biggest AI infrastructure companies: Baidu, Alibaba, and SenseTime. We also have some new startups that will showcase their interesting solutions—LightMatter talking about its optical computing solution, and TensTorrent giving a first-look at its new architecture for AI.

Cryptocurrency prices continue their downward slide making them no longer viable to mine on GPUs. The value of Ethereum has dropped to USD 256, down from its historic high of $1,250 this January. Bitcoin fell to below $6,000 Wednesday, way down from its late-2017 high of $19,000. A 79 percent devaluation isn't the worst of Ethereum's problems. The currency is facing stiff inflation from conversions to other cryptocurrencies or the Dollar. At its peak, ETH held 32 percent of all cryptocurrency market cap, beaten only by BTC at 39 percent. Now ETH only makes 14 percent.

INNO3D, a leading manufacturer of awesome high-end multimedia components and various innovations enriching your life, introduces its new P104-100 Crypto-Mining Accelerator. The new range will be available in TWIN X2 edition. The P104-100 has been designed with no less than 40% more mining power than its predecessor allowing the miner to enhance ETH, ZEC, etc. number crunching to levels, that have never been seen before. The freshly forged radical comes packed with 11 Gbps GDDR5X memory, and 4GB memory for optimizing cryptocurrency calculations. By deploying the INNO3D P104-100, miners now enjoy the ultimate power and utilize best-in-class hash rate today.

Hold on to your ETH hats: you will still be able to cash in on the ETH mining craze for a while. However, you should look towards your 3 GB and 4 GB graphics cards with a slight distrust, for reasons that you should know, anyway, since you have surely studied your mining cryptocurrency of choice. Examples are the GTX 1060 3 GB, or one of those shiny new 4 GB RX 480 / RX 580 which are going at ridiculously premium prices right now. And as a side note, don't you love the mechanisms of pricing and demand?

The problem here stems from ETH's own design for its current PoW (Proof of Work) implementation (which is what allows you to mine the currency at all.) In a bid to make ETH mining unwieldy for the specialized silicon that brought Bitcoin difficulty through the roof, ETH implements a large size data set for your GPU to work with as you mine, which is stored in your GPU's memory (through the DAG, which stands for Directed Acyclic Graph). This is one of the essential differences between Bitcoin mining and Ethereum mining, in that Ethereum mining was designed to be memory-intensive, so as to prevent usage of ASICs and other specialized hardware. As a side-note, this also helps (at least theoretically) in ETH's decentralization, which Bitcoin sees more at risk because of the inherent centralization that results from the higher hardware costs associated with its mining.