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AMD, Nvidia preparing stripped down Bitcoin mining GPUs

by Mark Tyson on 6 June 2017, 15:01

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Bitcoin, the most well known and successful cryptocurrency, has reached new highs today. As many a financial and tech site is reporting, 1BTC has broke past being worth $2,900+ (or £2,280+) for the first time ever. That's almost triple the value it held just a few weeks ago, it was under the $1,000 level for several days this March.

According to industry reports, people are still buying up graphics cards aimed at the gaming market to mine cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. Taiwan's DigiTimes suggests that such activity is helping the graphics card market "enjoy strong sales in the second quarter despite the quarter being the traditional slow season". However it's got negative effects too, preventing the supply of new, long awaited products to the traditional market of PC gamers and enthusiasts and thus leaving them disappointed.

The Bitcoin mining craze had a similar effect on the PC graphics card market back in 2013. Things cooled down for a while as Bitcoin values fell sharply in early 2014, using GPUs become uneconomical for many, and purpose built ASIC systems came to the fore. Now it looks like GPU mining must be increasingly economically viable and worthwhile.

In the face of PC graphics card shortages what are AMD and Nvidia going to do for their long-term loyal PC graphics card customers? DigiTimes says both firms are planning to release stripped down cards aimed at cryptominers. The cards will have reduced hardware specifications - in areas that are of no importance to cryptocurrency mining and will therefore be cheaper. However it also means AMD, Nvidia and partners won't find them flooding the second hand graphics card market and inflicting boom/bust upon the industry.

Giving more specifics, AMD will be releasing Bitcoin-mining graphics cards based upon a redesign of its entry-level 400 series graphics, and Nvidia plans to release GeForce GTX 1060-100 GPUs for mining, says DigiTimes. These products will lack monitor connector ports and carry just 90 day warranties, asserts the source, but will make up for that with a reduced purchase price.

At Computex we saw ASRock jumping on the Bitcoin mining train with its 13x PCIe slot equipped H110 Pro BTC+ motherboard, as pictured above.



HEXUS Forums :: 13 Comments

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Such a meteoric rise in Bitcoin value is, I suspect, highly unlikely to be sustainable and anyone investing a lot of money to start mining now, has probably missed the boat and liable to find themselves with a white elephant and a big hole in their bank account.
As someone with a 480 8gb that sits mainly unused (due to a 2 month old baby) I do keep wondering about whether it is worth mining but then I remember electricty prices in the UK are quite high and assume it isn't? Does anyone know better?
cheesemp
As someone with a 480 8gb that sits mainly unused (due to a 2 month old baby) I do keep wondering about whether it is worth mining but then I remember electricty prices in the UK are quite high and assume it isn't? Does anyone know better?

About 4.8 using Ethereum?
http://whattomine.com/coins
That's entering one 480 and $0.20 per kWh. Might be a bit more if their calculations are without any underclocking/undervolting.
The complexity of mining is way WAY past what a home user can do, even with the current value. Hell you might as well just buy some and sell em a few days later.

As so many East Asian markets are legitimising em, the risk of the bubble bursting is mitigated; there are fewer sole-owners who have the power to sway the market; as someone dumps a load of em, they're just as quickly bought up

I used to trade them back in 2012/2013, missus passed so took a break, got back into it in November when they were £563. It's ridiculous how high the demand is for em
cheesemp
I do keep wondering about whether it is worth mining but then I remember electricty prices in the UK are quite high and assume it isn't?

It's not just the electricity you have to factor in, some of the programs used for mining are quite bandwidth intensive.