Last month HEXUS reported on the green team's announcement of the Nvidia CMP HX processors – designed to appeal to cryptocurrency miners and reduce demand on the GeForce line, which is designed and meant for PC gamers. Later in the month we learnt that three of the four CMP HX SKUs would be created using Turing GPUs, a thoughtful decision meaning that (along with the RTX 3060 crypto perf-nerf) more Ampere GPUs would find their way to their intended market.
There have been previous rumours of AMD following a similar cypto-purposed GPU path and the rumours have gained some weight recently, as Linux-centric site Phoronix reports that the newest AMD GPU kernel driver references what appear to be head-less crypto mining graphics cards.
In particular, Phoronix notes that the new driver file makes reference to a Navi 12 SKU which lacks video-out support. This looks like further background work to implement support for the previously indicated release of 'Navi 10 Blockchain cards' which have disabled DCN (Display Core Next) and VCN (Video Core Next) components. The source reckons it is reasonable to expect AMD to come out with its Navi 1X crypto-mining SKUs shortly, for similar reasons to why Nvidia acted.
VideoCardz has some more background concerning what specs these upcoming AMD Crypto-mining cards might have. It says that Navi 12 was a GPU used exclusively by some Apple Mac machines. In Apple's systems the configuration had 2,560 Stream Processors (40 Compute Units) and 8GB of HBM2 memory. This could be reworked to play nicely with GDDR6.
