Jensen Huang, President and CEO of Nvidia, will speak at the company’s event at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 6, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Nvidia announced on Thursday that it is releasing a new series of semiconductors, specifically for the miner, the second largest digital cryptocurrency.
The new chip type is called CMP, or Cryptocurrency Mining Processor. The first cards will be sold in March, an Nvidia spokesman said.
Ether mining is a process in which computers solve complex math programs to make the Ethereum cryptocurrency network work. In return, miners get ether, the digital coin used on the Ethereum network. Ether reached a record high on Thursday, hitting more than 1609% to date.
Ether’s mining algorithms work best on graphics cards, this is the kind of chip Nvidia is known for. Miners often buy multiple graphics cards and place them in one machine to maximize their returns.
Last fall, Nvidia released a new series of graphics cards marketed to PC gamers that consistently sold out. The semiconductor industry also has a shortage.
Thursday’s announcement suggests that at least some of the demand for Nvidia chips comes from cryptocurrency miners, not just gamers.
“CMP products – which do not do graphics – are sold by authorized partners and optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency, “Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at Nvidia, wrote in a blog post.
Nvidia has said that the latest chip in its graphics card range, the RTX 3060, will be adapted when it is released later this year so that it will not exploit ether effectively. The cards already sold, such as the RTX 3070 or RTX 3080, do not have the same limitations, the Nvidia representative said.
“RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific features of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and to limit the hash rate, or mining efficiency, by about 50 percent,” Nvidia said in a blog post .
Graphics cards were first developed to enable high-definition computer games, but they are becoming increasingly necessary for new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Their utility in ether mining is also not new – in 2017, Nvidia said it earned hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter selling chips to cryptocurrency miners.
“Cryptocurrency and blockchain are here to stay. The market demand for them is going to grow and over time it will become quite large,” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said in 2017.
PC games are also growing strongly. According to an estimate by the NPD group, consumer spending on computer game hardware increased by 62% in 2020. A graphics card is often the most expensive part of a gaming computer.