Nvidia says it will not degrade Ethereum mining performance of existing GPUs

This morning, Nvidia announced that it will artificially reduce the performance of its upcoming $ 329 GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card when it comes to one specific task: Ethereum cryptocurrency mining. Strange as the news may sound, it was music in the ears of some gamers – who had been trying for months and failed to get hold of graphics cards due to the huge shortage of GPUs, and blamed the miners for it.

You may ask yourself: what does this mean? other GPUs? Nvidia is not yet talking about its plans for a future graphics card, but the company says The edge (in no ambiguous terms) that it will not weaken the existing GPUs. “We do not limit the performance of GPUs already sold,” said a spokesman.

I was also a little skeptical that the company’s new series of Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) cards, marketed as an alternative to the miners, would mean that players could actually buy an RTX 3060. If Nvidia diverts its already limited production capacity from GPUs to CMPs, does that not mean having fewer gaming GPUs in the beginning? There is a worldwide shortage of semiconductors, you know.

Nvidia’s new Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP).
Image: Nvidia

But Nvidia strongly suggests that the new CMPs do not affect the ability to produce GeForce playing cards. “The chips used for CMP could not meet GeForce’s specifications and have no effect on total GeForce capacity or availability,” a spokesman replied by email.

Although Nvidia would not confirm that it is talking about binning, the process by which chip makers such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia and other chips are taken that are not 100 percent operational due to occasional manufacturing defects, and sell as slower or less functional parts instead – the statement definitely sounds like something.

But it could also be that they are completely different. The photo you see above of Nvidia’s CMP does not look like anything the layout of Nvidia’s GA102 used in the Ampere-based RTX 3080 and 3090, or the GA104 used in the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. It also does not look much like Nvidia’s previous Turing desktop chips. Maybe the CMP is just a GPU design that is not public.

If so, it’s vaguely possible that Nvidia has a stock of older chips it’s using. After all, the company is bringing back the GTX 1050 Ti from 2016, and it is doubtful whether Nvidia has switched one of the RTX 30 series factories to make that happen. But without knowing what the CMP really is is, your guess is as good as ours.

Lastly, you may be wondering: why only Ethereum mining nerf, when other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin also had incredible profits? Here is Nvidia’s full answer:

Ethereum currently has the highest mining yield for any GPU minable currency and is therefore probably the most important driver for GPUs in mining. Other algorithms do not contribute significantly to the demand for GPU and it can not change quickly due to network effects within a given cryptocurrency. The tariff limitation applies to anything Dagger Hashimoto or Ethash-like algorithms use.

We look forward to seeing if Nvidia can buy the GeForce RTX 3060 $ 329 more easily than previous GPUs when it launches on February 25th at 12:00 ET. After months of hunting around the clock, I finally got a 3060 Ti a few weeks back – here’s the hope that you do not have to go that far.

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