Another day and another news coming from the NVIDIA home. With the growing demand for GPUs, many of which are being swallowed up by cryptocurrency miners, the GPU manufacturer has announced a new product line that will serve only the mining of Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. The company is also restricting the capacity of the next RTX 3060 by reducing the hash rate or mining efficiency by about 50%.
“With the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25, we are taking an important step to help ensure that GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of players,” said NVIDIA in a post. Basically, the company designed the software drivers for the RTX 3060 so that it can detect whether the card is being used for mining, thus limiting overall capacity. This appears to be a necessary step, as players around the world are dealing with limited stocks or extremely high prices quoted by online retailers and money changers.
Hi Ryan. It is not just a driver thing. There is a secure handshake between the driver, the silicon RTX 3060 and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter.
– Bryan Del Rizzo (@bdelrizzo) February 19, 2021
CMP or Cryptocurrency Mining Processor is the newest product that NVIDIA will offer to specifically address Ethereum mining needs. CMPs will be sold through authorized partners, including Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit and more. They will be optimized to provide the best mining performance with a completely different set of specifications. For example, CMP cards would not include video outputs, allowing them to be more densely compressed and to have a lower core peak voltage and frequency. Therefore, making them would not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs to players, although cryptocurrencies can swallow stocks for both.
There are a variety of models in the series, including the NVIDIA CMP 30HX processor that would come with an Ethereum hash rate of 26MHps, nominal power of 125W, an 8-pin power connector and 6GB of RAM. The NVIDIA CMP 40HX processor offers an Ethereum hash rate of 36MHps, nominal power of 185W, an 8-pin power connector and 8GB of RAM. The NVIDIA CMP 50HX processor will come with 45MHps of Ethereum hash rate, nominal power of 250W, 2 × 8 pin power connectors and 10 GB of RAM. And lastly, the NVIDIA CMP 90HX processor will come with an Ethereum hash rate of 86MHps, nominal power of 320W, 2 × 8-pin power connectors and 10 GB of RAM. The CMP 30HX and CMP 40HX will be available in the first quarter of 2021, while the CMP 50HX and NVIDIA CMP 90HX will be available in the second quarter of this year.
NVIDIA is taking this step primarily as an attempt to save the GeForce RTX 3060 that will hit stores on February 25. The company has faced monumental demands for its current line of RTX 30 series cards, including the RTX 3070, RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. We heard reports of money changers deploying bots to automatically buy GPUs in bulk to sell them at extremely high prices on eBay.
While the company suggests that the drivers of the RTX 3060 decrease the mining capacity of the GPU, Bryan Del Rizzo, Global Director of Public Relations at NVIDIA gave some more information. According to Mr. Rizz, there will be a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 chip and the BIOS (firmware) that will prevent the removal of the hash rate limiter. This means that it will not be possible to use an earlier version of the driver to restore the originally intended hash rate. We do not yet have confirmation from NVIDIA whether it would bring a similar update to the existing line of RTX cards to balance the supply and demand of GPUs worldwide.
A few days ago, NVIDIA announced its plans to launch the stock of its older GPUs – the GTX 1050 Ti and the mid-range RTX 2060 as another measure to control the growing demands of the GPU market. Certain retailers in Europe were recently seen listing the next GeForce RTX 3060 for more than double the original $ 329 cost. If you are looking for one of the new NVIDIA RTX 30 series graphics cards, keep an eye on our replacement guide .