Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ: AMD) is taking a position diametrically opposed to Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) about placing restrictions on the use of its gaming graphics cards for cryptocurrency mining, reported PC Gamer.
What happened: AMD reportedly confirmed that it would not block any workloads on its Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics processing units.
“We are not going to block any workloads, not just mining,” said Nish Neelalojanan, product manager at AMD, according to PC Gamer.
“Firstly, RDNA was designed from the beginning for games and RDNA 2 duplicates itself in that. And what I mean by that is that Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width have been carefully chosen to achieve a very specific game hit rate. “
Neelalojanan, however, added a warning that mining enjoys or scales with greater bandwidth and bus width, which means that there will be limitations caused by an “architectural level” for it.
Why does it matter: While Nvidia’s 24 GB GeForce RTX 3090 GPU can mine Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETHER) at up to 120 MH / s, state-of-the-art RDNA 2 cards based on AMD’s Navi 21 chip can manage 58-64 MH / s, noted PC Gamer. ETH was traded 1.61% down to $ 1,776.73 at the time of this publication.
AMD’s GPU drivers are based on Linux and are all open source, which raises the question of whether the company could implement a mining block in the first place.
Last week, Nvidia said it had inadvertently unlocked ETH mining performance after updating its drivers to the RTX 3060.
Nvidia has tried to discourage the use of its RTX 3060 GPUs through drivers before, so that they are 50% less efficient in mining ETH.
The chipmaker estimates that between $ 100 million and $ 300 million of its fourth quarter revenue came from ETH miners.
Nvidia launched a cryptocurrency mining processor, which it said would help mining companies build “the most efficient data centers while preserving GeForce RTX GPUs for players”, but has received criticism for its price.
Share price: AMD shares closed up 1.2% at $ 79.06 on Friday and fell 0.3% on the floor. On the same day, Nvidia’s shares closed 0.97% up to $ 513.83 in the regular session and fell 0.13% in the trading session.
Read below: Ethereum, Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies that you can ‘create’ using your laptop
Daniel Foster photo on Flickr
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