Nvidia says it will not negate the Ethereum mining performance of existing GPUs

This morning, Nvidia announced that it would artificially reduce the performance of its next $ 329 GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card when it comes to a specific task: Ethereum cryptocurrency mining. As strange as this news may seem, it was music to the ears of some players – who have been trying and failing to get their hands on video cards for months due to the great shortage of GPU, and blaming the miners for part of it.

You may be wondering: what does this mean for other GPUs? Nvidia is not talking about its plans for future graphics cards yet, but the company says The Verge (in no uncertain terms) that it will not override existing GPUs. “We are not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold,” said a spokesman.

I was also a little skeptical that the company’s new batch of Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) cards, marketed as an alternative to these miners, would mean that players could purchase an RTX 3060 as a result. If Nvidia is shifting its already limited production capacity from GPUs to CMPs, doesn’t that mean less gaming GPUs to start with? There is a global shortage of semiconductors, you know.

Image: Nvidia

But Nvidia strongly suggests that the new CMPs will not affect the ability to produce GeForce game cards. “The chips used for CMP did not meet GeForce specifications and did not affect GeForce’s overall capacity or availability,” replied a spokesman by email.

Although Nvidia does not confirm that it is talking about binning – the process by which chip makers like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and others take chips that are not 100 percent operational due to occasional manufacturing defects and sell them as slower or less share resources instead – the statement certainly sounds something like this.

But it could also be that they are completely different. The photo you see above the Nvidia CMP looks nothing like 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 doesn’t look much like the previous generation Turing desktop chips from Nvidia. Perhaps the CMP is simply a GPU design that has not been made public.

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

Finally, you may be asking yourself: why just nerf mining Ethereum, when other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have also seen incredible gains? Here is Nvidia’s complete answer:

Ethereum has the highest global mining yield for any GPU mineable currency at the moment and is therefore probably the main driver of demand for GPUs in mining. Other algorithms do not contribute significantly to the GPU demand and this cannot change quickly due to the network effects in a given cryptocurrency. The rate limiter applies to anything that uses Dagger Hashimoto or algorithms like Ethash.

We are looking forward to seeing if Nvidia can make the $ 329 GeForce RTX 3060 easier to buy than previous GPUs when it launched on February 25 at 12pm ET. After months of 24-hour hunting, I finally managed to get a 3060 Ti a few weeks ago – I hope you don’t have to go that far.