NVIDIA throttles mining power of the GeForce graphics cards
The announced CMP chip from NVIDIA, specializing in mining, should leave some pressure from the graphics cards market.
Because the miners bought almost all models of the RTX 3060 away from the gamers, Nvidia is now reducing the hashrate of the small 30-series graphics cards. At the same time, the company brings out a graphics card especially for miners. Can bring the hoped -for relief to the gamers?
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Computer players who have flirted with a new graphics card in the past few months had to accept a lot of frustration. Because the prices for graphics cards have literally exploded; It is not uncommon for new, powerful models with a surcharge of 75 percent or more to the manufacturer’s UVP, but almost normality.
The new GeForce RTX series from Nvidia, starting with a 30 of the model specification, was most affected. The 3090 as an extremely expensive noble model, the 3080 as a performance bearer, the 3070 as a slightly weaker variant, and the 3060 as a cheap alternative. The 3060 should relieve the gamers in a double-overheated market by the lockdown and the crypto rally. But of all people, it was so well suited for mining that the miners bought the cards from the factories with a surcharge, so that they were only in exceptional cases and of course massively overpriced on the European market for hardware.
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Now Nvidia is trying to counteract. “We are gamers, through and through”, the company clarifies. “We are enthusiastic about new features in games, new architectures, new games and new technology. We design the GeForce GPUs for gamers!“But because the GPUs are programmable, users constantly discover new applications for you, such as weather simulations, gene sequencing, deep learning or robotics. Since graphics cards – i.e. GPUS – are able to carry out special, highly sequenced tasks more energy -fed than the main processors (CPUs), they are increasingly used in supercomputing. For example, Juwels, the recent newcomer in Europe’s largest center for supercomputers, the Jülich research center, consists of more than 3.700 graphics chips from Nvidia.
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However, the strongest non-gaming demand comes from the crypto miners, especially Ethereum-Miner. Nvidia tries this with the publication of the Geforce RTX 3060 on 25. February to slow down. The RTX 3060 has been on the market for one to two months, but probably not yet as a GeForce model. NVIDIA now intentionally makes this graphics card unattractive for Miner by the software drivers recognizing the Ethereum Hashing algorithm and reducing the hashrate by about 50 percent.
This makes sense, explains Nvidia. “Our GeForce RTX GPUS introduce new technologies-such as real-time ray tracing, the DLSS-KI accelerated high scaling of the resolution … and much more-which are tailored to satisfy the needs of gamers.“But so that the miners do not completely bump, Nvidia announces the CMP series, which stands for“ Cryptocurrency Mining Processor ”-a graphics card made for professional miners. This has no graphic outputs, but better ventilation, so that mining rigs can be equipped more closely. The CMP also have a deeper peak voltage and frequency, which improves the energy efficiency of the mining.
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“With CMP, miners can form the most efficient data centers while leaving the GeForce RTX GPUs to the players,” Nvidia summarizes the new strategy. However, this should not change the fundamental problem that the gamers will continue to argue in the future with supercomputers and miners for the scarce resource of the GPU chips.