Current cryptocurrency rumors suggest that Nvidia may pull the GA100 GPU from its most expensive Ampere graphics card, the Nvidia A100, and put it on a giant CMP card configured specifically for cryptocurrency mining. If this happens, it would undoubtedly create the most powerful mining GPU in the world, and probably the most expensive GPU as well.

The shiny AI-focused A100, a $10,000 graphics card, was the first Ampere GPU to see the light of day. However, such a price tag on a graphics card would inevitably limit its potential to reach the widest possible audience, and many of the GPUs that universities and research institutions were planning to buy have already been purchased.

So what is a multi-billion dollar company to do with a bunch of expensive GPUs that they can't shift, or at least can't shift now? Well, if GeForce RTX 3090 cards are already trading at twice the list price, it is not unreasonable to think that Nvidia could make a lot of money on more expensive chips, given the insatiable demand for GPUs.

The rumored new card is called the Nvidia CMP 220HX and will retail for only $3,000. However, it is likely to fetch a much higher price as miners vie for the privilege of owning a 250W card that records 210MH/s.

All of this is being chatted about by two Twitter accounts (via WCCFTech) that are constantly leaking about the potential specs of such a card, which for now are treated only as rumors. The first to speculate was kopite7kimi, followed by I_Leak_VN, who replied with some possible details.

So why would a GA100 GPU be able to provide higher ethereum hash rates than the GA102 chip in the RTX 3090? The algorithm itself thrives on memory bandwidth, and the silicon that Nvidia shipped with the A100 card included five stacks of high bandwidth memory (HBM) and ten 512-bit memory controllers (white paper PDF alert).

HBM allows the Radeon VII to be AMD's crypto hero right now, despite being one of the worst graphics card deals for gamers at launch.

This is most likely the main reason for the higher hash rate, rather than the actual core configuration itself. On the surface, the A100 and RTX 3090 as GPUs have fewer CUDA cores: the A100 version of the GA100 GPU has 6,912 CUDA cores (the full core has 8,192), while the GA102 inside GeForce's top card has 10,496 CUDA cores.

However, since the GeForce version of Ampere is intended for gaming, its core count takes into account both straight FP32 units and shared FP32/INT32 units. If an operation requires only floating-point calculations, all 128 units of each GeForce Ampere SM can be used, but if integer calculations need to be performed, only 64 INT32 units of each SM can be called.

Since Ethereum does not care so much about floating point operations, the real doubling of the number of cores does not mean anything, since cryptocurrency mining is more about integer operations. To put this in perspective, the RTX 3090 has only 5,248 INT32 units, while the A100 GPU has 6,912 INT32 units.

With these 1,664 INT32 units and 1,555 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a CMP card with the GA100 would be a mining monster. Realistically, Nvidia will never put the same 40GB of HBM2 on the card, but even if it is reduced to 20GB or even 10GB of HBM2, it can still take advantage of the enormous bandwidth.

So how will this affect the GPU market, as gamers will have a better chance of actually buying a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti when it is released, while the miners will focus on CMP 220HX cards Will this be the case? I don't think so. It is also unlikely that Nvidia will be able to produce enough products to meet the demand of gamers and minorities.

After all, it would only boost Nvidia's bottom line again, which is a wise move if you have a large number of spare A100 chips, Jen-Hsun.