With the launch of the Nvidia RTX 3060 next week, the green team is taking steps to reduce the desirability of new mainstream GPUs for cryptocurrency mining Nvidia considers this "an important step" and Matt Wuebbling said so in a blog post published today on Nvidia's site.

Interest in cryptocurrency mining is once again growing significantly as Bitcoin surges and rises. However, peripheral altcoins like Ethereum can be mined more efficiently with a decent graphics chip. And as Bitcoin's price has risen, so has its value.

There have been numerous reports of large crypto-mining "farms" springing up in Internet cafes, with many hard-to-find RTX 30-series graphics cards being pushed in and out of the hands of PC gamers. the Nvidia RTX 3080 itself has been used in the Ethereum hash rate (a measure of mining performance) of 86 MH/s, while the older RTX 2080 Ti was around 50-60 MH/s.

The 70-plus percent improvement in crypto mining at a much lower cost made Ampere GPUs highly desirable. And the concern was whether more affordable cards based on the same architecture could be equally effective when daisy chained together in a large mining setup.

This made the RTX 3060's launch potentially particularly risky, as inventory was already severely limited at the time of the GPU's launch.

However, with the launch of its new mainstream Ampere GPUs, Nvidia announced a new driver that can "detect certain attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit the hash rate, and thus the efficiency of cryptocurrency mining, by about 50%." Nvidia has also announced a new driver that can "detect certain attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm and limit its hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by about 50%. This is quite a hack that Nvidia is dropping into its new GeForce driver.

It seems fairly unlikely that enterprising coders will not find a workaround or patch. After all, where there is money, there is a way. It also does not affect older Ampere GPUs, since miners only use older drivers that do not block more than Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti cards.

But to counter this and provide something better for cryptocurrency miners, Nvidia today announced a cryptocurrency mining processor (Nvidia CMP). [This is a family of products designed for professional miners and sold through certified partners; CMP cards optimize performance and efficiency and reduce peak voltage and frequency levels. [Nvidia promises that they "do not meet the specifications required for GeForce GPUs and, therefore, do not affect the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers."

This means that resale value will also be limited, so the only people who will really be interested in CMP products are professionals, not amateurs who support cryptocurrency gambling with the possibility of shipping used old mining cards on Ebay if the market hits bottom again. As in the previous issue.

The first CMP cards will be available by the end of March, with more powerful options expected later in Q2.

The CMP chips still appear to be based on the Ampere architecture, as some of the specs announced by Nvidia are very similar to some cards already announced by the Green Team. For example, the Nvidia CMP 90HX looks exactly like the RTX 3080 with the same hash rate, same power rating, and same 10GB memory configuration.

However, this is the top-of-the-line model, and the CMP 30HX, 40HX, and 50HX cards are all below the Etherium hash rate of the RTX 3060 Ti, making it one of the later models.

These new CMP cards need to be plentiful and inexpensive so that they can tempt miners from dropping yet more dollars on any RTX 3070 they can get their hands on, and because someone needs to manufacture that silicon, how Nvidia guarantee that the availability of GeForce will not be affected.

Potentially, the CMP card would have a failed GPU that could not actually perform at the level required for an actual graphics card, which would mean that it would contain a lot of redundant silicon. Perhaps this could be a whole new product line manufactured with GeForce chips in a factory that no one knows about.

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