The latest rumor is that a brand new Nvidia cryptocurrency mining processor is on the way that will support a hash rate of 164 MH/s for Ethereum mining. If you are not familiar with cryptocurrency mining hash rates, you will know that this is one heck of a card, considering that the GeForce RTX 3090 is in the 120-130 MH/s range. It's wild.

It's called the 170HX, has 4,480 CUDA cores, and runs at 250W, says Twitter leaker 9550Pro. The secret is in the choice of memory, which can outperform cards more powerful than the 350W RTX 3090. The reported card has only 8GB of memory, but that 8GB is made up of HBM2e, where HBM literally means High Bandwidth Memory.

Ethernet is memory bandwidth oriented by design; GPUs tend to have a lot of memory bandwidth, but even the latest gaming graphics cards with GDDR6X VRAM, with professional accelerators built around HBM memory It cannot match the bandwidth offered; there have been a few gaming cards with HBM2 memory, such as AMD's Vega and Radeon VII, but they fell flat at the time. Interestingly, HBM2 has since taken on a second life in the mining arena.

In particular, HBM2e is the most bandwidth-savvy design, with each chip offering up to 410 GB/s. GDDR6X is similarly ultra-bandwidthy but also delivers 84 GB/s.

If this CMP chip does make it to market, it will likely use Nvidia's A100, a GPU once designed for accelerators with HBM2e memory (GA100).

Although the core count of the A100 and 170HX has been significantly reduced from 6,912 to 4,480, this card also uses HBM2e memory and has a TDP that sits at 250W. Therefore, it is at least likely that.

It is also possible that Nvidia is preparing two CMP cards from the surplus GA100 chips. Previous rumors suggested a CMP HX card based on the A100, which may have been an early indication of the 170HX, which was later suggested to be the 220HX with an even more spectacularly fast hash rate of 210 MH/s.

There is reason for gamers to be concerned about the potential of such a powerful CMP GPU, which, oddly enough, depends on whether this CMP GPU is truly suitable for mining. Certainly, in many ways, more powerful GPUs for mining will mean more money in miners' pockets, but it is also possible that less powerful GPUs, such as GeForce and Radeon gaming cards, will be less desirable for the same task.

This is actually what happened to Bitcoin many years ago with ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). Unlike Ethereum, Bitcoin works very well on specific chips built only to perform the complex calculations required to mine Bitcoin. Individual ASICs may be cheaper and consume less power, so the use of GPUs in bitcoin mining quickly gave way to ASICs. These ASICs are capable of hash rates of 100 TH/s or higher, which scrapes the bitcoin algorithm.

A single GPU simply has no chance to compete, and as Bitcoin's difficulty rate increases (often a measure of how difficult it is to mine a block that is kept at a steady rate), miners who use GPUs buy more powerful ASICs or they will have to drop out of the game.

Such has not happened much with Ethereum, although hopeful ASICs do exist; things may change with the arrival of Nvidia's super-powerful processors for this task, such as those powered by HBM.

But it depends on whether such a card exists, and if it does, how much Nvidia charges for it (the A100 costs roughly $10,000), and how many GPUs they can/already have that fit.

This would be one way to shift the slightly broken A100 GPU, which is not suitable for professional data center work, in the same way that Nvidia says its existing CMP lineup is not suitable for gaming. The highest speed in the existing lineup is 86 MH/s on the 90HX, but this will be released in Q2, so it may not be available yet.

But one thing is clear: Nvidia has much to gain from such a card, in addition to the success of its CMP lineup. According to the leaked table, the 170HX could appear as early as this quarter.