Nvidia launches its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, a graphics card that can only be used to mine cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies are living a truly golden age, and both bitcoin and others are breaking historical records and reaching incredible values that have an inevitable side effect: Everyone wants to mine cryptocurrencies and “make” money.
Nvidia launches its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor
That has made Nvidia’s powerful RTX 3000 graphics a prized product for those processes, and in fact, demand has long been spectacular not only by gamers but by miners who get a lot of juice out of these cards. To avoid this, the company has come up with a very special product: It is called Nvidia CMP HX, and it is a family of graphics cards that do not allow gaming: It is designed for mining cryptocurrencies.
Nvidia’s idea is simple: Miners don’t want graphics cards for gaming, so why not create a product specifically for them? That’s Nvidia CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor), which takes advantage of the GeForce RTX architecture and features, but without all the gaming-oriented elements.
Nvidia CMP has no graphics support: it has no video outputs, for example, something that, as Nvidia points out, improves regeneration and allows more and more of these cards to be “stacked”. Also, they emphasize, in these processors work with lower frequencies and voltages, which allows to improve efficiency and reduce consumption during mining.
The new Nvidia CMP HX, which is the full name of the family, has several versions with different features that mainly affect their mining rate – measured in the rate of Ethereum hashes, a traditional reference already among miners of this cryptocurrency – and their consumption.
Nvidia currently offers four versions with different powers ranging from 26MH/s of the Nvidia CMP 30HX to 86MH/s of the CMP 90X. The latter consumes much more power to deliver that power, of course.
How powerful are these mining cards? For reference, the GeForce RTX 3090s are around 100-130MH/s, although the exact figure depends on the model, the algorithm used and, of course, the working frequency of the GPU of these graphics cards or their memory systems, which allow optimizing this performance.
The launch of these processors or cryptocurrency mining systems comes precisely with the idea of preventing miners from chasing the same graphics cards that gamers are trying to get, and this should help to gradually alleviate the problem of graphics card shortages.
The imminent launch of the GeForce RTX 3060 on February 25 will be a good way to test the effect of this decision by Nvidia, which certainly manages to come up with a very interesting solution that may also end up giving it an important new market niche if cryptocurrencies continue to generate the growing interest we are seeing.
At the moment there are no prices for these mining cards, which will appear in the first and second quarter of 2021. It now remains to be seen if indeed the Nvidia CMP HX achieve their goal and manage to make clear that, as Nvidia says.
