Nvidia Launches Dedicated Crypto-Mining Product Amid Game Card Shortage



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Nvidia Corp. introduced a specialized product for cryptocurrency mining on Thursday while limiting the mining capabilities of their low-cost gambling cards, an attempt to avoid a repeat of the hardships caused by demand from crypto miners in recent years .

Nvidia NVDA,
-0.52%
and its rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. AMD,
-1.45%
have struggled to produce enough graphics processing units, or GPUs, to meet demand from bloggers as well as server and other customers amid a global chip shortage. In a blog post, Nvidia announced Thursday that its RTX 3060 gaming graphics processing unit will use software to halve the performance of the card if a cryptocurrency mining is detected, along with a cryptocurrency mining. ethereum ETHUSD,
+ 0.10%
distinguished. Nvidia has confirmed that the limitation will only apply to its 3060 card scheduled for February 25.

“Ethereum has the highest global mining yield for all GPU-mineable parts at the moment, and therefore is probably the main driver of demand for GPUs in the mining industry,” an Nvidia spokesperson told MarketWatch in email comments.

“Other algorithms do not significantly contribute to GPU demand and this cannot change quickly due to network effects in a given cryptocurrency,” the spokesperson said. “The flow limiter applies to anything that uses Dagger Hashimoto or Ethash type algorithms.”

The decision is to ensure that the card is in the hands of players, who are clamoring for cards in short supply, and potentially avoids a repeat of the problems caused by demand from crypto miners in the past. At the end of 2018, Nvidia found itself with a glut of game card inventory after cryptocurrency prices fell, drying up interest in mining and creating a ‘crypto hangover’ which damaged the company’s finances for almost a year.

To find out more: “ Crypto hangover ” at Nvidia starts holiday with a big headache

To this end, the company announced that it is releasing a dedicated mining chip, the Nvidia Cryptocurrency mining processor, which offers GPU performance but not the graphics features used in games. Lower-performing chip models, the 30HX and 40HX, will be available in the first quarter, while the higher-performing models, the 50HX and 90HX, will be available in the second quarter, Nvidia said. According to the company, the 90HX offers about three times the ether extraction performance of the 30HX

Nvidia hasn’t listed a price for its CMP card, while its low-cost 3060 card, which was announced in January, is nominally $ 329. A spokesperson for Nvidia told MarketWatch that the company is not announcing pricing for the CMP at this time and that the first models will be rolled out in March.

Recently, bitcoin BTCUSD,
-0.33%
prices cleared $ 50,000 for the first time, while ethereum prices rose above $ 1,900 to record highs. Even cryptocurrencies like dogecoin, initially created as a joke, have risen more than 900% in price this year.

In 2018, ethereum prices fell from a high of over $ 1,300 in January to a low of less than $ 85 in December of the same year. Likewise, bitcoin started 2018 at over $ 10,000 and ended the year below $ 3,700.

Nvidia shares were down about 1% along with the rest of the chip industry on Thursday; the PHLX Semiconductor Index SOX,
-0.99%
was down 1.2%

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