AMD Allegedly Prepping RDNA Mining GPUs To Counter NVIDIA CMP HX Family
The news comes to us from the new AMDGPU kernel patch driver notes for Linux 5.12. The pertinent piece of information for us today is the appearance of a new NV12 (Navi 12) SKU. According to the report, this would be a new headless graphics card based on first-generation Navi architecture (RDNA). The card would lack support for Video Core Next (VCN) which further adds to the rumors that this could be AMD's answer to CMP HX.
NVIDIA previously stated that its CMP HX cards feature GPUs that didn't pass the grade to reside in GeForce products. Because of this fact, the sale of these cards won't affect the availability of currently-marketed GeForce graphics cards. Like NVIDIA, AMD doesn't have perfect yields for its RDNA- or RDNA2-based graphics cards. So, it's entirely possible that it too is looking to turn GPUs that would have otherwise been rejected into something a profitable product with a receptive market.
Although NVIDIA hasn't come out and confirmed it, the 30HX, 40HX, and 50HX are all allegedly based on the previous generation Turing architecture. Only the flagship 90Hx -- with an Ethereum hash rate of 86 MH/s – is reportedly using the new Ampere architecture.
If AMD goes down this path, it's likely that all the available offerings with be RDNA-based. The Radeon RX 6800 XT (RDNA2) has an Ethereum hash rate of 59 MH/s at 147 watts compared to 54 MH/s at 91 watts for the Radeon RX 5700 XT. In other words, the numbers just don't add up -- at this time -- for offering headless RDNA2 cards. Of course, there are other cryptocurrencies to mine, but Ethereum is the hot ticket item these days for miners, at least until the 2.0 update is released.
