AMD does not plan to limit cryptocurrency mining

On the graphics card side, AMD has a bit of a history of lagging behind Nvidia when it comes to new applications of technology. Where the green team is happy to take a new proprietary technology that between the laps has a big impact, AMD often comes six months or three later and propagates to open standards is best for everyone. An example of this is CUDA against OpenCL and a more recent one is Nvidia’s DLSS against AMD’s upcoming FSR.

As underdogs In the graphics card market, AMD simply does not have the market share required to point with the whole hand, and is often forced to do the opposite of the competitor. This now announces PC Gamer will also apply to cryptocurrency mining, where AMD has previously been rumored to consider a new series of cryptocurrencies similar to Nvidia’s CMP. However, this does not seem to be getting rid of, as AMD’s product manager Nish Neelanojan with all the desired clarity announces that customers can do what they want with its graphics card.

We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter. That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself. – Nish Neelanojanan, AMD

Neelanojanan emphasizes that AMD has fundamentally developed the RDNA and RDNA 2 architectures for gaming, and acknowledges that the graphics cards’ narrower memory buses mean that the cards are not optimal for breaking cryptocurrency. When asked by PC Gamers whether AMD is considering artificially limiting performance on certain loads, he says “the short answer is: no”. An aggravating circumstance for AMD and a possible willingness to limit in this context are its drivers for Linux, which is open source.

All our optimisation, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we’ve optimised everything for gaming. Clearly gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it’s not going to be ideal for mining workload. That all said, in this market, it’s always a fun thing to watch.

In addition, Neelanojanan does not seem to harbor resentment towards the market with cryptocurrency as a whole – where he concludes that the market “is always fun to follow”.

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