GPU, AMD will not limit performance in cryptocurrency mining

AMD has no plans to limit the performance of its GPUs in cryptocurrency mining. The company will not follow in the footsteps of Nvidia, intervened on the RTX 3060 12GB to limit its hash rate in the mining of Ethereum and the like with a software change – mistakenly removed by the same company in recent days with the spread of a driver without this limiter.

When asked during a conference call on the Radeon RX 6700 XT we were present at, AMD product manager Nish Neelalojanan denied AMD’s interest in a similar solution. “The short answer is no,” said Neelalojanan. “We will not block any type of workload, not just mining “.

“There are a couple of things to consider. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles this effort. What I mean is that Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width have been carefully chosen to achieve a very specific level of play. Mining enjoys or scales with higher bandwidth or bus width, therefore there are architectural limitations to mining“.

The RDNA 2 project of the new AMD RX 6000 video cards is not the favorite of cryptocurrency miners, so much so that even the RX 5700 XT is faster than an RX 6700 XT in mining Ethereum. The Ampere architecture of the latest GeForce returns much higher hash rates.

Nvidia intervened in the hope of limiting purchases by miners of GeForce cards intended for gamers, and at the same time created a line of ad hoc products called CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) for those seeking profits in the varied world of “crypto”. If we look at the mining of ETH, a GeForce RTX 3090 touches a hash rate of around 120 MH / s, while the Radeon RX 6900 XT stops more or less in the middle of that value.

Neelalojanan added that the optimizations that AMD will continue to make on the driver front to improve the gaming performance of its video cards certainly will not favor mining, even if they are side effects and not intentional limitations.

On the net there are also those who hypothesize that the existence of an open source driver for Linux nullifies any hypothetical attempt by AMD to limit performance with mining, but in our opinion here the choice is simply the market.

AMD is experiencing an even more pronounced shortage of video cards than Nvidia and the problem is certainly not the bulk purchases of miners, but a blocked production that is struggling to take off. Today the US company has many other problems to think about, and given the market shares at the lowest terms, each card sold only “leaking fat”, no matter if it is a gamer or a miner who buys it.