NVIDIA CMP 170HX, photos and tests pop up: GA100 GPU and HBM2 memory for high mining performance

It seems that the rumors of March were true, unless we find ourselves at a well-packed fake: soon we will see on the market a acceleratore CMP (Crypto Mining Processor) basato su GPU NVIDIA A100, currently reserved for the world of artificial intelligence. On the net they are appeared photos and screenshots that hint at how miners could soon get their hands on what looks like, basically, an NVIDIA A100 accelerator rebranded as CMP 170HX.

The CMP board in question would be able to achieve approx 164 MH / s within a TGP of 250W, definitely a very good value if we think that the CMP 50HX has the same TGP but stops at 45 MH / s. The new CMP 170HX would seem rely on A100 GPUs not eligible to end up on board the NVIDIA A100 accelerator, which the company markets with 6980 active CUDA cores and 40/80 GB of HBM2E memory. The full A100 GPU is equipped with 8192 CUDA cores, so we are talking about an 85% activated chip in its incarnation for the AI ​​sector.

In the case of the CMP 170HX, rumors tell us that the card it will only have 4480 active CUDA cores, which is about 54% of the units present on the entire GPU. The amount of onboard memory should also be considerably less, we talk about 8 GB HMB2e on two 4 GB stacks, for a bandwidth of 1.4 TB / s on 4096-bit bus. NVIDIA would also have made savings on the PCI Express bus, limiting it to PCIe 1.1 x4, for a bandwidth of 250 MB / s against 32 GB / s available for a modern video card with a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface. Furthermore, the totally passive design and, of course, the absence of video outputs.

In short, a particular product for a particular audience to whom to sell the card at a price that will certainly not be reduced (a few thousand euros) but that will not distract interested customers from the NVIDIA A100 accelerator. The new solution will be added to the models already created – CMP 30HX, 40HX, 50HX and 90HX – to discourage miners from purchasing gaming video cards, in parallel with the introduction of a limiter on GeForce cards with LHR – Lite Hash Rate solutions.

In the last quarter, sales of CMP cards to miners generated a total of $ 266 million in NVIDIA’s coffers, up + 180% on last year and + 25% on the previous quarter.