Nvidia’s new 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti graphics playing cards will launch with Ethereum hash fee limiters inbuilt once they go on sale later this month.
Nvidia’s new 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti graphics playing cards will launch with Ethereum hash fee limiters inbuilt once they go on sale later this month. Nvidia introduced the pending launch of the brand new playing cards throughout its Computex 2021 livestream on Monday, the place it unveiled specs and launch dates for each fashions.
Of explicit curiosity to cryptocurrency fans is Nvidia’s resolution to launch the playing cards with in-built limiters aimed toward curbing their Ether (ETH)-mining utility.
The corporate had beforehand pledged to create a crypto-specific card designed for mining Ether and different GPU-compatible cryptocurrencies. The transfer was designed to drag demand away from would-be crypto miners, however Nvidia’s insistence on releasing all of its newer GPUs with crypto-limiters suggests this plan is probably not as definitive as first anticipated.
Nvidia most lately declared in its Q1 earnings report that it couldn’t precisely gauge the demand coming from cryptocurrency miners. That’s regardless of black market costs of its 3000 vary promoting for as much as 300% greater than retail, having collected thousands and thousands of {dollars} in estimated secondary market gross sales already.
Whereas the 3060, 3070 and 3080 (together with their Ti fashions) will all characteristic the specifically designed Lite Hash Charge (LHR) GPUs, Nvidia made no point out of the 3090 collection of playing cards. Positioned on the greater finish of Nvidia’s product vary, the 3090 occupies a excessive sufficient worth level that its demand by both players or miners is mostly restricted to start with.
What’s extra, a comparability of the 3080 Ti and the 3090 reveals the previous to be a lot the identical because the latter. The one distinction is that the 3090 packs 24GB of video RAM in comparison with the 3080’s 12GB.
No matter Nvidia’s actions within the close to future, its provide conundrum because it pertains to Ether miners will seemingly dissipate over the course of the subsequent 6–12 months, as Ethereum strikes away from its Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm in direction of Proof-of-Stake. At this level, graphics playing cards will turn out to be irrelevant regarding the manufacturing of ETH cash. Whereas this would seem to detract from the worth of the playing cards in the long term, the short-time body left during which to revenue from ETH mining will seemingly end in one other spike in demand, and a subsequent provide shortfall.