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GPU and Motherboard OEMs Readying Components Optimized For Cryptocurrency Mining (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: With the popularity of upstart cryptocurrencies like Ethereum on the rise and the value of well-established currencies like Bitcoin steadily increasing, there is new-found interest in cryptocurrency mining. As such, there is another run on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, which is driving up prices. In an effort to prevent the same kind of GPU shortages that happened in the past, reports have surfaced claiming that AMD and NVIDIA are both readying stripped-down graphics cards, specifically targeting cryptocurrency miners. At Computex, ASRock also announced a new motherboard targeted at cryptocurrency miners, the ASRock H110 Pro BTC+. The ASRock H110 Pro BTC+ is packing 13 PCI Express slots -- twelve x1 slots and one x16 slot -- to accommodate as many graphics cards. ASRock didn't specify pricing or when the H110 Pro BTC+ will be available, however. And the reports that AMD and NVIDIA graphics card for mining will be made available sometime at the end of the June are as yet unconfirmed.
I thought GPUs were long dead for 'BTC' per the prefix, mining?
Or is this something like scrypt (before that goes to asic too)
They're mostly used for criminal activity. Ban them. It won't be necessary to mine them, plus there will be a decrease in crime. Can anyone justify why Bitcoins are legal? Of course not.
Note: The proportion of illegal to legal transactions is MUCH higher for Bitcoins than for dollars. Don't bother with disingenuous statements about dollars being used for criminal activity.
The fun is over, real people are getting killed by drug sales like fentanyl and graphics cards shortages are causing problems in the gaming community. It's time the NSA cracks the algorithms on cryptocurrencies and devalues them. It's time to treat Ethereum like trillion dollar Zimbabwe notes.
I played with bitcoin mining a couple of years ago back when BTC prices were around $7. At that point it was just about at the point where it was not economical (power costs) to compete in mining with GPU based hardware - the shift to FPGA and ASIC was just beginning. Today is it even economically feasible to generate enough hash power with GPU based hardware? If so, what has changed? Sure the BTC price is 300-400 times higher, but GPU speed hasn't increased by two orders of magnitude, and there is lot more mining competition for a relatively fixed amount of mining rewards / transaction fees.
Of course back when I was playing with it I purchased a couple of hundred dollars worth of graphics cards, mined about the same amount value in bitcoins, sold them and came out about $50 ahead - I was pretty proud of my self back then. Probably should have saved those 50 BTC...
Or is this something like scrypt (before that goes to asic too)
Scrypt *has gone* ASIC too.
(Except, due to it being a key derivation function, not hash, even with its very conservative parameters, isn't as easy as sha256 to accelerate.
ASIC Scrypt isn't many order of magnitude faster than GPU Scrypt - unlike sha256. But its much more power efficient)
Ethereum is the *current hot stuff* for GPU. And is even more tuned against ASIC than Litecoin's Scrypt.
Primecoin is another exemple which is currently mainly mined on GPU (which actual scientific use in the results).
But above all, these motherboards and "light" GPU are also extremely useful for scientific computing, (specially for task which are more GPU than memory-bound, where the PCIe x1 isn't limiting).
(Which I think was the primary target market before the marketing department decided to run for it with buzzwords).
And the machines can also be used for much more nefarious purpose : that is also a very good hardware platform for comp
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They're a boon to Ransomware as well.
It seems like a GPU without any video outputs would still be useful when paired with something like NVidia's Optimus technology. Since all the consumer Intel CPUs have GPUs on them anyway, it means that you could pipe the video data back to have the Intel GPU display it. The same thing that they're already doing for laptops, but for desktops this time.
Exactly how much money is saved by omitting the video output ports?
... selling to all the n00b johnny-come-latelies who flocked to Alaska and Yukon long after the best claims were already staked. This GPU market is sort of like that.
and that can be limited by the pci-e bus
What a great idea. I can imagine the sales pitch. Spend $1200 on a GPU then waste lots of energy to mine the shitcoin of the week. Great business model. It will work very well for the vendors of hardware.
GPGPU efforts started many years ago before Bitcoin, and there are tons of scientific and technical applications for headless GPUs. So pardon me if the "mining-only" definition seems idiotic. Some people even render graphics on headless machines.
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