AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: 'we will not be blocking any workload'

Authored by pcgamer.com and submitted by LeftiePedram
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AMD has confirmed it has zero intentions of blocking mining operations on its graphics cards. Following the news of an Ethereum mining limiter implemented on Nvidia's GPUs (and then accidentally turned off), the question on many peoples' lips has been whether AMD would follow suit. Well, here's your firm 'no' from the company on that front.

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"The short answer is no," Nish Neelalojanan, a product manager at AMD says regarding a potential mining limiter during a Radeon RX 6700 XT pre-briefing call. "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."

It's true that RDNA 2 isn't the best cryptocurrency miner. That accolade goes unsurprisingly to Nvidia's 24GB GeForce RTX 3090 at up to 120MH/s. The high-end RDNA 2 cards based on the Navi 21 chip aren't entirely useless when it comes to mining Ether, though, managing around 58-64MH/s.

And when cryptocurrency is still surging in value it appears any graphics card is preferable to none at all. Just about any GPU worth something is being snapped up and sent down the crypto-mines, and the market is still reeling because of it.

"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."

There's another question here, too, and that's whether AMD could implement a mining block, or at least one of substance, if it wanted to. AMD's Linux drivers are all open-source, a move highly praised by Linux developers and users alike, but leaves AMD with less direct say on how they're being used in the field.

And just look at how quickly miners circumvented Nvidia's mining limiter circumvented and its drivers were said to be watertight. That was Nvidia's fault, mind, and who knows how long it may have lasted without its dev driver slip-up.

With AMD standing down and Nvidia's initial attempts at a limiter seemingly in tatters, it doesn't look like there are any roadblocks capable of slowing down miners' fervent GPU hoarding habits.

On the plus side, Ethereum will one day move away from a cryptocurrency mining model, and the bubble is sure to burst for profitability sooner or later.

alyosha_pls on March 18th, 2021 at 23:25 UTC »

How about instead of software limiting the cards, you just do something about your inability to deal with sales in a fair manner. The average consumer shouldn't have to go and sign up for a fucking botting service to pick up a card at retail price, or at all really. There needs to be systems set up at point of sale to prevent bots and excessive amount of card purchases by individuals.

S0_B00sted on March 18th, 2021 at 21:31 UTC »

There's no point. Any block they could put in would just be bypassed. Nvidia acting like they blocked it on their gaming cards because they care about gamers is a joke. They just wanted miners to buy their mining-specific cards with no video outputs so that when crypto inevitably crashes the cards will end up in a landfill instead of on the used market which would drive down demand for new GPUs. People who believe otherwise are just naive.

EDIT: Okay, JFC. Maybe crypto won't crash. At some point it still won't be profitable to mine on GPUs anymore regardless. Get off my ass, you know what I meant and the point still stands.

starserval on March 18th, 2021 at 21:11 UTC »

That's fine. It never stopped anything and it had more of a negative impact on consumers than a positive one anyways.