Allen
Hotshot
Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,856
Ohio USA
More cyptocurrency mining news:
Quote
AMD and Nvidia to suffer from increased competition
Susquehanna Financial has warned that AMD and Nvidia are about to lose a big chunk of the cash that they have been making from crypto-miners.
Susquehanna’s Christopher Rolland said that the mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain had developed an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip to mine the cryptocurrency Ether — and an ASIC from Bitmain could pose new competition for AMD’s and Nvidia’s graphics-processing units (GPUs).
Ether mining-related sales accounted for about 20 percent of AMD’s sales and 10 percent of Nvidia’s revenue.
Apparently, Monero is not that happy, and an emergency software upgrade set for April is explicitly meant to change the rules of the system to block the effort entirely, rendering the Antminer X3 ineffective. To keep hardware manufacturers from catching up, these algorithm edits are planned to continue with bi-annual network upgrades.
According to the article, Etherium alone (1 of the most popular of 1000+ cryptocurrencies) accounted for 10 to 20 percent of AMD/Nvidia profit.
So, now, hardware manufacturers try to make cryptocurrency mining more cost effective -- and, the cryptocurrency algorithm writers try to make mining less cost effective (thereby keeping GPU prices high for we gamers).
The HD550 HTPC card I bought in January for $99 (and only worth $70), is now $169. $169 is the price of a Ryzen 5 2400G APU that contains a 4C/8T CPU that runs at 4GHz (in my case) and has a built in GPU about equal to the, now, $169 HD550 GPU.
If one is building a new cost conscious HTPC/light-gaming-rig, its a no brainer -- put together a Ryzen 5 2400G system.
