AMD Has No Plans to Block Cryptocurrency Mining on Its New GPUs

In a move that on the surface may seem pro-cryptocurrency, AMD has confirmed that it has no plans to limit the mining capabilities of its new GPUs. However, the American PC tech multinational also elaborated that their GPUs, as always, will be more optimised for gaming.

In a chat with PC Gamer during a pre-briefing call for the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD product manager Nish Neelalojanan threw some light on AMD’s intentions for its upcoming GPUs.

“We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter,”

AMD Product Manager Nish Neelalojanan

“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.”

AMD Product Manager Nish Neelalojanan

As per PC Gamer, it is true that the RDNA 2 is not the best candidate for cryptocurrency mining. While the Nvidia RTX 3090 hits a hash rate of 120 MH/s, AMD’s RNDA 2 cards average out at half that rate at 58-64 MH/s. This clearly makes the Nvidia RTX 3090 the crypto-mining Alpha and also backs Neelalojanan’s claim that AMD chips are more gaming friendly; a claim on which he doubled-down on later in the chat.

“All our optimization, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we’ve optimized 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.”

AMD Product Manager Nish Neelalojanan

Globally, the market situation for GPUs has been anything but fun due to lack of proper supply and exorbitant prices. Naturally, this has significantly worsened the never-ending tussle for GPUs between gamers and cryptocurrency miners.

While AMD’s counterpart Nvidia tried to tip the scale in the favor of gamers by including a hash limiter on the RTX 3060, this limiter was easily circumvented by hackers within a matter of weeks. We say ‘easily’ because it was Nvidia’s own beta driver that was employed to take the limiter down.

Nvidia’s pro-gamer stance has prompted gamers and miners to ask where other companies will stand on Gaming v Crypto. And now with AMD backing down, it seems that the GPU market still remains up for grabs for miners, leaving desperate gamers in the lurch.

About AMD

Founded in 1969, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American MNC that excels in making semiconductor devices needed for computer processing.

AMD is one of the world leaders when it comes to developing high-performance computing products. The company is best known worldwide for manufacturing cutting-edge processors, motherboard chipsets, graphic cards, and CPUs, etc.