The RTX 3060 brought quite a few surprises with it. Aside from being a much more pocket-friendly option for gaming than the other 30 series cards, it also came in-built with a crypto-mining software limiter to dissuade crypto-miners from using this cards. This was done to keep the cards in the hands of the intended audience, the gamers.
Nvidia also announced the launch of their new line of GPUs which were built specifically for crypto-miners. Lacking display ports, this GPU line was intended to focus all of its processing power towards mining cryptocurrency.
Not being ones to hang back, it seems that AMD too is planning to make the same move. A recent Linux kernel driver patch list includes mention of an RDNA 1, Navi 12-based GPU which doesn’t have any display ports. So far, the only application we know for a GPU without display ports is for crypto-mining, so there’s a good chance that AMD too will release a crypto-mining focused line of GPUs.
Navi 12 cards are Mac specific GPUs and don’t really have great performance overall. The Radeon Pro V520 has similar performance to the RX 5600 XT, an already popular mining card, so AMD may just be taking leftover Pro V520s and repurposing them to dedicated mining cards.
It should be noted that AMD has not officially announced anything on this topic.
In other, but related, AMD news, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is set to launch on the 18th of March. AMD claims, it will sit just below the RX 6800 and target 1440p performance with benchmarks, compare favourably to the RTX 3060Ti and even compete with the RTX 3070. That’s largely town to its 12 GB of DDR6 VRAM, allowing it to display at higher native resolutions without the need of Nvidia’s DLSS trickery.
About AMD
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. They develop computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. AMD’s main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers and embedded system applications.
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