AMD Might Be Backtracking on GPUs for Cryptocurrency Miners | Digital Trends

Amid the GPU shortage, AMD’s response to if it would take any action against cryptocurrency miners was a resounding “no.” Now, it seems Team Red might be taking some notes from Nvidia. A new, unbranded card has leaked that features two Radeon RX 570 cores, and it could be AMD’s response to crypto miners.

Twitter user @9550pro, who has previously leaked information about Intel’s upcoming DG2 graphics card, shared photos of the card that were posted to the Saraba1st forum. The card reportedly combines two of AMD’s 14nm RX 570 cores to double the mining performance, creating the tentatively named Radeon RX 570 Duo.

Sapphire ETH mining RX 570 Duo????

125W 60MH/s

Source: https://t.co/HA5v3EyeFn pic.twitter.com/tprNBw3987

— HXL (@9550pro) August 13, 2021

Based on the GPU-Z screenshot the original poster provided (below), the pictured card comes from Sapphire and PC Partner. Sapphire is a long-standing add-in board partner (AIB) for AMD graphics cards, and PC Partner is a graphics card maker based out of Hong Kong. It’s not clear if the RX 570 Duo is a new card AMD is working on or a mad experiment dreamt up by two GPU makers.

It seems unlikely that AMD is working on an entirely new card. The 14nm Polaris architecture is five years old, and the RX 570 itself is over four years old. Even with two cores smashed together, the RX 570 Duo performs about as well as an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti or AMD RX 6800 for mining Ethereum.

However, it’s possible that AMD is revitalizing the older architecture. In May, AMD signed an exclusivity agreement with U.S.-based chipmaker GlobalFoundries through 2024, who was behind the manufacturing of Polaris. AMD has already turned to Taiwan-based chipmaker TSMC for its recent graphics cards and processors that are built on a smaller node, so AMD could be riding out its commitment with older architecture.

A possible RX 570 Duo could draw miners away from AMD’s newer cards that are targeting gamers. Measured in millions of hashes per second (MH/s), the RX 570 8GB is capable of about 30.9 MH/s when mining Ethereum. The original poster shared an image showing similar mining performance across both of the RX 570 Duo’s cores, combing for a hash rate of around 60 MH/s.

The recently released RX 6600 XT is reportedly capable of half of that — around 28 MH/s.

In response to the growing demand from cryptocurrency miners, Nvidia introduced its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) cards. These cards are built specifically for mining, and Nvidia pointed miners toward them to take the strain off of its consumer cards. AMD hasn’t fired back yet, but that could be what the RX 570 Duo is.

This likely isn’t the final design, though. The shared images show a rather cheap-looking cooler haphazardly stuck on a board and a single HDMI output. Nvidia’s CMP cards don’t feature any video outputs.

If AMD is working on a mining card, we hope it comes soon — especially as the prices of RX 6000 cards continues to rise.

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