It appears that at least someone is sold on Nvidia's Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) offerings. Hut 8 Mining Corp., one of the world's largest and oldest Bitcoin mining companies, has put in an order worth $30 million for Nvidia's CMP graphics cards. Nvidia will start delivering the order starting May 2021, and Hut 8 Mining Corp. plans to get everything up and running by the summer.
With the purchase, Hut 8 Mining Corp. hopes to increase its mining operations substantially. The company estimates a collective performance up to 1,600 Gigahash. The incorporation of Nvidia's CMP devices will also allow Hut 8 Mining Corp. to venture into alternative blockchain networks as well as extending its current mining business.
The details of the deal are kept under wraps so it's unknown which CMP models Hut 8 Mining Corp. purchased. Currently, Nvidia offers four different CMP devices in the shape of the 30HX, 40HX, 50HX and 90HX. The first two models are available now, while the remaining models are scheduled for the second quarter of this year. Given the time frame of the order and estimated delivery date, it's anyone's guess which SKUs are part of the deal.
“The adoption and the development of applications interacting with various blockchain networks have never been stronger, opening many possibilities across a variety of industries,” said Jaime Leverton, CEO of Hut 8. “We are incredibly excited to have these high performance CMPs in our fleet. We believe mining with CMPs will open up new opportunities for Hut 8 and will allow us to continue to execute on our long- and short-term plans for increased and diversified revenue streams.”
Nvidia actively markets its CMP devices toward mining Ethereum, so it's plausible that Hut 8 Mining Corp. may be taking a crack at Ethereum. Even in its official announcement, the chipmaker didn't go into pricing so it's something of a mystery just to how many units can be bought for $30 milllion.
The CMP 90HX is the highest performer out of the CMP stack with a Ethereum hash rate up to 86 MH/s. However, there are rumors going around that Nvidia may repurpose its A100 data center GPU into a mining card. The rumored CMP 220HX could put up a hash rate of 210 MH/s, up to 144% faster than the CMP 90HX. If the CMP 220HX comes to life, it'll probably be the desire of big mining corporations.
With a budget of $30 million and a target performance of 1,600 Gigahash (for Ethash), that could be around 7600 CMP 220HX GPUs, priced at around $4,000 each. Alternatively, it might be 18,600 CMP 90HX GPUs at around $1,600 each, or 35,000 50HX GPUs at $850 each. Considering it can be difficult to get more than eight GPUs running off of a single PC, there's a desire to keep the total number of PCs down by using higher performance GPUs. Regardless of which GPUs Hut 8 purchased, there's a lot of infrastructure required to get that many systems up and running.
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Non-corporate miners who just want to make a few extra bucks find that the best mining GPUs are gaming models such as the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 though older cards like the GTX 1060 can pay for themselves more quickly.
Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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spongiemaster Reply
For anyone who said that miners wouldn't be interested in these cards because they had no resale value...Admin said:Hut 8 Mining Corp. has put in a $30 million order with Nvidia for its CMP mining graphics cards that will be delivered starting May 2021.
Bitcoin Mining Corp Buys $30 Million Of Nvidia CMP GPUs : Read more -
gg83 why do mining farms buy GPUs when ASIC are so much faster? is it the price to performance ratio?Reply -
blacknemesist Next time Nvidia mentions "Gamer" as their target remember this.Reply
As gamers we cannot pre-order cards, retailers cannot pre-order cards and price depends on the distributor initial price, after that everyone claims their share.
Let them have their fun and hope AMD and Intel bring something to the table that gives us gamers value again. -
blacknemesist Reply
I read something about ASIC not being efficient enough because when they were being developed the mining died. Also most of the components they need are also out of reach.gg83 said:why do mining farms buy GPUs when ASIC are so much faster? is it the price to performance ratio? -
Co BIY With that kind of capital I think founding a brand-new crypto currency would be a better strategy. There is no reason to think that a new "coin" will be less competitive than an old one. What is the advantage of a legacy "coin" over any new one.Reply -
VforV All I read from this news piece is that $30mil worth of potential GPU for gamers are now going exclusively to one mining farm, because these cards only mine.Reply
F U nvidia! You don't care about gamers, so stop lying!
At least if they were gaming GPUs, they would eventually find their way into the used market for gamers... -
lazyabum Nvidia selling $30 million of CMPs means $30 million of GPUs are being produced or reduced? These days you never know right?Reply -
yvdrhaeg Crypto mining is an ecological disaster, and completely unethical: the carbon footprint is the same as all the datacenters in the world combined (see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-carbon-footprint-is-skyrocketing-along-with-its-price/ ). The whole idea of cryptocurrencies is based on the 'proof of work' or similar concepts, and these usually have a large carbon foorprint. (side note: I'm not even talking about the actual uses of cryptocurrencies let's not go there!).Reply
I think we as citizens have a moral obligation to minimize our carbon footprint where possible and feasible (without stopping to live obviously).
Companies should maybe do the same?
So the questions begs, should companies be involved in cryptomining, willingly or 'unwillingly'? And more to the point: should we support, work with or buy from companies who do so?
I definitively will think hard about this when buying new graphic cards, I can only urge everybody else to do so too ... -
LolaGT These guys aren't selling their cards, they are in it for the long haul as a large corporation. They aren't some guy at home that built a mining rack.Reply
You have confused the demographic.
For anyone who said that miners wouldn't be interested in these cards because they had no resale value...