Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Nvidia's Volta Goes Mining: GV100 Powers CMP 100HX Mining Card
Nvidia is not exactly eager to disclose the hardware specifications of its cryptocurrency mining processor (CMP) cards aimed at Ethereum miners. Instead, it gives the chipmaker flexibility in GPUs (and GPU configurations) it can use for a given hash rate. But as the lineup of Nvidia’s CMP cards is expanding and they leak to the open market, details about them start to emerge. As it turns out, Nvidia’s former flagship datacenter GPU — the GV100 — now powers Nvidia’s CMP 100HX board.
Nvidia has never publicly announced its CMP 100HX card, and the board is absent from the list of its cryptocurrency mining options on its website. However, the card has been available for a while. Someone has published a picture of the CMP 100HX at PC_Shopping forums and for Komachi_Ensaka to discover it. According to the post, the most exciting part about the card is that the accelerator produces around 80 MH/s, so it is not exactly clear why it is called the CMP 100HX (perhaps to differentiate from the CMP 80HX?).
Based on the images of the board posted, the CMP 100HX is based on Nvidia’s Tesla V100 compute GPU for data centers. It’s similar to the chipmaker’s rather extravagant Quadra GV100 and Titan V boards for Proviz professionals, enthusiast gamers, and ML/DL software developers. However, these are the only Nvidia Volta-based product aimed at client PCs and the only Volta-powered boards with display outputs.
For obvious reasons, the CMP 100HX mining card does not have any display outputs and comes with a passive cooler with two heat pipes, which further implies the data center origin of the board, but the mining nature of the product. Meanwhile, we have no idea about the GPU and memory configuration of the device. Due to its large heat pipes, the CMP 100HX might be too large for standard 2U rack servers, but since mining machines do not precisely follow standards, this is barely a problem as they can certainly fit into 4U boxes.
Given that Nvidia’s cryptocurrency mining CMP-branded business has been on the decline for quarters (at least officially), it’s not surprising that the company is selling its leftovers to miners. Meanwhile, it is still rather interesting to see a unique GV100 GPU — which can do graphics, compute, and display interfaces — mining Ethereum.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
I'm sure there will be wailing and teeth gnashing from some in regard to e-waste, but let's be real. A perfectly working card that can do 80 MH/s isn't getting thrown away any time soon.
I still maintain that products for gamers; and completely separate products for miners is what we need. (besides software based solutions that can be implemented)
