Advanced Micro Devices, Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) is taking a diametrically opposite stand to Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) on putting restrictions on the use of its gaming graphics cards for cryptocurrency mining, PC Gamer reported.
What Happened: AMD reportedly confirmed that it would not be blocking any workload on its Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics processing units.
“We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter,” said Nish Neelalojanan, product manager at AMD, according to PC Gamer.
“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.”
Neelalojanan, however, added a caveat that mining enjoys or scales with higher bandwidth and bus width which means there will be limitations caused by an “architectural level” for it.
Why It Matters: While Nvidia’s 24GB GeForce RTX 3090 GPU can mine Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETHER) at up to 120 MH/s, higher-end RDNA 2 cards based on AMD’s Navi 21 chip can manage 58-64 MH/s, noted PC Gamer. ETH traded 1.61% lower at $1,776.73 at press time.
AMD GPU drivers are based on Linux and are all open-source, which raises the question of whether the company could implement a mining block in the first place.
Last week, Nvidia said it had inadvertently unlocked ETH mining performance after it updated its drivers for the RTX…
