New week, folks! Last month, the immensely successful graphics card manufacturer Nvidia said that it would deliberately change the way its latest GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card worked to make it up to 50% less efficient to mine Ethereum.
But as the BBC reports,
Many miners build rigs using several graphics cards at a time to produce a powerful machine dedicated to mining crypto-currency, rather than gaming.
Crypto-currency enthusiasts have contributed to a shortage of graphics cards by snapping up supplies to use for non-gaming purposes.
Nvidia said it had intervened to make sure its products “end up in the hands of gamers”.
Now, Nvidia had also announced that it would introduce hardware that was optimised to mine cryptocurrency so that it wouldn’t cannibalise gaming card stocks. On its recent quarterly earnings call,
CEO Jensen Huang told analysts on an earnings call that he does not expect the company’s business of selling processors to cryptocurrency miners to “grow extremely large.” and “We expect that to be a small part of our business as we go forward,”
– Nvidia beats earnings expectations, but stock dips as CEO downplays crypto play
On that news, even though Nvidia’s graphics cards division revenue was up nearly 50% year on year, and their data center division revenue up 91% y-o-y, both beating analysts’ expectations, Nvidia’s stock fell 2% that day. It does seem the market wants Nvidia to consciously push harder into the crypto mining hardware space.
(Disclosure: I own stock in Nvidia, but from well before these news items).