NVIDIA could reintroduce its Ampere GA100 GPU under CMP HX mining series

NVIDIA might be planning a GA100-based CMP HX mining card.

Known leaker @kopite7kimi suggests NVIDIA is evaluating the possibility of launching its flagship Ampere compute card for cryptocurrency mining. 

NVIDIA Cryptomining Graphics Cards (CMP HX and P104), Source: VideoCardz

NVIDIA A100 was the first Ampere GPU released months ahead of the GeForce RTX 30 lineup. Unlike the gaming-oriented models, the GA100 solution was designed solely with compute workloads in mind. According to Kopite, the A100 is a “mining monster” without sharing any hash rates or mining performance figures. He claims that NVIDIA will introduce a fifth CMP HX model with said GPU:

NVIDIA A100 also known as A100 Tensor Core GPU was introduced in SXM form factor. Later on, NVIDIA introduced a PCIe-based model with passive cooling. Data centers solutions (formerly Tesla series) have actually a lot in common with mining cards. Both require powerful compute GPUs, lack display connectors, and have a very specific purpose.

Ampere GA100 GPU, being a compute-oriented architecture, would undoubtedly offer better mining performance than GA102+ gaming GPUs. However, miners will only consider this solution if the price is attractive, which might be a problem, considering that NVIDIA A100 PCIe currently retails at 10,000 USD. A CMP-based model would obviously have to cost a lot less. It would probably also lack support for the data center NVIDIA software solutions that make these compute cards so expensive. Otherwise, launching a GA100 based mining card wouldn’t have made much sense to both NVIDIA and miners, but for different reasons.

The A100 Tensor Core offers up to 19.5 TLFOPs in single-precision calculations. The card is also equipped with high-speed (1.6 TB/s) 40GB HBM2 of memory. Both values are very important in mining. GA100-based mining solution probably wouldn’t need all five stacks of HBM2 memory, a single 8GB HBM2 stack would suffice. Current DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) size 3.49 GB for Ehtereum and 3.58 GB for Ethereum Classic. A reduction to single stack HBM2 would have noticeably reduced the cost of such a solution.

Kopite has not provided any more information on the CMP A100 mining card. The current roadmap is to introduce 30HX and 40HX Turing-based models by the end of March with 50HX and 90HX coming in the second quarter.

NVIDIA A100 PCIe, Source: NVIDIA

Source: @kopite7kimi