On swirling news that Nividia (inventor of the GPU) has implemented a performance limiting mechanism to restrict Ethereum mining on it’s newer cards (and accidentally releasing a driver that unlocks it), AMD has confirmed that it has no plans to limit mining performance.

During a Radeon RX 6700 pre-briefing call Nish Neelalojanan (AMD Project manager) was asked a question regarding limiting performance on AMD cards for cryptocurrency mining and he responded saying “The short answer is no, we will not be blocking any workload, not just for mining for that matter”.

Nish stopped short of announcing direct support for mining, adding “With that said, there are a couple of things, 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. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself.”

“All our optimization, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we’ve optimised everything for gaming. Clearly gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it’s not going to be ideal for mining workload. That all said, in this market, it’s always a fun thing to watch.”

Nvidia stock (NASDAQ: NVDA) has taken a nose dive since it’s controversial February announcement, dropping from a $613 high to a $463 low on March 8th, 2021. As of today NVDA is trading at $508.90.

Miners appear in the clear for now with AMD, them continuing to upload this stance remains to be seen. If an anonymous is permitted to be sentient, it is my opinion that Nvidia has taken an unethical stance on cryptocurrency mining. Whether it is trying to ease the burden on gamers is of no importance, as cryptocurrency mining has played a huge part in the widening success of Nvidia the past decade Nvidia should embrace the future, not lock it out.

Restriction breeds innovation.

-Anonymous