Earlier last month, NVIDIA announced a GPU lineup made exclusively for cryptomining, known as Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, or CMP. In light of the recent boom in the value of Bitcoin and not wanting to miss the bandwagon, it is now being rumoured that AMD is working on making GPU miners based on its RDNA architecture.
To be clear, AMD’s alleged GPU miners are said to be based on the 1st generation Navi GPU architecture, and not its 2nd generation RDNA2. In this case, evidence of the mining-specific GPU was discovered within a set of AMDGPU kernel driver that included some rather notable changes. Specifically, one change indicated a Navi 12 GPU without Video Core Next (VCN) support, meaning that the finished product would be devoid of any ports.
A correlating point to this is that Navi 12 isn’t widely available, nor is it being sold on any Radeon graphics card on the current market. In fact, the GPU was designed for a Radeon Pro 5600M, which in turn was made specifically for the Apple Mac.
At this stage, there is no indication when or if AMD intends on making such a GPU available. That said, it wouldn’t surprise us if such an announcement comes sooner, rather than later.
(Source: TPU, Phoronix, Videocardz)
