After cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have again reached their highest levels, AMD and its board partners such as XFX now want to get involved in the dedicated mining accelerators for Ether (ETH) and its various derivatives. One of these “graphics cards” now shows VideoCardz.
Navi 12 with 2,304 shaders and 8 GB HBM²
VideoCardz got a slide from a presentation about an” AMD BC-160 “from XFX, which is supposed to be based on the same Navi-12 graphics processor as the Radeon Pro 5600M, the AMD custom SKU for Apple MacBook Pro hangs up.
The graphics chip, flanked by a total of 8 GB and connected with 2,048 bits of HBM², was trimmed to 2,304 shaders and, with its 36 compute units, should achieve a hashrate of up to 72 MH/s when mining Ethereum. The mining accelerator is therefore designed ex works for up to 69.5 MH/s with a comparatively low Total Graphics Power (“TGP”) of 150 watts.
AMD BC-160 already sighted in the wild
Using the popular mining software Ethash, the “AMD BC-160” achieves up to 72, 5 MH/s, as shown by another screenshot from VideoCardz, which already shows the graphics card in a mining rig with a total of eight accelerators.
The AMD BC-160 reaches up to 72.5 MH/s (Image: VideoCardz) Everyone wants a piece of the mining cake
Since Nvidia has already made sales with the CMP-HX series and recently an even faster CMP 170HX with GA100 and HBM2 with 170 MH/s appeared, it is reasonable to assume that AMD would also like to have a piece of the mining pie.
While Intel has just announced that the discrete graphics cards Intel ARC will be released without a mining brake, the major cryptocurrencies are reaching new highs. Bitcoin is currently trading at around EUR 47,800 and has almost broken the EUR 50,000 mark in the last few days, a unit of Ethereum (ETH) currently costs around EUR 3,000.