AMD's opinion on Bitcoin

[rat]

just curious. has amd/ati ever made an official comment on bitcoin - and mining?

they gotta know that it's driving a nice chunk of their sales.


and with cheaper/higher powered fpgas coming into the picture do you think they will modify their cards to accommodate it?

or could they care less?

[jimbobway]

One time they mentioned the word "mining" in some web description for the GPU.  Other than that, no.

[kwoody]

I would say AMD didn't focus on mining and hashing when producing the 7xxx series of cards. Basis for this being a simple calculation of numbers. Only the 7970/7950/7870/7850 have more shader cores than their predecessors. The 7770 has fewer shader cores than the 6770. The "miner" market has always been a small niche to AMD, and doesn't respresent anywhere near 50% of their client base. If anything, nVidia decided their cards need to be more miner friendly than they have been in the previous generation. Compare the GeForce 580 with the GeForce 680; 512 cores vs 1536 cores. GeForce 570 vs GeForce 670; 480 cores vs 1344 cores. It'd be cool if AMD took their defective high-end cards and gimped them on purpose to make them usable, as they did with the defunct 5870 cards, which got turned into limited edition 5830's(1st generation 5830's are a rebranded 5870, same voltage regulator, same physical size, everything). The 5830 remains one of the top mining cards, producing more mhash/$ than anything still on the market; I got 2 for $109 each and they pump out just over 300mhash/s. Maybe turn defective 7970's into 7930's which have their color ROPs cut in half, memory bandwidth reduced etc, but maintain the usability of the GPU itself? Sure would be nice to see a limited edition Tahiti chip pushing out over 400mh for say, ~$179.

The bottom line for GPU manufacturers will always be to conform to the needs of their respective majority client base; gamers.

[Gabi]

Well, AMD has no reason to focus on mining. soon we will have ASICs