All this talk about "mining specific" GPU's

[Eyedol-X]

I think the reason why they are doing this is not to make money selling these "mining only" GPUs but I think its to protect their profits during a mining crash period.

Right now if mining crashed. Market would be flodded with cheap RX 580's. 2 of those would be the equivalent to a GTX 1080. So for maybe 2 quarters of the year, their sales would suffer from retail sales.

But since they started introducing these "mining only" GPUs and in 1 year the bubble bursts. Their retail sales might not suffer as bad, since no gamer will buy these GPUs with no display out. Maybe it'd be good for Crossfire/SLI combined with a retail GPU model.

It's a definite possibility of that plus the manufacturers have publicly stated that they are "dedicated" to the gaming industry and right now, Gamers can't get a "gaming" GPU for the most part that's under $400.

I believe they think they can swing miners with a cheaper mining only GPU and miners will quit buying the $250-$350 video cards for mining. If they understood what drives miners decisions on GPU's, they would have a better plan or definitely be coming to the table with a better GPU than what has been leaked already.

[leowonderful]

It's a delicate balance and if it breaks, manufacturers will pay a price. Last time GPU hype was in full swing and crashed, the 200 series AMD cards were rebranded to create a 'new' generation of cards, the 300 series. I appreciate the effort on AMD and Nvidia's side, but I really do not think this will do much. With problems like low resale, I only really see bumping production the way to go, which is still risky.

[mcturkey]

The only reason I think mining specific GPUs will come out is because of the number of businesses adopting the Ethereum blockchain for various uses. I don't see them being optimized for machine learning or other sorts of tasks, because that would cut into the professional market too much, but a blockchain mining optimized card does make sense for enterprise use.

[jpoker272727]

Can you mine with just CPU?

Yes, you can. But that is not recommended, you more are wasting the time mining with CPU rather than getting any (real) profit.

There are some coins that can be mined with CPU but it doesn't worth, some mine XMR some mine some other but at the end GPU mining is way too far.

[Aquazi]

The mining-specific GPUs are fake. I'm almost 100% sure. All the evidence comes from shady sources, the pictures all look fake, even the "real" ones. Someone is trying to influence the price of altcoins or the gpu mining card market.

Indeed, this is pure bullshit.

Maybe some distributors are faking IOs to make us believe this is real, but not a single GPU brand announced nor even hinted to those cards existence.

As a Sapphire PR guy stated it the other day, they don't have anything against miners, but the gpu shortages are hurting their brand.

There is only one solution to this: AMD/Nvidia/TSMC/GF producing more chips.

Also, as stated many times, the only way those cards can be better for miners is if they consume less and cost less than videogamers counterparts.

All I see are "mining cards" which are identical except for I/Os and much overpriced.

This smells like the "mining PSUs" you can find on many websites, fake as fuck bait for uninformed customers.