AMD Not Prioritize Mining Cards Over Gaming GPUs, Says CFO

AMD, along with other chip manufacturers, has struggled to keep up with the high demand for GPUs due to crypto mining. 

The past year has been hard on those looking to buy gaming graphic processing units (GPUs). The same high-powered units that are used in HD gaming applications also happen to be the GPU of choice for cryptocurrency miners worldwide. As the mining of cryptos such as Bitcoin becomes more and more difficult, more and more processing power is required to achieve the same goal.

Due to this, there has been a rush on GPUs in the last year with AMD, Nvidia, and other manufacturers struggling to keep pace. AMD has come under heavy pressure because of how poor its ability to meet the growing demand has been. Some even accused the company of prioritizing mining cards over gaming chips. The pandemic was another root cause of this shortage as the world’s population demanded more home electronics and entertainment devices across the board. 

During the recent Deutsche Bank Technology Conference, CFO of AMD Devinder Kumar said that AMD was not prioritizing GPU cryptocurrency miners when asked directly about it. Kumar’s response was “crypto, negligible. That’s not a priority for us. We do not prioritize our products or make them for the crypto folks is not for the gamers, and that’s a high priority from that standpoint. What’s driven the growth, as you know, we had the Radeon 6000 Series high-end GPUs introduced very competitive and that is driving the growth in the GPU space.” 

Crypto-specific cards might be the answer

Nvidia has suffered through the same issue as its competition and is tackling it in a rather reasonable way. The company began to produce and market GPUs that were specifically designed for cryptocurrency miners. Nvidia creating a distinct separation between the two should help alleviate the rush on gaming GPUs that users are scrambling to purchase. 

The crypto-mining processors (CMPs) that are now being sold aren’t as sophisticated as their gaming counterparts because they don’t need to be. Because they can’t be used for conventional graphics-related tasks, they will not flood the GPU secondary market. CMP cards can’t be used for graphics-related tasks are therefore won’t flood the secondary market with GPUs.

Another step that Nvidia has taken to combat this issue is to nerf its currency line of GPUs to make them less suited to the task of mining cryptocurrencies. Due to this, they are only effective as gaming cards.

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