Reports on Nvidia aiming to repurpose its A100 compute accelerator as a Crypto Mining Processor accelerator surfaced as early as March of this 12 months. The intermediate radio silence has now been damaged, with purported photographs and screenshots of a repurposed A100 surfacing as a rebranded CMP 170HX. There’s loads to chew over, however as this is not an formally introduced product, take the particulars with a bit of salt.
While preliminary studies pointed in the direction of a CMP 220HX branding with efficiency in the vary of 215 MH/s for Ethereum mining, the last end result delivered by the CMP 170HX is barely much less spectacular, with the examined card delivering round 165 MH/s in a 250W envelope. It remains to be extraordinarily spectacular in comparison with the CMP 50HX accelerator that falls in the identical 250 W envelope, although; that card can solely output 45 MH/s — lower than a 3rd of the CMP 170HX’s efficiency. Thus, Nvidia appears to nonetheless have some headroom for an eventual 220HX launch – no less than judging from these specs on supply in the 170HX.
The CMP 170HX is probably going made by way of faulty, harvested chips that did not make it into the firm’s A100 – a beast of a card with 40 or 80 GB of HBM2e reminiscence and packing a grand whole of 6,980 enabled CUDA cores (84% of the in-silicon CUDA cores in the GA100 chip design).
Being a cryptocurrency mining-oriented card, Nvidia minimize every thing that wasn’t strictly vital for typical mining workloads. Besides the aforementioned headless design, the CMP170HX options solely 4,480 CUDA cores (54% of GA100’s design cores). Its HBM2e reminiscence has been diminished to the naked minimal for Ethereum mining, with 8 GB HMB2e throughout two 4 GB stacks, delivering a most of 1,493 GB/s of bandwidth throughout its 4096-bit bus. Nvidia even slaughtered the PCIe bus on this card – the hyperlink is proscribed to PCIe 1.1 x4 (!), thus providing solely 250 MB/s bandwidth throughout the PCIe bus (for reference, fashionable graphics playing cards with PCIe 4.0 x16 obtain 32 GB/s throughout the bus). However, mining workloads aren’t dependant on the bus velocity for efficiency – whereas most different functions customers would possibly need to use these playing cards for (like, say, precise ML and typical HPC workloads) will thus be rendered just about not possible to course of at a excessive sufficient throughput to make it worthwhile.
These alterations enable Nvidia to promote this card solely for cryptocurrency mining, at a premium, whereas retaining establishments, information facilities and even tech-savy prosumers centered on the firm’s A-series choices, additionally at a premium.
GPU-Z screenshots of the card, which has “170hx” added to cowl no matter identify has been assigned to the card in the identifier string, determine it with the 20C2 Device ID. The card was working on Nvidia’s 471.41 driver model and core clocks are set at an 1140 MHz base and 1410 MHz enhance. This is probably going in the candy spot for efficiency and energy consumption for this specific accelerator since reminiscence speeds, not core speeds, are the defining issue in cryptocurrency mining efficiency. This additionally allows a completely passive design since in-memory processing is much less heat-intensive than in-core processing.
CMP is Nvidia’s crypto-specific accelerator lineup, constructed to take some of the pressure off the firm’s gaming-oriented GeForce lineup by streamlining the playing cards’ design and extracting the bits and items that are not required for crypto mining operations, similar to the show outputs. All of Nvidia’s CMP lineup, together with the CMP 30HX, 40HX, 50HX and 90HX (with relative efficiency scaling with the product numerals), are headless.
Now there’s another instrument to draw miners in the direction of these graphics playing cards as a substitute of our basic GeForce graphics playing cards. Even with Nvidia’s Lite Hash Rate efficiency limitation, these playing cards nonetheless current attention-grabbing venues for mining revenue. However, do not anticipate these CMP 170HX to be scooped up in droves by mainstream miners: While its pricing is not at present recognized, the GA100 die inside is pricey for Nvidia to provide. However, it’ll positively be an interesting answer to larger-scale mining operations — it does qualify as one of the most effective and higher-performing mining options in a single card at present out there in the market.
