AMD May be Working on their Own Crypto-Specific GPUs

With Nvidia recently confirming that cryptocurrency-specific mining graphics cards were in development, it appeared to be good news all around really! It would, hopefully, provide miners with what they needed while not making, or at least alleviating, any particular impact on the gaming-based GPU designs. Well, in something that could potentially be even better news, following a report via Videocardz, it is believed that AMD is now working on their own mining-orientated graphics cards.

AMD Navi-12

Following a data mine into AMD’s latest GPU drivers, a reference to ‘Navi-12’ has been noted. Based on prior rumours of a Navi-11 mining GPU seen last October, it is believed that this new reference is a pre-emptive hint that Cryptocurrency graphics cards from Team Red are on the way! – Why do we know that they’re for mining? Well, apparently, they won’t feature any display output ports!

“Handle new NV12 SKU” – This change is in reference to Navi 12 coming to market and doesn’t support Video Core Next (VCN) video support as it’s going to be a headless SKU. Details on this headless Navi 12 SKU remain light and haven’t heard anything about it recently from AMD. This may be similar to the previously reported on Navi 10 “Blockchain” graphics card. That “blockchain” SKU added to the Linux driver at the end of last year also disabled the DCN and VCN driver paths since it’s obviously headless. Given NVIDIA just announced their CMP mining cards perhaps AMD will soon be announcing these Navi 1x Bitcoin mining SKUs…” – Michael Larabel, Phoronix

What Might we Expect?

One popular theory is that AMD has been repurposing it’s last-gen Radeon 5700 XT and 5800 XT graphics cards for these new mining-specific designs. Albeit, with this fresh information, it is now being suggested that they might look to transition this development onto their recently “released” Radeon 6000 platform.

Either way though, if AMD and Nvidia can start pumping out GPUs that are better at mining than gaming GPUs, it can only lead to good things for us humble gaming consumers!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!