Posts Tagged ‘AMD’

Shortage of AMD Radeon RX 500 Series of GPUs on the Market

28, May 2017

With the switch from the RX 400 to the new RX 500 series (even if there is not much difference in hardware), AMD started having issues with availability. Older GPUs have been pretty much sold out where there were some left and the newer 570/580 models are pretty much out of stock everywhere. If there are some units left they are with an inflated price tag, because the people selling them want to make some extra bucks from the lack of availability and high demand. It is not known how long this lack of video cards will continue, but things were slowly progressing towards this negative outcome the whole month.

We are pretty sure that one of the reasons is mining and the recent peak of the price and profitability of Ethereum that inevitably leads to more and more new miners and mining rigs getting built. It seems however that AMD was really not ready for an increased demand after the release of the RX 500 series, even though RX 400 GPUs were already selling a lot. It may take a couple of weeks for things to get back to normal, unless the craze continues and unless AMD is actually having trouble making enough GPUs at the moment to cover the demand. Maybe the fact that the company is preparing for the release of their newer higher-end Vega solutions has something to do with the problem as well.

Miners are already looking at the alternatives of using Nvidia GPUs that are available plenty on the market, because they are not as good deal for Ethereum mining like the AMD cards in terms of price/performance. If you however take out the Ethash algorithm (Dagger-Hashimoto) out of the equation Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance/power usage ratio… just not as good in memory intensive algorithms where GPU power is not required as much. Mining aside, gamers already have no other choice but to go for Nvidia if they are currently in the market for a new video card with AMD GPUs being out of stock.

The people that were mining a couple of years back during the Litecoin craze will most likely remember a similar situation where things got out of control for a while with the exchange rate of LTC exploding. This was only temporary as everyone was rushing to get into mining the top altcoin back then and then the price went down and things started to get back to normal. There are no guarantees that the same situation will happen again though, but don’t forget that we may be heading for a POW to POS switch for Ethereum by the end of the year…

AMD Radeon RX 480 May Not be That Great for Mining

17, Jun 2016

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With less than two weeks left before the official launch date of the highly anticipated AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs that are supposedly coming out on 29th of June with a recommended price tag of $199 USD people are getting anxious to get their hands on the hardware. The speculations are that the RX 480 will be doing great for mining Ethereum while also being quite power efficient and at the announced price it could be the killer ETH mining choice for multi-GPU mining rigs. So what could potentially make the Radeon RX 480 not so great choice for mining after all when the cards start hitting the market at the end of this month?

When AMD announced that the RX 480 will be priced at $199 USD everybody was surprised by the good news, yes, it is not top model GPU offering the highest performance on the market, but for the expected performance the price was great. Unfortunately with the upcoming release on the market we are hearing some not so good news that will make the RX 480 less attractive choice for mining and it is entirely related to the price point. It seems that the $199 USD price tag was indeed too good to be true, we are hearing from different sources that the actual end user prices will be more like 20-30% higher than that. Furthermore initially the availability of the new GPUs will most likely not be able to match the high demand that it is expected, so in the end it seems not very likely that will be able to get your hands on an RX 480 on 29th for $199 USD.

A few days ago AMD has also announced two lower-end Polaris-based models – the RX 470 and RX 460 GPUs that should be even more affordable and still manage to provide good performance (for gaming that is). What you should be more interested in however is the AMD Radeon RX 470 that is expected to be slightly cut down version of the RX 480 GPU, retaining the same PCB and 256-bit memory bus. So the chances that the RX 470 might be able to perform very similar in terms of performance for Ethereum mining like the RX 480 are pretty good and with the right price it might be even more attractive for crypto miners. However while AMD says that the RX 470 and RX 460 should be available at the same time the RX 480 launches, we expect that they will be a bit late with about a week or two on the market.

The focus of the RX 480 was mostly put on the Ethereum GPU mining, but we are still on the speculation phase and nobody knows for sure how much MHS the new GPUs will be able to provide. What you should also wonder however is how well these new video cards based on the 14nm AMD Polaris architecture will perform in other crypto currency algorithms and not just buy them because of possibly good Ethereum performance. With the recent issue with the DAO and the drop of ETH price this has become even more important and you should not forget that Ethereum will be mineable for probably up to a year more and then will be switching to PoS…

AMD Radeon RX 480 (Polaris) is Now Official and Looks Promising

1, Jun 2016

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AMD today unveiled the first of its upcoming Polaris architecture-based Radeon RX series graphics cards – the Radeon RX 480 at a surprising price point, surprising at is it quite affordable compared to what you will have to pay for the latest generation of Nvidia Pascal GPUs. The AMD Radeon RX 480 as well as the other upcoming GPUs are all based on the 14 nm FinFET production process that the Polaris architecture utilizes. As a result what we expect to get is more performance with a lower power usage and at a more affordable price point and AMD delivers just that with the Radeon RX 480. The full specifications are not yet revealed, but we know the cards should be available on the market on June 29th with a price point of just $199 USD for the 4GB edition. The TDP rating of the new RX 480 GPUs is 150W, but we do not know all of the specifications yet, so it is hard to estimate what is the expected performance, especially for mining.

We already know that the RX 480 uses 256-bit memory bus and will come in 4GB and 8GB VRAM models, so the big question that many Ethereum miners are probably already asking is what performance can we expect from the new cards. Since Ethereum’s Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm is memory intensive one the speculated performance for Ethereum mining for the new AMD Radeon RX 480 is somewhere in between 20 and 30 MHS, hopefully around the full performance that Radeon 280x had with 1GB DAG files or around 26-27 MHS or more, but that is pure speculation for now. So we’ll have to wait and see some real numbers, but we are not going to be surprised if the lower priced RX 480 does manage to outperform the Nvidia GTX 1070/1080 at least for mining Ethereum, making the new Radeon the better solution for mining ETH. What you should not forget however is the fact that Ethereum mining is not going to last forever, sooner or later the coin will switch from PoW to PoS and you would have to switch to a different altcoin maybe with different algorithm where the RX 480 might not be the best choice…


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