Many of you are already aware that coin mining GPUs are hitting the market from both AMD and Nvidia. This presents an interesting offer to people looking to invest in an additional mining card to run alongside their conventional gaming pieces in their PC, but since there is either no video output or only a single DVI option on all of these cards, the real market is going to be people building entire rigs exclusively for mining. Either way, I'm hoping it will bring demand and prices down on GPUs for the rest of us.
From PCWorld's June 28 post:
Asus is bringing to market the MINING-P106-6G, based on the GTX 1060, and MINING-RX470-4G, clearly an RX 470.
Sapphire has a nice lineup of 6 cards based on the RX 470 with different memory & clock speeds and power options, and one more based on the RX 560 low-power card.
MSI gets their feet wet with their GTX 1060-based P106-100 Miner 6G.
Inno 3D, EVGA, Zotac, and Colorful are also working on mining cards - some of which will be based on the GP104 (1070) GPU.
Now for the interesting part..
AMD's Ryzen 7 processor lineup sports the 1700, 1700X, and 1800X processors with quite the appealing spec list for the price. One important number to pay attention to is 24 - the number of PCIe lanes supported by the processor. Paired with the X370 chipset, you can get up t0 40 PCIe lanes on your board. That's enough for five potential GPUs in a 5x8 configuration. No more silly x1 to x16 adapters and underutilized cards!
If this isn't enough for you, consider AMD's coming enterprise-class EPYC processors. These are truly the Zen beast AMD has been keeping hidden under the rug. EPYC processors are coming in with some impressive numbers in both core count and price:
These nine are 2P only parts, meaning they are only intended for dual socket boards, but 64 of the 128 PCIe lanes are used for the Infinity Fabric needed to facilitate communication between the chips. While you do end up doubling the total memory support, we're more concerned with price / PCIe lane.
This brings us to the single socket, or P, chips:
With the 7351P still bringing 8 x16 buses at between $700 and $1000 and AMD's support for bifurcation down to x1 with the only limit being 8 PCIe devices per x16, there's a very exciting proposal for having up to 64 x2 devices! VSAN cluster anyone?
So we've got PCIe and bifurcation heaven, mining-specific GPUs, and a cryptocurrency menu packed full of possible coins to mine, but is it worth it?
That's a tough question to answer. The hardware is just now becoming available, and the initial investment and power cost is higher than many of us can even begin to stomach, but the real problem with trying to evaluate the potential profitability of an EPYC-based mining system is a simple lack of benchmarks and data. The initial look at the P106 cards shows that they aren't the game-changer some thought they would be, and EPYC-supporting boards from Gigabyte and Supermicro are lacking some price information and are loaded with more enterprise features than we really need.
In summary, only time will tell if miners will see affordable options to utilize the insane amount of PCIe lanes that AMD's EPYC processors bring to the table, but I'm interested in hearing what you think about it, so leave your comments below!
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