The largest manufacturer of video gas pedals Nvidia decided at the software level to combat the shortage of video cards, which are bought out by miners. In this case, a special series of chips for mining will be developed.
On RTX 3060 graphics cards through drivers hash rate will be cut by 50%. At the same time the company is not going to lose a huge demand from miners. A special chip for cryptocurrency mining Nvidia CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) was announced for them.
During the development of Nvidia CMP engineers optimized the chip for maximum efficiency of mining. Voltages on the chip's cores are lowered, as well as frequencies, but cooling has been improved. In addition, these cards are stripped of video outputs to reduce the cost of production. The mining cards will hit the market as early as the end of Q1, or early Q2.
"Creating specialized products for customers with special needs is the best way to go. With CMP, we will help miners build the most efficient data centers, but keep GeForce RTX graphics cards for gamers," according to the company's blog.
Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics cards will be released on February 25, but will not be as interesting for miners:
"The RTX 3060 drivers will detect video card workloads specific to the Etherium mining algorithm. If such a load is detected, the hash rate will be programmatically limited by about 50%."
Nothing has been said about other mining algorithms yet, but it is possible that restrictions will be introduced for them as well.
In mid-January it was already reported that Nvidia was considering resuming the release of specialized video cards for mining cryptocurrencies. Previously, video cards for mining on graphics chips Nvidia already produced, but for the corresponding gaming video cards GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 no restrictions were introduced.