AMD Won't Restrict Crypto Miners From Using Its Graphic Cards

Major chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) keeps making headlines amid the battle between crypto miners and PC gamers. Now, the company seems to have made a step forward to become friendlier to those with crypto mining purposes.

AMD Doesn’t Want to Follow Nvidia’s Path

According to a PC Gamer report, citing a product manager from AMD, the chipmaker has zero intentions to block crypto mining operations on its devices. “The short answer is no,” said Nish Neelalojanan, a product manager of the firm.

Crypto miners were concerned about AMD’s possibility of implementing the same measures as its competitor, Nvidia, which recently implemented a limiter on its graphic processor units (GPUs) for ethereum (ETH) mining.

Specifically, Nvidia made the maneuver on the Geforce RTX 3090 graphics cards in the wake of the gaming community’s complaints.

Neelalojanan said:

We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter. That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming, and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate.

PC Gaming Will Remain the Highest Priority, AMD Says

But the AMD product manager further clarified:

However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width, so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself.

That said, Neelalojanan pointed out that AMD’s focus is still on improving its devices by giving gaming the highest priority. AMD Navi 21 chip is capable of handling around 58-64 MH/s for mining ETH.

As Bitcoin.com News reported on March 9, 2021, the Navi 12 GPU won’t support VCN (video core next), a requirement for PC gaming purposes, and making it the proper candidate for crypto mining.