Defective PS5 chips arrive at cryptocurrency miners

news hardware Defective PS5 chips arrive at cryptocurrency miners

This is an aspect that we speak very little about, but which is nonetheless very real. Not all chips are created equal. In a production cycle, there are the processors that can push their limits… and the bugs. The former are sold at extortionate prices in overclocker circles. Seconds often find a second life in products that are completely different than what they were originally intended for. The PS5, whose chip (processor and graphics card) is produced by AMD, is of course one of them.

AMD is doing something new with missed PS5 processors

ASRock, a well-known PC maker brand, recently introduced a new product dedicated to cryptocurrency mining. It is a server element that can accommodate up to 12 AMD BC-250 cards dedicated to this task. Nothing special at the moment, except that ASRock was not aware until then that there was more than this interest in this avant-garde market.

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VideoCardz has some additional information. The AMD BC-250 card would, in truth, consist of the PlayStation 5’s SoCs that would not have passed their line inspections. We’re talking about APUs that may lack certain cores, that may not support certain high frequencies, or that lack certain features related to the audio signal, for example.

Neither the first nor the last

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this type of card appear in the market. Just for the SoC of the PS5, AMD has already put up for sale its 4700S platform, which takes it while allocating various components (like RAM). The same happened with the Xbox One SoC integrated into the AMD A9-9820 system.

It’s just a relatively elegant and fun solution for not messing up chips that don’t pass all the certifications required for consoles. And now, one question might stay in your mind for a long time: is the chip built into your console one of the most powerful of its production or the weakest? You will never know.