Mining has become a problem for gaming GPU users as they have absorbed all the demand for them and it is a market with the willingness to pay more which means higher profits. Since they don’t know when this situation will end, all market players want to take advantage of this situation.
In the midst of this situation we have the gaming graphics cards from Intel, the ARC Alchemist, which are not going to help but be objects of desire on the part of those who want to mine cryptocurrencies, that either personally or using large mining farms. However, the creators of the x86 ISA have a containment plan, which would be very different from NVIDIA’s CMP HX, i.e. releasing their own graphics cards for mining.
Intel confirms graphics cards only for mining
He did so with the help of Raja Koduri in an interview where the already veteran graphics architect answered a few questions about how Intel is stepping up its foray into gaming hardware and how they intend to prevent mining demand to leave PC gaming fans powerless to take advantage of the new ARC Alchemist architecture. We have to keep in mind that despite the good reputation of the CPU, they don’t have it in the GPU and they have to take up space in people’s mental quota which mining would not achieve.
Well, on the Intel Gaming Koduri channel, he dropped that they were thinking of dedicated hardware for mining, but the engineer didn’t define as a GPU because it wouldn’t run graphics. By the way, we remind you that the NVIDIA CMP HX cannot do it either as the video output is not blinded. Although from the engineer’s words, we can deduce that this architecture for mining would have certain improvements over a conventional GPU for blockchain and configured to be more energy efficient.
What would Intel’s mining hardware look like?
Koduri’s words remind us of the already canceled Intel Xe-HP, which was taken off the roadmaps due to the fact that it no longer had a reason to be in the product line, since the gaming sector was left to the ARC Alchemist and in the face of high performance computing, its bet is the Ponte Vecchio.
It should be noted that the Intel Xe architecture is designed to be fully modular, so it would be easy for them to build a version without the fixed-function graphics hardware. Eliminate texturing units, ray tracing, rasterization, and even accelerators like video codecs and display driver in the process. Instead, keep the Xe cores with the computing power intact.
Unlike games, GPU exploration uses the compute pipeline. Therefore, multiple lists of orders can be maintained. Intel could resurrect the Xe-HP concept with various HBM memory tiles around it. Which has much higher power efficiency than GDDR6 graphics cards.
