GPU

A crypto mining farm has seen an untimely end thanks to a fire in a town in northern Thailand. A report claims that “72 servers” were destroyed, although images issued by local emergency services make it difficult to work out whether the burned-out bitcoin farm was utilizing much-wanted GPUs or ASIC miners.

Names of upcoming Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs seem to have been confirmed in system files from a test Intel driver. The driver lists names such as Arc A380, Arc A350, Arc A370M, Arc A350M, and Xe A200M, which are likely to be low-end parts. We are also getting to hear that the upcoming DG3 Elasti Battlemage lineup will transition to a multi-GPU architecture in 2023 similar to AMD's RDNA 3.

Nvidia surprised everyone by announcing the GeForce RTX 2050 via a press release. Its specifications are quite puzzling, especially for a graphics card that will hit shelves in early 2022, making it Nvidia's most questionable launch so far

In the midst of a GPU supply crisis that's seen consumer GPU prices soar by 300 percent or more, crypto influencer @jaxson_davidson shared a video in which he shows off a mining farm with hundreds upon hundreds of GeForce RTX 3070 Founders Edition GPUs, all apparently sourced off-market, directly by him from NVIDIA, raising questions about the underlying reasons for today's GPU price inflation.

Nvidia has officially announced the GeForce RTX 2050, MX550 and MX570 mobile graphics cards. The RTX 2050 will feature 4GB of VRAM and a 45W TDP. Nvidia has not divulged the MX550 and MX570's specifications and stated that all three cards will be available for purchase in early 2022.

Apart from two "Elasti" dGPU models that may be released in 2023, the NUC driver also mentions iGPU models for quite a few Alder Lake successors, including Raptor Lake-S, Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. Rumor has it that the "Elasti" family will feature high-end GPUs that could match AMD's RDNA3 and even RDNA4 models.

Twitter stalwart @kopite7kimi has just revealed that the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti will feature a GA106-150 GPU with 2560 CUDA cores and 8GB of VRAM, while the RTX 3050 will use a GA106-140 GPU with 2304 CUDA cores and 4GB of VRAM. Nvidia is expected to unveil both graphics cards at CES 2022.

Nvidia is collaborating with Digital Storm, NZXT and Staszek "Tips" Wiertelak to give away three Matrix Resurrections-themed gaming PCs to three lucky users. Five others will get a custom GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card.

This model is now expected to launch in late January 2022 with 384-bit memory bus, 912 GB/s memory bandwidth, 8690 CUDA cores and a TGP of around 350 W. The performance bump over the 10 GB version is supposed to boost Ethereum hash rates by 20%.

According to reports, NVIDIA has shelved the RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB and the RTX 3080 12 GB, tipped to arrive on December 17. The pair may now arrive after CES 2022, where NVIDIA is expected to reveal the RTX 3050 and RTX 3090 Ti.

Twitter user @Redfire75369 discovered a research paper on using low-precision GPU compute for deep learning with GPU-N. The mystery card appears to be a single-die GH100 NVIDIA Hopper GPU, offering a mammoth 779 TFLOPs of FP16 compute.

ASUS has confirmed how much the RTX 2060 (12 GB) should cost, a week after its supposed on-shelf date. The rehashed graphics card has between a €494 and €499 list price depending on the model, making it barely any cheaper than the RTX 3070. The high prices make the RTX 2060 (12 GB) more expensive than the RTX 3060 Ti, too.

EVGA has reportedly outed a firmware update for GeForce RTX 3080 Ti LHR models that addresses the "power lock" issue on these cards while mining. With the new firmware installed, miners found that their 3080 Ti LHR cards delivered up to 91 MH/s in Ethereum workloads.

XFX recently launched the BC-160, a cryptocurrency mining-oriented card built around the Navi 12 GPU. The BC-160 is currently available exclusively in China and delivers a hashrate of over 70 MH/s in Ethereum, thanks to its fast HBM2 memory.

Intel Arc Alchemist's segmentation, lineup, and launch timelines have leaked. It is now becoming clear that Intel is targeting Nvidia RTX 3070 / RTX 3070 Ti on the desktop with the 512 EU SKU while aiming up to the RTX 3080 on the laptop side depending on TDP configuration. Intel aims to price the cards about 10% lesser than equivalent Nvidia offerings while looking to extract 10% more performance as drivers mature.

A mining farm was recently spotted on Flexpool that appears to incorporate GeForce RTX 4090 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 7000 GPUs. While there's no way to verify if the parts are indeed next-gen AMD and NVIDIA hardware, the farm's 4.3 TH/s hash rate suggests that high-performance parts are at work.

Lenovo accidentally listed the AMD RX 6500 XT as a discrete GPU option for its Legion T5 prebuilt gaming PCs. According to the Lenovo document, the RX 6500 XT will feature 4GB of GDDR6, in line with previous leaks.

After Moore's Law is dead leaked die shots of the Intel Arc Alchemist GPU die, @Locunza_ took measurements, discovering that Alchemist's 396mm2 GPU die is roughly the same size as GA104, the GPU powering the GeForce RTX 3070 and 3070 Ti.

The Bitcoin mining network has demonstrated its resilience in the face of major country crackdowns, as the Total Hash Rate of miners completely recovered to pre-Chinese ban levels on Friday. Analysts are saying that the reason behind this quick recovery of the global Bitcoin mining network was due to a combination of factors. On one hand we had the swift reactions of mining companies which moved to more welcoming countries like Russia, Kazakhstan, or the U.S., and on the other there was the Fed's money printing spree that left investors with tons of cash they had to park somewhere.

The current mobile RDNA2 GPU variants do not seem to get quite enough supplies to threaten Nvidia's position, but AMD could solve the supply problem with the alleged 6 nm refreshes expected to launch in early 2022. Rumored to be produced on the TSMC N6 nodes, the RX 6000S models should come with increased energy efficiency and higher core clocks.

NVIDIA has confirmed that it will be attending CES 2022 in Las Vegas, with an Executive Keynote scheduled for January 4. Reportedly, NVIDIA will unveil the RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB before the end of the 2021, but it, the RTX 3050 and RTX 3090 Ti will not launch until late January.

Gamers who have a hard time finding an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 12GB may see stock and availability improve after Christmas, even though cryptominers will likely claim most of these GPUs for themselves.

Gigabyte has filed a listing with the EEC, confirming many different variants of its upcoming RTX 3080 12 GB and RTX 3070 Ti 16 GB GPUs. There are ten SKUs of the new RTX 3080 and six of the still unannounced RTX 3070 Ti.

Gigabyte has submitted RX 6500 XT SKUs with the EEC. The listings confirm that Gigabyte will be one of AMD's partners to sell RX 6500 XT custom cards, and that the RX 6500 XT has 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM.

Early gaming benchmarks have shown that the RTX 2060 (12 GB) is no match for the RTX 2060 SUPER. The nine triple-A games underline that the new Turing-based graphics card offers barely any performance improvements over the original RTX 2060 too, despite having a more powerful GPU and double the VRAM.

NVIDIA has released the RTX 2060 (12 GB) to absolutely no fanfare. There are hardly any launch day reviews either because neither NVIDIA nor its partners have sent out any press samples. An MSRP remains elusive too, but retailers are already offering the RTX 2060 (12 GB) for nearly €700.

A French retailer has revealed pricing for the RTX 2060 (12 GB), NVIDIA's latest desktop graphics card. The last-generation model will not come cheap and will officially be available from December 7.

NVIDIA may have just announced the RTX 2060 (12 GB), but we may only be 6 weeks away from the launch of the RTX 3050. The entry-level card is believed to feature 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM and a GA106 GPU, the same graphics chip found in the RTX 3060.

A TechPowerUp report indicates that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 12GB will not have a pricey Founders Edition variant from NVIDIA. Instead, the refreshed Turing card will be an AIB-exclusive, which could potentially help keep pricing under control.

Members of Congress recently introduced the Stopping Grinch Bots Act. If it passes through, this piece of legislation could make it illegal for scalpers to use bots and scripts to hoard electronics for resale.

According to a report by Jon Peddie Research (JPR), AIB graphics card shipments increased by 25 percent over 2021, despite the apparent global silicon shortage. This raises questions about the impact of crypto mining and scalping on cards meant to reach the consumer market.

A new report from Digitimes tells us that Intel and TSMC are close to negotiating a deal for the latter's 3nm capacity. Pilot production for the node has already kicked off, and it is expected to churn out 40,000 wafers per month starting in H2, 2022.

AMD will reportedly launch the Radeon RX 6500 XT sometime in mid-January 2022. Its younger sibling, the Radeon RX 6400, will follow suit sometime in March.

More details about the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 and Intel Arc A380 have emerged. While the RTX 3050 is tipped to launch with 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM, the Intel Arc A380 could come in with 6 GB. The Intel Arc A380 is thought to offer GTX 1650 SUPER levels of performance, too.

Gigabyte could soon hike the prices of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, RX 6800, RX 6700 XT, RX 6600 XT and the RX 6600. It is expected to be effective in the coming weeks.

NVIDIA has unveiled the RTX 2060 (12 GB), a mixture of the RTX 2060 (6 GB) and RTX 2060 SUPER. Essentially the RTX 2060 SUPER with the RTX 2060's memory bus, the RTX 2060 (12 GB) also has a higher TGP than the pair. The RTX 2060 (12 GB) will be available as a Founders Edition card and from AIBs.

Sapphire has released the GearBox 500 eGFX solution, a GPU enclosure with a built-in Pulse RX 6600 XT graphics card. The enclosure comes equipped with a 40 Gbps Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port capable of 60 W Power Delivery (PD), two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and a gigabit ethernet port. A 500 W PSU powers the eGFX solution.

Spanish outlet El Chapuzas Informaticos recently discovered that Sapphire was selling RDNA2-based GPUs under its GPRO brand off retail channels. These are sold exclusively to high-volume crypto mining clients at a time when consumer GPU prices remain sky.

Innosilicon plans to release mid-range Type A Fantasy 1 cards with up to 16 GB of GDDR6x 128-bit VRAM that could match the Nvidia RTX 3070, while the Type B dual-GPU variants with up to 32 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6X VRAM could take on Nvidia's and AMD's high-end offerings.

Nvidia's upcoming RTX 3090 Ti card will use the complete GA102-350 core with 10,752 CUDA cores and 21 Gbps memory speeds. The RTX 3090 Ti is expected to use Micron's latest 2 GB GDDR6X memory modules that can run at 21 Gbps. Combined with a 384-bit wide bus, the RTX 3090 Ti will be the first GeForce card with a 1 TB/s memory bandwidth.

According to a report by DigiTimes, factories in Taiwan are already ramping up to help NVIDIA bring out its RTX 4000 series gaming GPUs in 2022, based on 5nm lithography. Notably, the report indicates that "Hopper," rather than being a new GPU generation, will be an MCM architecture for datacenter and HPC use cases.

According to reports, the GeForce RTX 2060 12 GB will offer more than double the VRAM of the RTX 2060. Instead, the 12 GB card will match the RTX 2060 SUPER in many areas, including CUDA cores.

@theBryceIsRt, an Intel product manager and community advocate for the company's upcoming ARC graphics cards, recently tweeted that fourth-gen Arc Druid GPUs could hit the market as early as 2025.

A new leak tells us that the desktop version of the GeForce RTX 3050 will run a GA106 GPU with 8GB of VRAM and perform on par with the GTX 1660. Nvidia is expected to launch it and the higher-specced GeForce RTX 3050 Ti sometime in Q2, 2022.

GALAX recently announced the launch of the GALAX GeForce RTX 3060 Metaltop Mini FG. The diminutive single-fan card will deliver reference GeForce RTX 3060 performance in a compact package, ideal for SFF builds.

VideoCardz has detailed what specifications to expect from the Radeon RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT, two upcoming entry-level graphics cards. The website has revealed a release window for the pair, too.

The Radeon RX 6000 series may continue to sell for well above MSRP, but AMD is pushing their prices even further. Reportedly, AMD is to push higher TSMC wafer costs onto AIBs, with 10% price increases felt across all Radeon RX 6000 GPUs.

It also features an AMD RX 550 GPU, 16 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM plus a 512 GB SSD and can run emulated Windows apps and games, including Crysis. Users can replace the SSD and GPU to boost performance.

We may be a year on from the arrival of AMD and NVIDIA's latest desktop graphics cards, but their prices are still nowhere near MSRP. As research shows, the price of a GeForce RTX 30 or a Radeon RX 6000 series card will set you back roughly 1.9x more than NVIDIA and AMD state they should cost.