Analyst Christopher Rolland recently confirmed Bitmain’s completed development of a new ASIC miner for Ethereum (and similar cryptocurrencies), and thusly reduced stock targets for both AMD and NVIDIA. According to Rolland, Bitmain’s ASIC may eat into GPU demand by cryptomining companies, as the ASIC will outperform GPUs in efficiency for the hashing power.
Rolland noted that this may, obviously, reduce demand for GPUs for mining applications, highlighting that an approximate 20% of AMD and 10% of NVIDIA sales revenue has recently come from mining partners.
For our readers and viewers, the most immediate relief would be in potential GPU demand reduction. Gaming machines have become impossibly expensive to build, by comparison to previous years, with thanks to increasing Flash and GPU customer cost. We’re hopeful that Bitmain’s address to Ethereum-specific ASIC mining will make for more cards making it to retail channels. Presently, many manufacturers are selling straight to large mining operations, as are some retailers (according to our sources), which indicates that a hefty percentage of overall product never makes it to retailers for consumer purchasing.
Rolland lowered share pricing expectations to $7.50 for AMD (from $13) and to $200 for NVIDIA (from $215), citing gaming demand for cards as persisting past mining demand, but heavily weighting nVidia in this citation.
Although this new Bitmain ASIC won’t replace GPUs for all mining, it could replace them for most Ethereum (and similar) mining, similar to what ASICs did for BTC mining many years ago.
Editorial: Steve Burke