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