AMD and NVIDIA compete for the Bitcoin mining market: new drivers and new cards are frequently released

Although the price of Bitcoin has declined to a certain extent, the current price is still attractive enough, which has led hardware manufacturers to step up their efforts to compete fiercely for the Bitcoin mining machine market. Previously, foreign media reported that Nvidia is about to launch a special graphics card "Turing" for Bitcoin mining machines, which will be specially used for virtual currency mining. AMD is not to be outdone and recently released a new beta driver, claiming that it has a new optimization for mining and can improve efficiency.

According to foreign media reports, graphics card manufacturer AMD will launch a new software driver specifically for cryptocurrency mining. The website prompts that "Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition Beta for Blockchain Compute" is described as a beta driver that can improve the performance of GPUs used for mining.

Mining is an energy-intensive process by which new transactions are added to the blockchain and new tokens are created as a reward. AMD released the software driver as the rise in the price of cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum has driven demand for GPUs. The release of the driver (software that allows computers to communicate with hardware devices) shows that AMD wants to attract miners, at least in the short term. AMD released the beta version of the driver, stating that "no further updates, upgrades or bug fixes will be supported."

It is also reported that NVIDIA will release the GP102-100 series mining card "Turing" at the GTC conference on March 26. This graphics card is based on the GP102-100 core, has 3200 CUDA cores, a clock frequency of 1582 MHz, and a video memory of 5GB GDDR5X.

The influx of graphics cards into the cryptocurrency space has forced major manufacturers to take steps to meet the growing market demand. In 2017, cryptocurrency miners purchased a total of 3 million graphics cards, with sales reaching $776 million. This can be said to be Nvidia's efforts to ensure the supply of gaming graphics cards when the large-scale use of its graphics cards for virtual currency mining has led to higher prices.