NVIDIA had a solid Q3, thanks to growth in both the Graphics and Data Center segments. Although the limited quantity of the next-gen Ampere GPUs is a concern, there’s another thing that NVIDIA probably doesn’t want you to know. According to a report from RBC Capital, cryptominers contributed $175 million to NVIDIA’s Q3 revenue via graphics card and ASIC purchases.
This may be rather insignificant compared to the company’s overall revenue of $2.79 billion from the Graphics and Gaming Business, but you need to remember that the RTX 20 series parts perform rather mildly in mining. AMD’s Navi 10 (Radeon RX 5700 series) offer a notably better price-performance ratio compared to the Turing parts.
With the next-generation though, NVIDIA’s hardware is much attractive for miners, especially the RTX 3080, thanks to its high bandwidth which improves the mining performance. At the moment, the Ampere cards are out of miners’ as well as gamers’ hands, but later next year when supply improves, we might have another GPU rut on our hands.
To make matters worse, the prices of BitCoin and Ethereum are expected to grow even further next year. The primary reasons imminent launch of the Ethereum 2.0 network and the impressive success of the DeFi (decentralized finance) sphere.
In case you’re wondering, BitCoin/Eth prices are already sky-high, with the former trading at $18K and the latter at $506. Luckily, since AMD’s Big Navi graphics cards have a much lower effective bandwidth than NVIDIA’s cards, they’re much less likely to be targeted to be miners. The RTX 3080 is expected to be the prime target.
