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Motherboard guys happy, crypto idiots are godsend
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Because of rising demand for mining cryptocurrencies, motherboard players including Biostar, ASRock and China-based Colorful are enjoying increasing shipments of their mining motherboards, according to a Chinese-language Apple Daily report.

    Biostar recently launched its TB250-BTC Pro motherboard that can support up to 12 graphics cards simultaneously and priced at US$124.99. The company pointed out that orders for the motherboard are lined up to the end of September, and it has already asked its production lines to work on a 24-hour rotation shift schedule in order to satisfy demand.

    The company's mining motherboards accounted for 10% of its overall shipments in the first quarter, but the percentage has risen to 20-30% and profits are also expected to increase because of the motherboards' high ASPs, the paper said.

    Currently, 80% of miners are estimated to have come from the Asia Pacific market, with 70% from China and the remaining 30% from South Korea and Southeast Asia countries, noted the paper.

    And this last remark is definitely false. As GPUs are gone almost worldwide this week.

  • 10 Replies sorted by
  • alcomposeralcomposer

    How does that motherboard support 12 GPU? It has 7 PCI-E ports (one of which is full - all others 1x)?

    I suppose you could place a PCI-E splitter, but you could do that with any motherboard.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @alcomposer

    Well, people are lazy. It is just very slow PCI-E x1. For mining it does not matter, as all data remains in card memory.

    Whole point of last crypto currencies is that they are designed to be ASIC resistant due to huge memory and memory speed required.

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    Still don't know how they expect 12 GPU to fit on this motherboard. Now- if it was 7 PCI-E 16x slots then easy.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Still don't know how they expect 12 GPU to fit on this motherboard. Now- if it was 7 PCI-E 16x slots then easy.

    I guess it is special form factor for open mining farms :-)

    Current thing is unprecedented, as before it happened only in 2014 with AMD cards and their usage for bitcoin mining (btw guys who did it and later invested in ASICs and moved along are very rich).

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    I still don't quite understand why we don't have lots of FPGA's as PCI-E cards, as this would seriously increase power of current systems for specialist tasks.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    I still don't quite understand why we don't have lots of FPGA's as PCI-E cards, as this would seriously increase power of current systems for specialist tasks.

    Because FPGA is much less efficient, compared to any modern chip implementations they have big complexity bounds.

    For new crypto currency it is very hard to make any ASIC as it requires resources available only to few leading companies and even in this case it won't bring much profit due to memory speed bounds.

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    I thought FPGA could be very efficient if there was a good software implementation like CUDA or OpenCL for FPGA. As the software is able to re-configure the chip itself it could lead to advanced specific use scenarios, (like 3D rendering, colour grading, encoding etc).

  • robertGLrobertGL

    How much coal has been consumed for crypto-mining?

  • alcomposeralcomposer

    I thought that they were using ASIC now anyway not GPU? ASIC is much more powerful- if not a bit limited to one currencies hashing. When Bitcoin became big I could hardly even find a 7970 GPU (one of the prefered GPU's for bitcoin mining).

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @alcomposer

    ASICs is used for Bitcoin. New currencies are designed such that you need to be international giant to make specialized chips for them.

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