Are we about to see a return of crypto mining wreaking havoc on PC hardware prices? Let's hope not, but there are already signs that mining activity is driving up the prices of some CPUs.
Yes, processors, not GPUs as has been the case in the past, and specifically, we are talking about AMD Ryzen chips, high-end models of the Ryzen 7000 family.
What is happening is that the recent rise in the value of Bitcoin has had a knock-on effect on the prices of other alternative cryptocurrencies, some of which are suitable for mining with a robust CPU.
Enter the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X, a 16-core processor that excels in those types of mining workloads, thanks to the AMD CPU's support for AVX instructions (which Intel Core CPUs don't offer since Alder Lake) and its abundant L3 cache. . The icing on the cake for miners is also Ryzen's energy efficiency.
With the crypto globe rising rapidly at the moment, what this means is that, as Wccftech points out, money can be made mining dark coins like Qubic, to the tune of $3 per day currently. (That is profit obtained after electricity costs of running the Ryzen 9 7950X, assuming it's 170W, according to tech site calculations).
Compared to an RTX 4090 graphics card, it offers a daily profit of up to $1.90, with much higher power consumption to boot (450W). So you can see why people are now looking at CPUs instead of GPUs in some scenarios.
As a result, looking at the retail landscape in the US, the Ryzen 9 7950X is sold out online at Newegg, Best Buy, and Micro Center; even in-store pickup is only an option at some of the latter's stores, with AMD. The flagship was also mostly sold out in physical stores.
Additionally, the price of the 7950X has gone up, at least with Newegg, to $741 in the US (but not at the other retailers, we should note).
Analysis: Zen 5 and the art of cryptomining
Okay, this all sounds pretty bad, but really, how worried should we be about this apparent development?
Well, on the brighter side, it's still early days and this could just be a temporary spike in interest in crypto mining. When Bitcoin (inevitably) experiences its next crash and these altcoins also deflate, the situation with AMD's high-end Ryzen processors should normalize again.
Additionally, we should note that this only applies to the top CPUs in the Ryzen 7000 family, and outside of the highest tiers, the processor market is not affected. Obviously, Intel CPUs are also unaffected as they lack the mentioned strengths (AVX) as described above.
Whether this cryptocurrency rise continues, or at least maintains much of its momentum over a longer period, it raises some troubling questions. AMD has next-gen CPUs coming out later this year and as a hardware leaker, Keplerclaims on X (formerly Twitter), those Zen 5 chips have twice the AVX-512 performance of the current Zen 4 silicon.
Which means that Ryzen 9 models for the next-gen desktop launch could be highly sought after by miners, and stock, which may be tight at the highest levels anyway to begin with, will disappear very quickly. (Enter the price gougers, who also emerge from the general hotbed of PC villainy.)
All of which could wreak havoc on AMD's Zen 5 launch, at least at the high end, leading to speculation about LHR processors (chips with their performance restricted for mining tasks, as happened with GPUs at the height of the last mining boom). That speculation is mostly a joke at this stage, of course, but it makes clear that this is clearly becoming a concern.
For AMD, anyway, for Intel it could be a golden opportunity, as its next-generation Arrow Lake chips will apparently no longer support AVX-512 (at least according to current leaks), so they won't be seen affected. in the same way. This could push many consumers towards the Intel side of the equation in the high-end CPU space for desktop PCs, purely out of necessity, depending on how the mining situation develops, naturally.
Via PC Gamer
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