Sheer demand for graphic cards results into increase of its price for everyone but cryptocurrency miners.
By Sofiko Abeslamidze
Updated
2 mins read
Nowadays graphic cards considered a quite frequent tool for mining amidst blockchain community. Along with cryptocurrency’s exposition comes the new wave of interest into GPUs. Given experts opinion, the Nvidia’s products win the respect throughout the industry not just for gaming. It is also listed as a turnkey solution for mining due to a high hash rate and relatively low energy-consumption.
Development and adoption of cryptocurrency was beneficial for graphic cards manufactures, including Nvidia and its arch-rival AMD, as for the last year revenue reports show significant growth for both companies. For Nvidia, in particular, mining boom resulted into 56% jump from projecting income.
Intended to both support miners and multiply further profits, well-known chip producer Nvidia has recently updated the licensing agreement for customer use of GeForce software. According to the last amendment, the company prohibited the usage of its GeForce or Titan Chips to large data centers unless they are processing blockchain.
On the official site, the renewed version reveals:
“No Datacenter Deployment. The software is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.”
In public announcement the company emphasized the detailed graphic chips were exclusively designed to deliver services for individual customers in compliance with limited capacity for operation process.
Nvidia spokesperson suggested large corporations to pay attention to its enterprise-level products such as Tesla V100 that perfectly attended to run the most common for data centers applications like artificial intelligence tests.
He also added: “We recognize that researchers often adapt GeForce and Titan products for non-commercial uses or other research uses that do not operate at data center scale. Nvidia does not intend to prohibit such uses.”
However, the price gap between two products is significant, while market supply for GeForce cards estimates around $700, Tesla will costs just under $10.000.
Off Nvidia, mentioned circumstances sheds a new light on its major competitor, AMD. Fully recovering from its misfortune with Baidu project, the second larger chips producer should not miss the opportunity to storm new hills.
Sofiko is a freelance fintech copywriter at Coinspeaker. With a Bachelor degree in International Business and Economics, Sofiko has been deepening her knowledge of an agile innovative industry primary focusing on the robust blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. As a bank employee, Sofiko particularly keens on crypto and blockchain integration into the established banking systems.
