Before 2009, cryptocurrencies barely existed And as technology has advanced to meet its growing demand, cryptocurrency mining has become a reality for many on their personal computers.
Over the years, the extraction process and its efficiency have improved with the use of better equipment. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been used in the mining process for years, simply because they are more efficient.
On the Asus DIY PC Facebook group, Asus technical marketing manager, Juan José Guerrero III, warned that prices of the company's components would increase during this year.
"We have an announcement on manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) price changes for our series of graphics cards and motherboards," which will go into effect in early 2021, while warning that other models could also be subject to increases. of prices.
“Our new MSRP reflects the increase in component costs, operating costs, logistics activities and maintenance of import tariffs. We have worked closely with our procurement and logistics partners to minimize price increases. We greatly appreciate their continued collaboration and support to the company during this period of unprecedented market change. "
Una of the main causes of this increase in the prices of graphics cards could be the boom observed in the cryptocurrency industry.
In fact, since the launch of GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards, GeForce RTX 3080, GeForce RTX 3070, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 6800, demand has continued to increase and components continue to be sold as fast as they occur.
With the recent upward trend in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices, the best graphics cards are now expected to disappear even faster.
As a reminder, cryptocurrency mining has bolstered demand for GPUs for much of the past year, from which AMD and NVIDIA have benefited greatly from this situation.
For its part, Nvidia trusted in August that cryptocurrency mining had become a great growth engine for GPU manufacturers, while the market for GPUs dedicated to gamers even suffered for many months from the shortage of graphics cards and the increase in the prices of this type of material due to the high demand for traditional GPUs in the cryptocurrency mining market.
In an attempt to solve this shortage, NVIDIA even asked retailers to stop selling your GeForce GPUs to cryptocurrency miners. This situation led AMD and NVIDIA to launch the commercialization of new graphics cards dedicated to mining operations.
And it is that GPU-based mining offers many advantages over the use of the CPU, for example, a standard GPU, such as a Radeon HD 5970, registered processing speeds of 3200 32-bit instructions, which is 800 times the speed of a CPU that it only executes 4 32-bit instructions. It is this property of GPUs that makes them more suitable for cryptocurrency mining, as the mining process requires greater efficiency to perform repetitive calculations. The mining device continually tries to decode the different hashes over and over again, with a single digit changing with each attempt.
GPUs are also equipped with a large number of arithmetic logical units (ALUs), which are responsible for performing mathematical calculations. Thanks to these UALs, the GPU can perform more calculations, which improves the efficiency of the crypto mining process.
The operation of the cryptocurrency mining industry has become a business billionaire and continues to grow. More and more companies are investing in cryptocurrencies and innovating in this area.
Unlike previous years, where graphics cards were vastly improved for the video game industry, game enthusiasts will now have to deal with minors and develop more tricks to further their passion.