The current line of Nvidia CMP (CryptoMining Processor) graphics cards is not very popular with miners, and for several reasons : they are expensive, provide average performance, and come with a very limited warranty. Therefore, it is not surprising that the company received only 260 million dollars in revenue from sales of CMP models in the second quarter, instead of the planned 400 million. However, the widespread availability of the CMP 170HX model could change everything, because it provides performance at the level of three GeForce RTX 3070 or two GeForce RTX 3080.
One of the users in China has already managed to get acquainted with the new product, and it has demonstrated very convincing results in mining operations, although the GPU runs at a very low frequency, there are few CUDA cores, and there is not very much memory either. But the hash rate is 164 MH / s, and this is without any memory subsystem optimizations! And it is not yet possible to increase the frequency of memory chips - this is not allowed by the BIOS. In reality, when the CMP 170HX begins to be sold officially and will be provided with full support from the drivers, the hash rate can be brought to about 200 MH / s.
The CMP 170HX was born out of the rejection of the most powerful GA100 graphics accelerators used in the Nvidia A100 data center accelerators. Actually, the rejection explains the difference in the characteristics of the GPU and memory of the Nvidia A100 and CMP 170HX. So, a mining video card has only 4480 CUDA cores, while the GA100 has 6912 cores in the A100. Instead of 40 or 80 GB of memory, the A100 (different models have different sizes) CMP 170HX received only 8 GB, but this is HBM2e memory with bus with a width of 4096 bits, which gives a throughput of almost 1.5 Gbit / s. The memory subsystem and its bandwidth are critical for mining operations, which is why the CMP 170HX provides such high performance. The graphics processor of the video card operates at a frequency of 1140 MHz, the maximum frequency is 1410 MHz. There is no support for a video card in the Nvidia driver yet (at least in version 471.21 for sure), so the device is recognized as 20C2. However, this does not affect the functionality of the CMP 170HX.
Like other models in the CMP series, the CMP 170HX lacks video outputs. And in order to prevent the video card from being used in the same data centers or at least for games, Nvidia limited its support for the PCIe interface to four lanes.
In general, the CMP 170HX was supposed to go on sale in the second quarter, but, apparently, this did not happen - only now users have got access to this unique model.
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