AMD Navi 22 Cryptomining GPU Smiles for the Camera

[harlan4096]

It looks like Big Navi is about to go cryptomining.

AMD's Navi 22 silicon powers some of the best graphics cards on the market. Apparently, one of the chipmaker's partners has repurposed the die for cryptocurrency mining. VideoCardz today shared photographs of an alleged Navi 22-powered mining graphics card.

In screenshots VideoCardz shared, most of the graphics card's specifications are blurred out, but Navi 22 (aka Nashira Summit) is visible, letting us know that the card was fabricated on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process node. The manufacturing date is March 17, so the graphics card recently came out of the oven. The XFX logo is also clearly stamped on the card. The Navi 22 device reportedly features 2,304 stream processors, pointing to either a rewarmed Radeon RX 6700 or Radeon RX 6700M.

The mining graphics card operates with a fixed 1,300 MHz base clock, which is understandable, since you don't really need high clock speeds for mining Ethereum. It features 10GB of GDDR6 memory at 16 Gbps across a 160-bit memory interface. This is the same memory configuration as on the Radeon RX 6700M, leading us to believe that XFX probably recycled the mobile graphics card into a desktop unit.

According to the screenshot, the Navi 22 graphics card delivered at hash rate of 39.06 MHps in Ethereum. It got as hot as 92 degrees Celsius, which is to be expected for a passively cooled graphics card. For comparison, the mining graphics card's performance is on par with the Radeon RX 5600 XT (39.6 MHps) and in the same alley as the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti LHR (42.9 MHps).

The mysterious graphics card, which appeared in China, features a passive cooler with two 8-pin PCIe power connectors situated at the rear. It's an interesting design because the cooling system and the position of the PCIe power connectors are typically used in AMD's high-performance computing (HPC) products, such as the Radeon Instinct accelerators.

AMD has made it clear that it doesn't have any problems with consumers using its RDNA 2 graphics cards for mining. Although the chipmaker designed Big Navi specifically for gaming, clever people have found ways to adapt RDNA 2 for mining. For example, the Radeon RX 6600 XT has demonstrated a high level of efficiency at mining Ethereum with a hash rate of 32 MHps at a mere 75W.

Now that Nvidia has given the Lite Hash Rate (LHR) treatment to its GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) graphics cards, we wouldn't be surprised to see AMD partners looking to compete. Nvidia also has its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) lineup to compete with though.

The question remains if this Navi 22-based graphics card is the only one that XFX is releasing or if more models are on the way. More importantly, it'll be interesting to see if AMD's other major partners also jump on the Big Navi mining bandwagon.
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