NVIDIA's Crypto Mining (CMP) series of graphics cards are made to work only for one purpose: mining cryptocurrency coins. Hence, their functionality is somewhat limited, and they can not be used for gaming as regular GPUs can. Today, Linus Tech Tips got ahold of NVIDIA's CMP 170HX mining card, which is not listed on the company website. According to the source, the card runs on NVIDIA's GA100-105F GPU, a version based on the regular GA100 SXM design used in data-center applications. Unlike its bigger brother, the GA100-105F SKU is a cut-down design with 4480 CUDA cores and 8 GB of HBM2E memory. The complete design has 6912 cores and 40/80 GB HBM2E memory configurations.

As far as the reason for choosing 8 GB HBM2E memory goes, we know that the Ethereum DAG file is under 5 GB, so the 8 GB memory buffer is sufficient for mining any coin out there. It is powered by an 8-pin CPU power connector and draws about 250 Watts of power. It can be adjusted to 200 Watts while retaining the 165 MH/s hash rate for Ethereum. This reference design is manufactured by NVIDIA and has no active cooling, as it is meant to be cooled in high-density server racks. Only a colossal heatsink is attached, meaning that the cooling needs to come from a third party. As far as pricing is concerned, Linus managed to get this card for $5000, making it a costly mining option.More images follow...

NVIDIA announced the first four Crypto Mining Processor (CMP) cards earlier this year with performance ranging from 26 MH/s to 86 MH/s. These cards were all based on existing Turing/Ampere silicon and featured board partner-designed cooling systems. NVIDIA appears to have introduced a new flagship model with the passively-cooled 170HX that is based on the NVIDIA A100 accelerator which features a GA100 GPU.

This new model is the first mining card to be designed by NVIDIA and features 4480 CUDA cores paired with 8 GB of HBM2E memory which are both considerably less than what is found in other GA100 based products. NVIDIA has also purposively limited the PCIe interface to Gen 1 x4 to ensure the card cannot be used for tasks outside of cryptocurrency mining. The 170HX has a TDP of 250 W and runs at a base clock of 1140 MHz with a locked-down BIOS that does not allow memory overclocking resulting in a hash rate of 164 MH/s when using the Etash algorithm.

During this year's ISC 2021 event, as a part of the company's exhibition portfolio, NVIDIA has decided to launch an updated version of the A100 accelerator. A couple of months ago, in November, NVIDIA launched an 80 GB HBM2E version of the A100 accelerator, on the SXM2 proprietary form-factor. Today, we are getting the same upgraded GPU in the more standard dual-slot PCIe type of card. Featuring a GA100 GPU built on TSMC's 7 nm process, this SKU has 6192 CUDA cores present. To pair with the beefy amount of computing, the GPU needs appropriate memory. This time, there is as much as 80 GB of HBM2E memory. The memory achieves a bandwidth of 2039 GB/s, with memory dies running at an effective speed of 3186 Gbps. An important note is that the TDP of the GPU has been lowered to 250 Watts, compared to the 400 Watt SXM2 solution.

To pair with the new upgrade, NVIDIA made another announcement today and that is an enterprise version of Microsoft's DirectStorage, called NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage. It represents a way of allowing applications to access the massive memory pool built on the GPU, with 80 GB of super-fast HBM2E memory.

When NVIDIA introduced its Ampere family of graphics cards, the GPU lineup's first product was the A100 GPU. While not being a GPU used for gaming, the model is designed with compute-heavy workloads in mind. Even NVIDIA says that "NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU delivers unprecedented acceleration at every scale to power the world's highest-performing elastic data centers for AI, data analytics, and HPC." However, it seems like the GA100 SKU, the base of the A100 GPU, could be used for another task that requires heavy computation and could benefit very much from the sheer core count that the biggest Ampere SKU offers.

According to a known leaker @kopite7kimi (Twitter), NVIDIA could repurpose the GA100 GPU SKU and launch it as a part of the CMP HX crypto mining series of graphics cards. As a reminder, the CMP series is specifically designed for the sole purpose of mining cryptocurrency, and CMP products have no video outputs. According to Kopite, the repurposed GPU SKU could be a "mining monster", which is not too hard to believe given the huge core count the SKU has and the fact that it was made for heavy computation workloads. While we do not the exact specifications of the rumored CMP HX SKU, you can check out the A100 GPU specifications here.

NVIDIA today unveiled the GTC 2020, online event, and the centerpiece of it all is the GA100 scalar processor GPU, which debuts the "Ampere" graphics architecture. Sifting through a mountain of content, we finally found the slide that matters the most - the specifications sheet of GA100. The GA100 is a multi-chip module that has the 7 nm GPU die at the center, and six HBM2E memory stacks at its either side. The GPU die is built on the TSMC N7P 7 nm silicon fabrication process, measures 826 mm², and packing an unfathomable 54 billion transistors - and we're not even counting the transistors on the HBM2E stacks of the interposer.

The GA100 packs 6,912 FP32 CUDA cores, and independent 3,456 FP64 (double-precision) CUDA cores. It has 432 third-generation tensor cores that have FP64 capability. The three are spread across a gargantuan 108 streaming multiprocessors. The GPU has 40 GB of total memory, across a 6144-bit wide HBM2E memory interface, and 1.6 TB/s total memory bandwidth. It has two interconnects: a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 (64 GB/s), and an NVLink interconnect (600 GB/s). Compute throughput values are mind-blowing: 19.5 TFLOPs classic FP32, 9.7 TFLOPs classic FP64, and 19.5 TFLOPs tensor cores; TF32 156 TFLOPs single-precision (312 TFLOPs with neural net sparsity enabled); 312 TFLOPs BFLOAT16 throughout (doubled with sparsity enabled); 312 TFLOPs FP16; 624 TOPs INT8, and 1,248 TOPS INT4. The GPU has a typical power draw of 400 W in the SXM form-factor. We also found the architecture diagram that reveals GA100 to be two almost-independent GPUs placed on a single slab of silicon. We also have our first view of the "Ampere" streaming multiprocessor with its FP32 and FP64 CUDA cores, and 3rd gen tensor cores. The GeForce version of this SM could feature 2nd gen RT cores.

Here's the first picture of a Tesla A100 "Ampere" AIC (add-in card) form-factor board, hot on the heals of the morning big A100 reveal. The AIC card is a bare PCB, which workstation builders will add compatible cooling solutions on. The PCB features the gigantic GA100 processor with its six HBM2E stacks, in the center, surrounded by VRM components, and I/O on three sides. On the bottom side, you will find a conventional PCI-Express 4.0 x16 host interface. Above it, are NVLink fingers. The rear I/O has high-bandwidth network interfaces (likely 200 Gbps InfiniBand), by Mellanox. The tail end has hard points for 12 V power input. Find juicy details of the GA100 in our older article.

Thanks to the sources of VideoCardz, we now have the first picture of the next-generation NVIDIA Tesla A100 graphics card. Designed for computing oriented applications, the Tesla A100 is a socketed GPU designed for NVIDIA's proprietary SXM socket. In a post few days ago, we were suspecting that you might be able to fit the Tesla A100 GPU in the socket of the previous Volta V100 GPUs as it is a similar SXM socket. However, the mounting holes have been re-arranged and this one requires a new socket/motherboard. The Tesla A100 GPU is based on GA100 GPU die, which we don't know specifications of. From the picture, we can only see that there is one very big die attached to six HBM modules, most likely HBM2E. Besides that everything else is unknown. More details are expected to be announced today at the GTC 2020 digital keynote.

NVIDIA is rumored to introduce their next-generation Ampere architecture very soon, at its GTC event happening on May 14th. We're expecting to see an announcement for the successor to the company's DGX lineup of pre-built compute systems—using the upcoming Ampere architecture of course. At the heart of these machines, will be a new GA100 GPU, that's rumored to be very fast. A while ago, we've seen NVIDIA register a trademark for "DGX A100", which seems to be a credible name for these systems featuring the new Tesla A100 graphics cards.

Today, NVIDIA's CEO was spotted in an unlisted video that's published on the official NVIDIA YouTube channel. It shows him pulling out of the oven what he calls "world's largest GPU", that he has been cooking all the time. Featuring eight Tesla A100 GPUs, this DGX A100 system appears to be based on a similar platform design as previous DGX systems, where the GPU is a socketed SXM2 design. This looks like a viable upgrade path for owners of previous DGX systems—just swap out the GPUs and enjoy higher performance. It's been a while since we have seen Mr. Huang appear with his leather jacket, and in the video, he isn't wearing one, is this the real Jensen? Jokes aside, you can check out the video below, if it is not taken down soon.Update May 12th, 5 pm UTC: NVIDIA has listed the video and it is not unlisted anymore.