AMD product manager Nish Neelalojanan answered firmly that AMD has no plans of limit any applications including mining during an interview with PCGamer. This follows news about NVIDIA’s hash rate limiter for mining.
The short answer is no.
“The short answer is no,” was the response of Neelalojanan when asked about the possibility of a mining limiter in a briefing call for the Radeon RX 6700 XT. He goes on to say that ย “We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter.” And further expands with the quote below:
That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself.”
The emphasis on gaming workloads rings true especially when discussing features like Infinity Cache which improves performance by increasing cache utilization in exchange for memory bandwidth, something is really of importance for mining.
AMD’s new RDNA2 graphics card aren’t stellar mining cards with the Radeon RX 6900 XT doing around 69MH/s in Ethereum which is equivalent to the previous mainstream offering from AMD, the Radeon RX 5700 XT, which is based on the previous-gen RDNA architecture. Demand for AMD’s newer Radeon 6000 cards are particularly not that high with regards to mining in comparison to NVIDIA’s ~120 MH/s on the RTX 3090. AMD has been reportedly working on their own mining cards particularly using their older RDNA architecture.