Pictures of NVIDIA’s fastest mining card, CMP 170HX, have appeared online. The pictures were shared by Codefordl on Zhihu. Unlike the majority of the CMP (CryptoMining Processor) cards, whose design is based on board partners’ design, this is not the case with CMP 170HX.
The 170HX is a reworked NVIDIA A100 accelerator with no display connectors or gaming functionality. NVIDIA couldn’t decide what to do with the broken GA100 GPUs, so they started offering them to miners.
As far as the features are concerned, the 170HX will have 4480 CUDA cores (54% of cores in GA100). It will also have 8GB HBM2e memory in four stacks supposedly which is a massive reduction from the 40GB or 80GB capacities offered by various A100 models. The maximum band will be up to 1.493 GB/s.
NVIDIA wanted to make sure that 170HX is useless to gamers and researchers, who could have utilized it instead of the Data Center Ampere series, which is way more expensive. Considering this, they have decided to limit the PCIe interface bandwidth to version 1 and only four lanes (despite physically being 16 lanes).
As per GPU-Z’s data, the card will have a base clock of 1140 MHz and a boost clock of up to 1410 MHz. The board is detected as Device ID of 20C2, and is using NVIDIA 471.41 drivers.
Card’s current BIOS version has no support for memory overclocking (as of July 28), which blocks further power optimizations for mining. Take note that memory speed is the most important thing in mining.
An Ethash algorithm test shows that the card can offer up to 164 MH/s without optimizations. It is almost the same amount NVIDIA stated in its official specification datasheet.