AMD, given the great benefits that Ethereum and Zcash mining is giving it, sells MXM graphics cards for laptops directly to miners, according to some sources have commented to Fudzilla.
A large part of AMD's great financial moment is largely due to the interest and development of large numbers of miners to mine Ethereum, Zcash and LBRY, which have caused the disappearance of the shelves of the highest models of the RX 400 families Series and RX 500 Series. AMD currently has yet to see how the RX Vega for gaming reaches the market, they compete with NVIDIA with a strategy of good performance for a reasonable price, leaving AMD the high-end market.
The rise in the price of Ethereum and Zcash has opened a door through which many have wanted to enter and we have seen how AMD graphics have flown from the market and at some point they have cost an AMD RX 580, double its original price . Despite the electricity costs, the mining of the mentioned cryptocurrencies is very useful with the RX 470/480/570/580, since they offer good mining power and the different BIOS profiles developed to improve power and consumption, they are a great solution, although shortages have caused the GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 1070 to start flying, too.
According to Fudzilla, who has consulted industry sources about this graphics shortage, they say that these sources report that AMD is selling MXM cards directly to miners. The MXM PCIe Modules are reserved for portable equipment, but with some modifications they could be used for mining. The MXM-B are 82mm wide and 105mm long, supporting up to 256bits of memory and would have a maximum TDP of 200W. This would explain how a large number of miners in China have been activated in recent weeks at a time when there is a shortage of graphics.
We must bear in mind that a miner usually has at least six graphics, although special motherboards that support twelve and thirteen graphics cards have already come on the market, so they would be buying a large number of MXM GPUs for mining, giving preference to this market for the large number of products it offers. Distributors on the other hand are raising profit margins amid low demand.
AMD logically forgets about the gaming graphics card market, since it has found a niche that gives it many more benefits and it is foreseeable that it will still take time to return to normality in the gaming market. The AMD RX Vega, which are about to arrive, if they perform well in mining and their consumption is not as high, as it is speculated that it will be, they could last little on the shelves, since the miners would choose to buy them in mass. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks.
Source: Fudzilla
