On January 19, 2022, sales of the budget AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT video card begin with a recommended price of $ 199. But due to the shortage of components and the global boom for mining, it is now impossible to buy practically any video card at the recommended price, especially a budget one.
Therefore, AMD took a non-standard move. She deliberately downgraded the technical characteristics of the new GPU to make it less attractive to miners. That is, AMD deliberately undermines the demand for video cards, scaring away some of the buyers. This looks absolutely amazing in market logic. So what to do? It seems that there are essentially no other options left.
Perhaps for the first time in the history of the industry, the company physically degraded the product in order to reduce the demand for it among the “wrong” users who do not like the manufacturer (and the target audience). This action can be regarded as creative PR. This should increase user loyalty, albeit at the expense of damage to the affiliate network.
Laura Smith, AMD VP of Radeon Products, spoke about the special damage to video cards in a press commentary at CES 2022. The interview was subsequently removed from the PCWorld website. A copy has been preserved in the archive.
Laura Smith said the map was "optimized to be used primarily by gamers":
The amount of video memory was reduced to 4 GB, which is quite enough for most AAA games, but not very attractive for working with blockchain and mining.
This is probably not the only "optimization". If you look at the technical characteristics of the RX 6500 XT, you will notice two differences from the RX 5500 XT, the previous generation video cards:
Lack of the 8GB variant that came before.
64-bit memory interface is relatively rare in modern GPUs, except in the cheapest mobile video chips like the GeForce MX 450. Normal desktop video cards of the latest generations always use a 128-bit memory interface as a minimum.
Etherium miners understand why exactly such specific changes were made, because for the software to work properly, more than 4 GB of video memory and an interface are required as quickly as possible.
Apparently, AMD engineers carefully figured out the specifics of Etherium - and made the appropriate changes in the GPU architecture. But in general, comparing the technical characteristics of video cards in recent years is rather sad, because it looks a bit like degradation.
AMD Radeon RX 6500 XTAMD Radeon RX 5500 XTAMD Radeon RX 480Release dateJanuary 2022December 2019June 2016Shader cores1024 RDNA 21408 RDNA2304 GCNROP'y323232Texture units6488144Memory capacity4GB GDDR64 GB GDDR64 GB GDDR5 memory capacity4 GB GDDR64 GB GDDR64 GB memory 24GB / bit124 GB TFLOPS5.20 TFLOPS5.83 TFLOPS Board Power 107W 130W 150W Price $ 199 $ 169 $ 199
To partially compensate for the slow memory interface and improve the performance of the new graphics cards compared to the RX 570 family, which is due to leave the market, AMD significantly overclocked the GPU clock speed - from 1845 MHz (RX 5500 XT) to 2815 MHz in turbo.
But even the top-end 6900 XT has a clock frequency of only 2200 MHz. But there, high performance is provided by a larger buffer, faster interface, and other hardware advantages.
Obviously, a company cannot and should not make every product as productive and efficient as possible. The technical characteristics of microcircuits are often determined by marketing specialists. For example, in this case, AMD had no other choice but to raise the clock speed, and not keep it at an artificially low level, as usual.
As we have discussed many times, artificial market segmentation and distribution of users by market sectors with different profitability allows you to maximize profits. Therefore, it is often necessary to specifically disable "unnecessary" functions of processors, such as extra computational cores or the AVX-512 instruction block.
Previously, Nvidia also took some steps to cut off the mining audience. In the middle of last year, it released "degraded" RTX 3000 series LHR (Low Hash Rate) video cards. But in terms of technical characteristics, these cards were in no way inferior to the usual ones, and sometimes surpassed them. The performance limits were purely software-based. Therefore, experts quickly found ways to bypass them using BIOS modifications, specially sharpened miners and alternative drivers.
But physically damaged GPUs cannot be used for mining anymore.
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