> Is this really good news, or is this just Nvidia playing both sides? To be clear, these CMP cards are still the same exact silicon that goes into GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. They don't have video outputs, cooling should be improved (for large-scale data center mining operations), and they're better tuned for efficiency. But every single GPU sold as a CMP card means one less GPU sold as a graphics card. What's perhaps worse is that while miners can still use consumer cards for mining (maybe not the upcoming RTX 3060, depending on how well Nvidia's throttling works), gamers can't use these mining cards for gaming.
> Nvidia does state that these GPUs "don't meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Frankly, that doesn't mean much. What does Nvidia do with a GPU that normally can't be sold as an RTX 3090? They bin it as a 3080, and GA102 chips that can't meet the 3080 requirements can end up in a future 3070 (or maybe a 3070 Ti). The same goes for the rest of the line. Make no mistake: These are GPUs that could have gone into a graphics card. Maybe not a reference 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, or 3090, but we've seen TU104 chips in RTX 2060 cards, so anything is possible.
Nivida isn't risking anything.
They boost their sales now by selling mining cards knowing they won't enter the seccond hand market to compete with their new products.
They gain good PR with their mining locked 3060 cards. Gamers praise them without internalising that a number of mining cards would have been binned lower and sold, but instead an artificial restriction allows Nivida to allocate behind the scenes.