Intel Appears To Buck Crypto Mining With Arc GPU Drivers But It May Be Short Lived
Oh no, Intel's discrete desktop graphics cards might not be great at mining, what in the world will we ever do!? Perhaps rejoice if you're a gamer, content creator, or anyone who has no interest whatsoever in cryptocurrency mining. At least for the time being, it appears as though Intel's GPU drivers for its Arc graphics cards do not support mining.
At best they may offer limited mining support, but that's yet to be verified as far as we're aware. The apparent lack of mining support has come to light now that the Arc A380 is finding its way into the hands of reviewers and users, following the GPUs launch in China. In a Twitter post, DjMines (@djwaters) listed out a bunch popular mining programs that don't seem to work on the card.
"Well we got the Intel GPU driver working great, but unfortunately looks like no mining programs support Intel GPUs yet. Tried
@NiceHashMining
, trex miner, lolminer, teamreeminer (all on windows). Guess we have to wait
@hiveonofficial," DjMines wrote.
This could be due to drivers, the mining programs identifying Intel's new GPU as a resource, or both. Some of the replies to the post ask if he tried using any other programs, and specifically NBMiner and BetterHash. It's possible that one or both of those could yield different results, but overall it doesn't look like miners will find much to be excited about with Intel's Arc GPUs.
Granted, the Arc A380 probably wouldn't be a super popular option for mining anyway, though its price is certainly attractive—Intel's Tom Petersen has said it would carry a $129 to $139 suggested price in the US if it ends up launching stateside. As it stands, the A380 is only available in China.
The other interesting thing about this situation is the dynamic state of crypto. Following a market-wide crash, some cryptocurrencies are starting to rebound. That includes Ethereum, which is still effectively mined with GPUs (as opposed to specialized ASIC hardware). It's risen in value by more than 26 percent in the past five days, and 38 percent in the past month.
It's still down significantly from the beginning of the year, having fallen nearly 59 percent since January 1, 2022. And its current value of $1,576.67 is far below its all-time high of $4,865.57. The crypto market is nothing if not volatile, though, so who knows if we'll see another huge spike in the coming months.
Ethereum's also on track for a merger that will make mining with GPUs pretty much pointless. So there are a lot of factors at play. On top of it all, we don't know if future GPU driver releases from Intel will play nicer with mining platforms. It doesn't really matter at the moment, but it's something to keep an eye on as higher-end SKUs come into view.
