This article is written specifically for Steemit and was not published anywhere else. Where I use information from other sources – I mention the sources. All pictures are linked to original websites where I have found them
This morning I asked myself a question – how important are miners to AMD? Do miners really help AMD with its competition with NVidia in terms of market share? What if Ethereum goes to Proof-of-State tomorrow – would that affect AMD numbers significantly? I have conducted a small research about that topic and would like to share it with you. It is important to remember, that I make quite a few assumptions, that may or may not be correct, so the final result may vary a bit. Please do not hold that against me.
I would like to start with the data available at https://ethstats.net/. While it claims, that it does not represent the entire state of the Ethereum network, it covers most of it. Based on the data available, we can see that the average network hashrate is somewhere around 3Th/s. I suggest raise this number to 4 Th/s just to be sure that we are not underestimating hash power.
AMD R9 390 is arguably the most popular card for mining. It produces 31Mh/s (I used user data provided here - http://62.212.74.86/~mining/list/index.php?brand=both) . If we assume that all cards in the network are R 390 (which obviously there are not), it would give us an estimate of 129 000 GPU’s working, mining Ethereum. Now we have to be careful, as a lot of people are using cards that are providing lesser amount of hash power. So let’s take R9 380 providing roughly 20Mh/s. If everyone would be mining with that card, it would give us 200 000 graphic cards. I believe that this number is more representative. But we can increase it even further, assuming that not everyone is mining 24/7. I suggest that we double it. In total we will get 400 000 graphic cards for Ethereum alone.
What about other crypto currencies? Let's talk about Sia - http://explore.sia.tech/ shows us a difficulty of 12,799 GH/s , one 390Х, for example provides us 1200 Mh/s. Now, considering the variety of GPUs, I have previously talked about I propose to assume that there are 40 000 GPU's mining SIA. Plus, there are hundreds of other cryptocurrencies not mentioned here. All together that would give us less then 1 million graphic cards involved (remember – we have over calculated numbers quite a few times, so I doubt that this final number is underestimated. Let’s see how big this number is, relating to global GPU market.
Most news sites relate to Jon Peddie Research http://www.jonpeddie.com/ while talking about GPU market. So I will also use the data provided there. Unfortunately, most relevant data is not available, so I will use numbers from earlier years and Jon Peddie comments on comparing this year to previous one. In 2015 all-in board market sized around 43 million GPUS. Last known figure for AMD is 22.8% market share. This is a little bit under 10 million GPU per year, each year. It is important to remember that video card mines more than a year, the guarantee usually covers up to 3 years. But even we limit it to two years that basically means that we have to divide our 1 000 000 cards involved in mining in two parts – those sold during the last year and those, that are sold more than a year ago.
That leaves us with 500 000 GPUs, that is 5% from all GPUs sold by AMD. Not really impressive. I think that I can safely assume, that even if all miners stop mining, AMD would still be fine.