Recently Advanced Micro Devices ($AMD) reporting their Q2 2018 earnings, which as a technical trader is not really anything that I pay attention to other than knowing we will have some higher volume around these events. As a technologist, a miner, and a trader I found the conference call and discussion about mining rather interesting.
I reached out to some of the smartest and most involved miners I knew to get a feel for the reality at the other end of the mining spectrum, the actual miners.
_"Evan and I spent the last three months sourcing and selling wholesale mining hardware, working direct with OEMs getting the absolute inside track on present and future hardware production orders.
I can 100% attest to the fact that miners were absolutely unphased by the price decline. All the biggest mines doubled down on their investment, massively.
Q3/Q4 2018 will be insane for new hardware. We'll see multiple new architectures coming to market (or staying private) as well as a new series of NVIDIA chips. They stopped all production on the Pascal cards, and we'll see the first Ampere based mining cards later this year.
What isn't being said: the industry is quickly shedding inefficiencies. 2017 we saw the shift from gaming cards to mining specific cards (and the Bitmain G series in China). 2018/2019 will be the shift from general purpose computing to integrated and embedded solutions.
Integrators are already working on GPU chipset based mining machines with all the extra parts torn out. Just memory, processors, and a control board. (A la Bitmain E3)
To tie it all back, AMD Samsung NVIDIA will be supplying all the chipsets for these machines"_