NVIDIA’s Turing Card Is Actually Made Specifically for Crypto-Mining

Early when we reported on NVIDIA releasing a gaming card next week something seemed off about the naming in the initial report. I mean “Turing” was not a conventional name that NVIDIA used, even for a codename, and I think we would have heard of it by now if it was a consumer gaming card. Well it turns out that “Turing” is named after British scientist Alan Turing, who is credited with leading a team of mathematicians that broke the Nazi “Enigma” cryptography. There is actually a great movie on this called The Intimidation Game. In any case NVIDIA’s “Turing” is a crypto-mining and blockchain compute accelerator. It is designed to be compact, efficient, and ready to be deployed in large scale.

turing

This new accelerator could be produced at a low-enough cost and in high-enough scales to help bring down prices of gaming graphics cards. It could also have ASIC-like crypto-mining performance which would making using gaming graphics cards less viable, lowering their prices.

Currently we are seeing a 200-400% price inflation in the wake of the crypto-currency mining wave. This threatens PC gaming as a whole as gamers are lured to the still affordable new generation consoles.

We do not know if “Turing” will be based on NVIDIA’s “Pascal” or “Volta” architectures. NVIDIA is however expected to launch its entire family of next-generation GeForce GTX 2000-series “Volta” graphics cards in 2018.

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