AMD Announces New RX 5700 RDNA GPU — Will It Impact Cryptocurrency Mining?

The new announcement confirms suspicions that AMD would unveil its first line of Navi-class GPUs at the Computex expo, though with a slightly different naming scheme than many previously anticipated. Instead, AMD took the opportunity to rename its new architecture, tossing out Navi in favor of the less memorable ‘RDNA.’ The first card announced from the new RX 5000 series lineup based on the RDNA architecture is the RX 5700, which is aimed to go head to head with Nvidia’s upper-end RTX 2070 card. According to the announcement, the new RX 5700 GPU is expected to outperform the RTX 2070 by around 10 percent in a Strange Brigade benchmark demo.

AMD RX 5000 Series

Despite announcing the new cards, AMD appears to be keeping tight-lipped about the specifics of the new cards and has avoided providing specifics on the clock speed and power requirements of the RX 5700. However, AMD did reveal that we can expect around 50 percent better performance per watt and 25 percent better performance per clock compared to its previous generation 14nm Vega Architecture. Beyond this, the new RX 5000 series cards will feature GDDR6 memory with PCIe 4.0 support. The remaining specifications, pricing, and exact availability are expected to be divulged during its E3 live stream on June 10. Technically, the RX 5700 is the second card built with AMD’s new 7nm silicon — with the previous card being its flagship Radeon VII GPU, which currently retails at around $699. Based on this, we expect the new RX 5700 card to cost somewhere in the range of $399-$449 when it lands in July.

A Boon to GPU Cryptocurrency Mining

Although AMD has kept the full details of its new lineup intentionally vague, interest in the new hardware appears to be growing among cryptocurrency GPU miners. [bctt tweet=”AMD announced its new 7nm RDNA-based GPU, the RX 5700. Meanwhile, ETH and XMR have doubled in value since January. Is GPU mining back in fashion?” username=”beincrypto”] As it stands, AMD’s Radeon VII is a popular choice among miners thanks to the price-performance ratio it offers against Nvidia’s RTX series cards. However, AMD’s previous generation RX 480, RX 570 and RX 580 cards are easily the most commonly used GPUs for mining, though they are gradually finding their way onto eBay now that mining difficulty has increased. With the expected 50 percent better performance per watt the new RDNA line is expected to bring, cryptocurrency GPU mining may be due to become more profitable than before. Combining this with the fact that Ethereum (ETH), Monero (XMR) and many other GPU-mined coins have practically doubled in value since the beginning of the year, it may not be long until cryptocurrency mining begins to boom again. How this will affect the availability of the new cards remains to be seen. However, if past events are any indicator of the future, then getting your hands on an RX 5700 could prove challenging. What is your opinion on the current state of cryptocurrency mining and the new AMD RX 5700 RDNA GPU? Is it still possible for casual miners to profit in 2019? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!