Intel’s latest GPUs are bad news for crypto miners

by Arthur · July 21, 2022

The drivers for Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs apparently do not support the ability to mine cryptocurrency.

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, anyone who equips their system with Intel’s Arc A380 card for desktop PCs will apparently not be able to mine Ethereum.

Intel Arc Alchemist reference design rendering.

YouTuber DJ Mines stated that he got “the GPU driver working fine, but unfortunately no mining software seems to support Intel GPUs yet.”

He was unable to set up mining functions even after trying a number of crypto programs including NiceHashMining, trex miner, lolminer and teamreeminer. These were all tested on a Windows-based system. “I guess we’ll have to wait [Hive OS mining platform].”

In any case, the revelation shouldn’t have too much of an impact considering the state of the cryptocurrency market. The value of Bitcoin and Ethereum have fallen spectacularly throughout 2022. Overall, as pointed out by TechRadar, the latter coin lost around 70% of its value this year.

The result? Graphics card prices and availability have finally returned to normal, with the current state of the market even pushing retailers and board partners to drop prices below the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP).

Mining ETH on graphics cards that allow it (the Nvidia RTX 30 series is particularly popular for this purpose) used to be a hugely lucrative activity. In total, Ethereum miners have spent a staggering $15 billion on graphics cards in the past two years alone.

Mining rig for cryptocurrency from computer graphics card. — A cryptocurrency miner connected to a laptop. Getty Images

Now, however, the return from ETH mining at current value means that in some cases it will take over a year to just cover the cost of the GPU itself.

Anyway, Tom’s Hardware notes that Intel’s Arc A380 graphics card is not necessarily a board designed with gamers or miners in mind – the architecture is based on the entry-level ACM-G11 GPU which has 8 Xe cores (1024 stream processors). These specifications allow it to deliver around 3 FP32 TFLOPS, in addition to a 96-bit GDDR6 memory interface.

After many delays and a somewhat problematic laptop launch, Intel’s discrete Arc Alchemist GPUs have now arrived for consumers in China. However, reviews for the Arc A380 in particular highlight some glaring issues.

As reported by VideoCardz, ComputerBase reports that there are “a lot of (driver) issues” and that “the 2D fan control is simply completely broken.” Furthermore, the Resizable BAR feature appears to be a requirement as Arc “without rBAR is simply unplayable.”