The 4-year-old NVIDIA P106 card is rumored to be coming back by PALIT for crypto mining purposes if a recent EEC filing is something to go by. It could be the next GPU making a comeback with cryptocurrency mining in mind.
The news was posted by PC Gamer, which has reported that GPU manufacturer Palit has registered 12 P106 cards with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) for approval. The NVIDIA P106 is the mining version of the GTX 1060 which was first introduced 4 years ago.
The original NVIDIA P106, which was first introduced four years ago, was designed solely for mining Ethereum using the same Pascal-based GPU that powered the Nvidia GTX 1060 – the GP106 GPU. According to the ECC listing, Palit’s new listing P106 cards have different product codes from the original P106 cards.
Coming to the specifications, there are two variants of the P106 GPU, the P106-90, and the P106-100. The P106-90 is the cut-down variant which features 640 CUDA cores and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory while the P106-100 variant features 1280 CUDA cores and 6 GB of GDDR5 memory.
The newly registered P106 versions have a product designation similar to the GTX 16-series cards. It is unlikely that the cards will be updated to a new GPU architecture, the report notes, otherwise, we would be seeing a “P116” listing rather than “P106”.
The reason we may be seeing these cards listed by Palit may be that the company is looking to sell off the previously unsold P106 cards during the crypto-mining boom. In terms of hash rates, it looks like the P106 will be able to hold its own against the newly unveiled CMP cards. Nvidia’s lower-spec GPU comes with a hash Tate of 26MH/s, while the aging P106 has a listed hash rate of 24MH/s.
Crypto mining has been on a constant rise since the end of last year. Miners have been ravaging the gaming graphics card for their mining purposes and in order to tackle them, NVIDIA has introduced mining-specific CMP cards while limiting the hashing capabilities of RTX 3060 and other future cards. We will have to wait and see how this impacts the industry and whether the stocks of gaming cards normalize or not.
