Probably quite a while, as NVIDIA currently doesn't mention cryptocurrency mining publicly to keep investors from worrying about the sustainability of their recent revenue growth.

I wonder whether cryptomining sells more gpus than deep learning, outside public cloud providers.

I don't know about the deep learning side of things, but on the mining side of things, over the past month, my calculations are that ~50,000 GPUs are added to mine the major GPU-minable coins every day -- from roughly one million GPUs on April 1 to about 3.5 million GPUs now. At an average of $250 revenue per card, that'd work out to ~$13M revenue per day in GPU sales for cryptomining, split between AMD cards and NVidia cards. This, however, is up about ten-fold from March, and in all likelihood will return to those levels as mining returns inevitably decline.

Source of this data is my own calculations using historical data on mining difficulty for the various coins, plus benchmarks for typical/optimal-ish GPUs used to mine each coin.

Are you assuming that all mining is happening with GPUs? Because a large portion of it now is being done with dedicated mining hardware.

Yes, I am assuming that all mining is done with GPUs for ETH/ETC/ZEC/XMR and some others. I'm only including coins which are currently profitable to mine on GPUs, which I take as an indication that those algorithms have seen little/no efficient ASIC implementation yet. I'm thus not including bitcoin, since GPUs are little more than space heaters mining bitcoin; and I'm not including e.g. lbry and litecoin and some others because I don't know enough about the ASICification of those.

It's possible, though, as you suggest, that there are some folks running ASICs or improved hashing algorithms at a small scale, small enough not to overwhelm profitability of GPU mining but large enough to muddy calculations which assume that all mining is being done on GPUs.

GP states they are referring to "... the major GPU-minable coins ... ".

I interpreted that as "possible to mine on GPUs", not "profitable to mine", but I guess I misunderstood that.

Hard to say... most recent quarter had datacenter at $409mm in revenue. Mining falls under gaming, which has grown ~$600mm since 2015 to >$1b per quarter today. Try to buy a gaming GPU today and you won't be able to -- they're all sold out because of cryptomining.

Nvidia 1050 ti is almost untouched for mining purposes and there is 10% price increase in 1060s and 1070s. 1080s & 1080 ti you can get for retail. The GPUs the are in insane demand are AMD RX 580/570/480.

Only mid-tier, where they're most power efficient. High end cards are generally still available, since the efficiency curve drops off.

It is rumored that NVIDIA will announce mining-only cards within weeks: http://wccftech.com/nvidia-pascal-gpu-cryptocurrency-mining-...

Why don't they run them themselves?

You can usually sell mining equipment for more than the net present value of the coins it will mine.

I was under the impression that ASICs were far better for mining. Have GPUs caught up again?

GPUs are definitely dead for bitcoin. You'll get something like 10^9th more efficient SHA256 hashing from an ASIC than a GPU.

But for many other coins, there are two big factors bringing GPUs back into the game for mining:

- Lots of alt-coins competing for popularity; many might have ASIC mining implementations in the future, but there either hasn't been enough time or enough money to be made by doing it yet.

- There's been various research done to reduce the potential gain in efficiency from an ASIC implementation over using commodity hardware. This was done in response to the concentrating effect of ASIC mining operations, which put a greater percentage of global hashpower in a smaller set of hands. The main way ethereum implements this "ASIC resistance" is by exercising memory bandwidth -- an area where GPUs are already quite optimized -- in the hashing algorithm. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash goes into detail.