GPU sales spike by 20 percent, fueled by cryptocurrency miners and laptop sales

GPU sales grew an astounding 20 percent at the end of 2020, spurred by pandemic-induced gaming, a new mining craze, and huge demand for laptops, according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research. 

But there’s a light at the end the tunnel—for gamers, at least. The GPU-based cryptocurrency craze, which has consumed the already limited supplies of cards with the speed and mercilessness of locusts, just might go bust.

Jon Peddie of JPR, who has followed the graphics market for more than three decades, said the new variant of Ethereum is likely to kill the cost-effectiveness of using GPUs. “Ethereum, the best-suited coin for GPUs, will fork into version 2.0 very soon, making GPUs obsolete,” he explained. “A person would be very foolish to invest in a high-end, power-consuming AIB [add-in-board, in this case a discrete graphics card] for crypto-mining today.”

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