saw this yesterday, and bumped into it again so I thought I should share.

https://news.bitcoin.com/amd-and-nvidia-enter-into-the-graphic-card-for-mining-business/

AMD's stock has been surging on the back of the rise in demand for GPUs for mining. With all the altcoins going moon-wise lately it's quite profitable to mine them, I have been doing this myself to a delightful result, two rigs with two cards each making about 400 euros a month, cost about 2500 euros, and I haven't got down to tweaking or riser cards and external power yet.

One thing that I would like to suggest to these video card makers is they think about making them USB3 based self-contained modules and power supplies specifically designed for powering them, or at least make them in PCI and PCI-Express 1x sockets. External modules would be more practical I think, especially if they had a way to be stacked or lined up in rows.

This won't last forever, as a slow creep of PoS mechanisms for controlling issuance rates that is even looming possibly over Ethereum. For the moment, AMD cards are the best for mining Ethereum, but Nvidia cards do very well with Zerocash, Monero and Lbry.

It's not just mining though...

I also would suggest that even if the demand for these chips for PoW mining diminishes, they will start to become demanded as database search accelerators. Graphic cards have very fast memory, which makes walking very large tables very quick, current first generation database accelerators are already showing from 5-100x improvement in this function.

Having tinkered quite a bit with Steem's RPC database system, I can say that in my opinion, it will be vital as the application of distribution of media content becomes a bigger part of blockchain tech, that this kind of more complex database system and AI enhanced database systems will also require an order of magnitude more search capability and more locally to where it is being used, so I am going to predict that these headless video cards are not just going to be for mining, this is just what will drive their sales at first, when there is peer to peer database service systems (like the one I am designing), this will enable hosting of applications locally while allowing them to synchronise rapidly globally.

You can see yourself at Nvidia's compute acceleration site that 'big data' is a major target, it is only a matter of time before these devices become standard parts of data centers, and Byzantine Fault Tolerant database replication systems are very important now - when you look at Amazon or Facebook or Twitter - behind these are massive distributed database systems with nodes all over the world.