Is the NVIDIA Turing a dedicated mining card?

A couple of days ago, Reuters mentioned that NVIDIA is working on a new gaming GPU codenamed Turing. The news agency said this chip is slated for March 2018 but up until now, nobody had ever heard about a Turing GPU. The rumor mill indicated NVIDIA's next-gen gaming GPUs would be based on Ampere, so this Turing news is a big surprise.

DigitalTrends speculates this chip may not be a gaming GPU but a dedicated cryptocurrency mining solution. There doesn't appear to be firm evidence for this, but it's an interesting theory as it could help to solve the supply issues of gaming GPUs.

At the moment, NVIDIA is struggling to get GPUs in the hands of gamers because miners are buying up a lot of supply. This drives up prices to ridiculous levels, with middlemen pocketing the extra profits. To succeed, NVIDIA would not only have to create dedicated mining cards, but also come up with a hardware-based restriction to gimp mining performance on its consumer-class gaming GPUs. Merely launching mining-specific cards, as NVIDIA has already done, doesn't solve the issue.

The Turing code name stems from Alan Turing, an English computer scientist, theoretical biologist, mathematician, and cryptanalyst. The use of his name for a class of add-in GPU cards dedicated to cryptocurrency mining makes sense given his work on cryptography. He helped crack coded messages sent by the Nazis, contributing to the Allies winning World War II.

It's assumed that both Ampere and Turing are derivatives of the Volta architecture. Turing is expected to be revealed at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) at the end of Marh.