The hobby passed away peacefully, again, after reading a draft improvement proposal. Funeral arrangements are pending, as is the activation height.
GPU mining died this month, surrounded by loved ones, several box fans and one riser cable nobody has trusted since 2021. It was 17, give or take a few earlier deaths.
The cause of death was given as "FP8," a word most of the mourners had learned that week. Doctors noted that the patient was still clearly breathing at the time. Family members asked that this not get in the way of the grieving.
GPU mining has a proud history of dying. It died when ASICs arrived. It died when the Merge arrived. It died every time a forum thread opened with "is it still worth it." Each time it came back, a little louder and running a little warmer, like a man who swears he has quit coffee.
In its last year it found Pearl, a chain whose proof of work is matrix multiplication, the same math AI runs on. Friends said it seemed happy. It finally had a job its parents could understand: "I do AI, sort of."
Pearl was not a quiet partner. Since mainnet launched on April 27, 2026, the network has taken in a hard fork in June, a soft fork in July, another soft fork in early August and a salted noise-seed hard fork at block 99,000 on August 11. Each one activated less than 15 hours after its node release. Mourners remember the pace fondly.
"You'd go to bed with a working miner, and wake up with a learning opportunity."
Then came PIP-3, "FP PoUW Certificates," a draft that would move the mining work from exact integer matrices to FP8 floating point, the format GPUs actually use for AI. Code for a fourth certificate version has been landing on a development branch called fp8-scheme since September 9.
The reference miner on that branch recognises three NVIDIA families: Hopper, data-center Blackwell, and consumer and workstation Blackwell, which means the RTX 50 series. Anything else exits with an unsupported-GPU error. That list leaves out the RTX 40 and RTX 30 series, the A100, and every AMD card, including RDNA4 cards that have FP8 in hardware but no profile in the spec.
The news reached the RTX 3090 community first. A three-day vigil followed, attended by roughly the same people who had attended the vigil in 2022.
The attending physicians, meaning the spec, the branch and every careful explainer we could find, agree on a few points that the mourners would like everyone to stop bringing up:
In medical terms, the patient has been told it might need surgery at some point, by a surgeon who hasn't booked the theatre. The family has already sold the house.
GPU mining is survived by:
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you read the actual pull requests before you sell your cards. Grief is valid. Grief based on a draft with no activation height is optional.
Memorial services will be held whenever a fork height is announced, which may be later than you think. Bring your own riser.
From the redPeaRL desk: our AMD miner for RDNA4 keeps mining Pearl's live integer scheme. Beta.6 is about 2% faster than beta.5.1 on our test fleet. If the protocol changes, we'll tell you what that means for your cards, plainly and with sources. For the facts without the jokes, read What Is FP8? Pearl's Possible Upgrade, Explained Simply. Find us at redpearlminer.com/beta.
Disclaimer: This article is satire. Status details are accurate as of October 21, 2026, and may change. Nothing here is financial or investment advice, or a prediction about price, protocol timing or profitability. Do your own research.