As reported by various Chinese forums and even some well-known outlets, apparently some people in China have managed to hack PS5 and turn it into mining hardware that can reach the mining power of 99 MH/s, supporting NBMiner, an Ethereum mining algorithm. While we can't completely deny the PS5 crypto mining ability using various system hacks, but the power rate mentioned above sounds a little bit odd.

PS5's hardware, especially the processor and graphics unit, has been developed based on AMD's RDNA-2 architecture, the same technology that has been used for the company's latest and most powerful graphics cards, RX 6000 series. Now, some quick research by TweakTown reveals that AMD's RX 6900 XT graphics card cannot go beyond 60 MH/s mining power even with some effective overclocking methods. Given that PS5's graphics unit is not as powerful as the RX 6900 XT, it doesn't sound reasonable enough the console could mine cryptocurrency at a rate of 99 MH/s.

While the mining power mentioned in the reports could possibly be wrong, yet we cannot deny the whole PS5 crypto mining ability using hacks. If turns out to be true that PS5 can effectively mine some popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, then we can probably expect the shortage of PS5 consoles to last even longer than before as it would be a cheap but efficient device for miners to keep their business growing.

With Bitcoin's price rising dramatically over the past few years, the number of cryptocurrency miners around the world has increased at high rates. Recently, Nvidia announced a bunch of new mining-only chipsets that will hopefully keep miners away from the gaming-only graphics card such as RTX 3060 and help to end the hardware shortage soon enough. It's yet to be seen whether AMD would have the same approach as Nvidia, but there are surely lots of miners in the world that use AMDs graphics units for crypto mining as well.

If the PS5's crypto mining rumor turns out to be true, there will probably be some immediate reactions from Sony for fixing the console's vulnerability against hacks and blocking the possible exploits.