– Welcome to! Please read the following rules before posting. Rules • No 'FOR SALE' posts.

Feel free to hawk your wares in or on - this means no group buys either. As common as it is in Bitcoin Mining, it is far too risky to be carried out over reddit. • No verbal abuse. If you don't have anything nice to say, it's best not to say anything at all. Remember, we were all newbies once. Mining isn't exactly a trivial venture.

Nov 24, 2017 - Is Bitcoin mining profitable after the mining difficulty increased dramatically in the past 2 years. Here's my answer. It may surprise you. Only then this doesn't need to bother you. But if you are planning to convert these Bitcoins in the future to any other currency this factor will have a major impact of course. How to mine Bitcoin Cash (BCH)? Bitcoin Forum. It wouldn't be worth using a 3 th miner minng BCH. Mining BTC with any thing below a 7 th miner might be. Better to mine that you can afford to buy if you have s9 miner then you can mine with bitcoin cash because its more profitable than bitcoin as of now base on my own calculation. But if you can't afford to buy asic miner build your own rig as alternative to mine with altcoin. Since you have free electricity.

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If there is a new alt coin out, this is not the place to discuss or promote it. If you have questions about mining that altcoin, feel free to ask as long as it is also somehow relevant to Monero. • No short-URLs. Nobody should have to trust you before clicking on a link. URL-shortener services serve no use on Reddit as there is nothing restricting the size of your comment string.

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Feel free to ask questions, even if you think they are stupid. We encourage you to. Related Subreddits & Forums Chats IRC: Other. It is a pleasure for us to announce the new release of xmr-stak 2.0.0. And me working the last few month to simplify mining and allow everyone to participate with their hardware.

The most obvious change is that there is no longer need to download for AMD/NVIDIA and CPU independent miner. You can mine on all architectures just from one pre- or self-compiled binary. During the first start you will be guided to configure the miner. XMR-Stak is now supporting Monero and Aeon without recompiling. Features • 10% boost to CPUs without hardware AES • Supports all common backends (CPU/x86, AMD-GPU and NVIDIA-GPU) • Supports all common OS (Linux, Windows and MacOS) • Supports algorithm cryptonight for Monero (XMR) and cryptonight-light (AEON) • Guided start (no need to edit a config file for the first start) • Automatic configuration for each mining backend • Allows to tweak each core or gpu by hand • Supports backup pools • TLS support • HTML statistics • JSON API for monitoring • Support the new stratum • Easy precompiled and portable Linux binary The miner is fully open source (GPLv3). This means each improvement can be reused by the community and you have always the possibility to verify the source code. We are also raising funds for two new exciting projects to take Monero mining to a new level - see if you like them: • • • • •.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.. If you typically follow GPU performance as it related to gaming but have become curious about Bitcoin mining, you’ve probably noticed and been surprised by the fact that AMD GPUs are the uncontested performance leaders in the market. This is in stark contrast to the PC graphics business, where AMD’s HD 7000 series has been playing a defensive game against Nvidia’s GK104 / GeForce 600 family of products.

In Bitcoin mining, the situation is almost completely reversed — the Radeon 7970 is capable of 550MHash/second, while the is roughly 1/5 as fast. There’s an article at the Bitcoin Wiki that the difference, but the original piece was written in 2010-2011 and hasn’t been updated since.

It refers to and AMD’s VLIW architectures and implies that AMD’s better performance is due to having far more shader cores than the equivalent Nvidia cards. This isn’t quite accurate, and it doesn’t explain why the GTX 680 is actually slower than the GTX 580 at BTC mining, despite having far more cores.

I Want To Mine Monero XMR. This article is going to explain the difference, address whether or not better CUDA miners would dramatically shift the performance delta between AMD and Nvidia, and touch on whether or not Nvidia’s GPGPU performance is generally comparable to AMD’s these days. Topics not discussed here include: • Bubbles • Investment opportunity • Whether or not ASICs, when they arrive next month, this summer, in the future will destroy the GPU mining market. These are important questions, but they’re not the focus of this article. We will discuss power efficiency and Mhash/watt to an extent, because these factors have an impact on comparing the mining performance of AMD vs.

The mechanics of mining Bitcoin mining is a specific implementation of the SHA2-256 algorithm. One of the reasons AMD cards excel at mining is because the company’s GPU’s have a number of features that enhance their integer performance. This is actually something of an oddity; GPU workloads have historically been floating-point heavy because textures are stored in half (FP16) or full (FP32) precision.

The issue is made more confusing by the fact that when Nvidia started pushing CUDA, it emphasized password cracking as a major strength of its cards. It’s true that GeForce GPUs, starting with G80, offered significantly higher cryptographic performance than CPUs — but AMD’s hardware now blows Nvidia’s The first reason AMD cards outperform their Nvidia counterparts in BTC mining (and the current Bitcoin entry does ) is because the SHA-256 algorithm utilizes a 32-bit integer right rotate operation. This means that the integer value is shifted (), but the missing bits are then re-attached to the value. In a right rotation, bits that fall off the right are reattached at the left. AMD GPUs can do this operation in a single step. Prior to the launch of the GTX Titan, Nvidia GPUs required three steps — two shifts and an add.

We say “prior to Titan,” because one of the features Nvidia introduced with Compute Capability 3.5 (only supported on the GTX Titan and the Tesla K20/K20X) is a funnel shifter. The funnel shifter can combine operations, shrinking the 3-cycle penalty Nvidia significantly. We’ll look at how much performance improves momentarily, because this isn’t GK110’s only improvement over GK104. GK110 is also capable of up to 64 32-bit integer shifts per SMX (Titan has 14 SMX’s). GK104, in contrast, could only handle 32 integer shifts per SMX, and had just eight SMX blocks. We’ve highlighted the 32-bit integer shift capability difference between CC 3.0 and CC 3.5. AMD plays things when it comes to Graphics Core Next’s (GCN) 32-bit integer capabilities, but the company has confirmed that GCN executes INT32 code at the same rate as double-precision floating point.

This implies a theoretical peak int32 dispatch rate of 64 per clock per CU — double GK104’s base rate. AMD’s other advantage, however, is the sheer number of Compute Units (CUs) that make up one GPU. The Titan, as we’ve said, has 14 SMX’s, compared to the HD 7970’s 32 CU’s. Compute Unit / SMX’s may be far more important than the total number of cores in these contexts.

DiabloMiner author here. Nvidia keeps claiming they produce a product for GPGPU compute, yet they keep failing on integer performance. Bitcoin is not the only use of integers out there, and its not even limited to crypto research either. There is zero reason for Nvidia to have made this fundamental mistake generation after generation. This is why I don’t support their product, its too slow to be useful and Nvidia doesn’t seem to care.

I repeatedly tried to reach out to that company, and I never got a response. Although, now, it is too late for Nvidia to ride the BItcoin train, ASICs are now coming in and making all GPUs (including the highest performance Radeons) obsolete. Diablo, Thanks for dropping. While I recognize that ASICs are arriving, and ultimately make BTC mining on the GPU obsolete, I’ve stopped paying attention to them until shipping hardware arrives *in volume.* I think the bigger problem for anyone considering doing some BTC mining is the current price volatility. Making your money back on any investment is an open question. With that said: Do you agree that the problem is likely related to Int32 instruction rates per SMX? That’s the explanation that’s “newer” here compared to the funnel shifter in Titan, which is a known quantity.

Avalon has already shipped 900 68ghash/sec units, ASICMINER privately owns a 65thash/sec farm (helping them fund further operations and have real world extreme testing of their designs) and is preparing to sell their upcoming 200thash/sec batch publicly. The current network performance is about 70thash/sec and was about 25 before ASICs came online. I think its safe to say they’ve already come. Yes, integer instruction rates in Nvidia are horrendous, they seem be as slow or slower than double precision math, but on Radeons I can issue a single cycle integer up every clock cycle on every ALU (VLIW5 has 4 + limited 5th, VLIW4 has 4, GCN has 4 quad width SIMD ALUs plus 4 single width ALUs (and the driver/hardware manages ALU usage across multiple work items to maintain optimal instruction level parallelization).

What also gives Radeons the leg up is they can do certain things SHA256 requires that would normally take 2-3 cycles in a single cycle, such as bitselect takes a single cycle as does rotate, Nvidia seems to be slower at these than simple integer ops (add, xor, etc). Nvidia needs to focus on code like this: If Nvidia was serious about Bitcoin mining, they’d make ZR25, ZR16, ZR26, ZR30, ZMa, and ZCh single cycle instructions, and they’d also make integers as fast as single precision ops instead of as slow as double precision ops. If they did this, they could possibly give current generation ASIC miners a run for their money. And don’t bother making high integer performance a Quadro/Tesla only feature, make it part of consumer Geforces too. The reason people buy consumer Radeons over Quadros/Teslas for double precision math use cases is because consumer Radeons beat Quadros/Teslas at both per watt and per dollar. Tl:dr; Nvidia, stop screwing customers and you’ll make more money.

I’m willing to work with Nvidia on this to compete with existing and next generation solutions if they’re interested. They just have to email me. Diablo, I should clarify. ASICs aren’t something that “regular people” can buy in any reliable quantity at this point. And projects like this one: Have yet to get off the ground.

Butterfly Labs advertises a 50GH/s miner for $2499, with a 5GH/s box for $249 — but no firm ship date. If I thought they were coming within 2 months, I’d probably buy in. Let me ask you this: Given what we know about GK104 / GK110, do you think it’s possible to significantly improve current NV performance through kernel optimization?

Diablo, Unrelated question for you. How much optimization work could theoretically be done to squeeze more performance out of AMD cards at this juncture?

I ask because it seems to me as though performance gains have plateaued. Earn SmartCash SMART Playing Minecraft. I remember in 2011, when switching from poclbm to phatk was a huge performance gain of 50-75MHash on my hardware. Now, the benefits seem fractional — but it also seems like not much has been done in the way of new GPU clients. Poclbm and Diakgcn haven’t been updated in awhile (as far as I know — not with new performance capabilities, anyway). Is there any fruit left on the optimization tree? The problem isn’t just limited to the OpenCL drivers.

Nvidia drivers as a whole are very shoddy on both Windows and Linux (its more evident on Linux). Nvidia has no interest in the GPU market at all, really, and I find that somewhat ironic since no one is particularly interested in their mobile/ARM products. More and more next gen games are picking up OpenCL to offload physics and other non-graphics tasks and Nvidia is going to be left behind if they don’t fix their drivers. I don’t want to see them go under, but this is why the past 4 generations of cards I’ve bought have been all AMD: AMD at least treats me right as a customer.

Benchmarks don’t mean anything to me if their driver stack is a failure. The problem for AMD isn’t actual performance, but the implementation. I am not a programmer, but I do know a couple, and from what I’ve heard from them and read online, there are several issues. The first and probably biggest for the HPC space is the proliferation of CUDA prior to OpenCL. Most pre existing software is already written in CUDA, making porting harder than it should be. Second, and this is old, so it may be fixed by now, is that the OCL drivers on linux are unstable.

This is something I have actually seen with luxrender and blender. My OCL version of Luxrender was, until recently, unstable, with the blender cycles render engine not even working with AMD hardware due to what the developers are referring to as “driver limitations”. Another issue is, at least from what I’ve heard, that OpenCL is harder and more complex than Cuda, although that has never stopped anyone before. As far as I know, AMD’s latest cards were physically optimized for OpenCL, whereas I believe Nvidia’s cards have added it through drivers, it was really more of an afterthought which came about when AMD’s cards demonstrated such a massive advantage in this front. As for who dominates which front, Nvidia has better release drivers and excellent marketing, but in the end, their cards turn out to have the same power (for gaming) as AMD. All that isn’t quite so relevant anymore, though, because Bitcoin mining has gotten to the point where at least one company has already begun producing custom processors specifically for mining – Butterfly Labs is one (the only?) example. 1) Bitcoin mining is related to processor performance because the hashing algorithms used to generate and validate BTC can be run on a variety of architectures.

In the beginning, hashing was done on the CPU. Now, in order to be competitive, you need at least a GPU. 2) A GPU is better than a CPU for password cracking if the relevant algorithm (SHA2-256 in this case) can be effectively parallelized. AMD’s GPUs contain multiple elements that improve SHA-256 hashing on these cards.

How can a GPU be faster than a CPU? The highest-end Intel Xeons can dispatch 4 int32 instructions per core. With eight cores, that’s 32 instructions per clock. A top-end Radeon 7970 can execute 64 int32 instructions per CU and carries 32 CUs. That’s 2048 int32 instructions per clock.

Yes, the x86 CPU is running 3x faster than the Radeon 7970, but the Radeon 7970 is executing 64x as many instructions. That’s a no-brainer win for the graphics card. 1) Bitcoin mining is related to processor performance because the hashing algorithms used to generate and validate BTC can be run on a variety of architectures.

In the beginning, hashing was done on the CPU. Now, in order to be competitive, you need at least a GPU. 2) A GPU is better than a CPU for password cracking if the relevant algorithm (SHA2-256 in this case) can be effectively parallelized. AMD’s GPUs contain multiple elements that improve SHA-256 hashing on these cards. How can a GPU be faster than a CPU?

The highest-end Intel Xeons can dispatch 4 int32 instructions per core. With eight cores, that’s 32 instructions per clock.

A top-end Radeon 7970 can execute 64 int32 instructions per CU and carries 32 CUs. That’s 2048 int32 instructions per clock. Yes, the x86 CPU is running 3x faster than the Radeon 7970, but the Radeon 7970 is executing 64x as many instructions. That’s a no-brainer win for the graphics card.