The cpuminer-opt miner (source) is a fork from cpuminer-multi by tpruvot that adds optimizations for many algorithms for more recent CPUs with support for the AES-NI instruction set, though the miner also works on older SSE2 capable CPUs with lower performance. Up until recently the cpuminer-opt was available only for Linux users, but starting from version 3.3 there is also Windows support and we have compiled 64-bit binaries of the miner for Windows. In the archive below you can find multiple executable files that are compiled for different CPU architectures that support AES-NI instructions, so you are welcome to try them. The default cpuminer.exe is compiled for Intel Westmere, the first architecture that has support for the AES-NI instruction set and cpuminer-amd.exe is bdver1 which should work on all AMD processors with AES-NI. If you have a more recent Intel Sandybridge, Ivybridge, Haswell or Broadwell-based processor you can try the respective binary to see if that will squeeze some extra performance, or you can compile directly on your PC with the native instruction set supported by your CPU. We have not tried much of the algorithms of the miner yet, but we have checked HODL support – one of the more recent interesting CPU-only coins and it seems to be working well, though on some systems it occasionally gives low difficulty shares.

Update: We have updated the binaries to the latest version cpuminer-opt 3.3.4 that has support for the X11Evo algorithm used by Revolvercoin (XRE). The latest version should also fix the low difficulty shares for HODL that were present in the earlier releases and improve compatibility for some CPUs, including resolving issues that some people had with Intel Westmere-based processors. There is also a significant improvement for the performance of the M7M used by the Coin Magi (XMG) over the older versions of cpuminer-opt. We have also added cpuminer-sse2.exe binary for processors that do not have AES-NI support, so you might want to try that one if you have an older processor. Just download the archive below for the latest version of the binaries compiled for Windows.

– To download and try the cpuminer-opt 3.3.4 CPU miner 64-bit Windows binaries…

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