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Baikal Giant-N, The First Cryptonight ASIC Miner
13, Mar 2018
Baikal Miner has started selling their new Baikal Giant-N ASIC miner and it is the first Cryptonight and Cryptonight-light ASIC miner on the market, essentially taking away another algorithm from GPU miners. The Cryptonight algorithm was mostly in the domain of AMD GPUs as they were performing faster than Nvidia price/performance wise, but now that is about to end apparently. With 20 KH/s hashrate for Cryptonight and 40 KH/s for Cryptonight-lite at just 60 Watts of power usage any GPU feels out of date already, even AMD’s VEGA GPUs with just about 2 KH/s are not interesting for mining these algorithms anymore. So Monero (XMR) is going to become the next major ASIC only coin with the many Cryptonight-based alternatives following when the Giant-N miners start hitting the market, unless of course they fork to another algorithm.
The price of the new Baikal Giant-N ASIC miner is not listed on the website, but if you request a quote you will get a $3600 USD price with a minimum order quantity of 6 devices and the devices are apparently shipping already. It already seems that Monero (XMR) could be the first one to fork to a new version of the algorithm that will net be mineable by this new ASIC device and if others coins follow you may actually end up with an expensive piece of hardware that might not be very usable, so be careful if you are considering to buy one or more of these ASIC miners.
– Visit the official Baikal Miner Giant-N Cryptonight ASIC miner product page for more details…
We got a tip that that Nvidia P102-100 GPUs are starting to hit the market and they are going to be interesting for miners similar to the P104-100 as they are offering a custom configuration for the memory and faster performance, unlike their desktop GeForce counterparts. We got information about an Inno3D P102-100 GPU and the specifications of the mining card as well as some preliminary performance results coming from the manufacturer, so if you are interested you can check out the specs and hashrates below. Unfortunately the initial photos of the Inno3D mining GPU show that there are no video output connectors (kind of expected for a mining GPU), but there is also no backplane for attaching the video card to a mining frame or a case easily and that is more of a problem (though they mention Standard PC Bracket as an accessory?). Gigabyte did that thing back when they released the first revision of their Nvidia P106-100 Mining GPU, but later on they have added a backplane in the next revisions.
Inno3D P102-100 Specifications:
– GPU: P102-100
– CUDA Cores: 3200
– Base Clock: 1582 MHz
– Memory Clock: 11 Gbps
– Physical Memory Size: 5 GB
– Memory Type: GDDR5X
– Memory Interface Width: 320-bit
– Memory Bandwidth: 400 GB/s
– Bus Support: PCIe Gen1 x4
– Card Size: 21.5 cm length, 12.5 cm height, dual slot
– Max TDP: 250 Watt
– Power Connectors: 2x 8-pin PCI-E
Inno3D P102-100 Hashrate:
– ETH: ~47 MHS
– ZEC: ~660 Sol/s
– XMR: ~879 H/s
The hashrates cited are from Inno3D directly and are for reference only, there is no mention if these are at stock frequency or after overclock or any user optimizations (could they be stock?). Judging from the number it seems that the new P102-100 GPUs are optimized and will be great for mining Ethash coins, but not that good for others compared to what you can get from a GTX 1080 Ti as a comparison. We do hope that soon we will be able to do a detailed review and have some firsthand performance numbers for the P102-100 mining GPUs, but for now it is only what we are getting from manufacturer specifications. Another very important thing is the pricing of these new GPUs, but unfortunately at the current market conditions we do not expect to find them that much cheaper than what a GTX 1080 Ti goes for.
There is now a fork of sgminer also available for mining the X16r algorithm used by Raven (RVN), so the coin is no longer in the domain of Nvidia miners alone. The sgminer-gm fork with X16R support by aceneun should work on most recent AMD GPUs such as RX 4xx/5xx series and RX VEGA just fine, we have not tested it on older generations, but it might be just fine for them as well. Do note that there is a Windows binary available and it requires you to have the 32-bit (x86) version of Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 installed in order to run it.
The performance you could expect from the sgminer-gm-x16r is about 5-6 MHS on AMD Radeon RX 470/480 or RX 570/580 series of GPUs, though the results can vary based on different clock settings. On an AMD Radeon RX VEGA 56/64 GPU you should be able to get about 10-12 MHS, though again results can vary depending on configuration and clocks. Performance wise it is not bad compared to what users are getting on their Nvidia GPUs, though the latest ccMiner Enemy 1.03 fork for Raven (RVN) does provide higher hashrate on Nvidia GPUs.
Regardless if you are using AMD or Nvidia GPUs, mining Raven (RVN) might not be a bad idea at the moment as there is a lot of user interest and hype surrounding the coin and difficulty is growing. We are yet to see however how will things develop in the near and the not so near future with this coin as it may all end up with too much hype, but then again this could also end up being a gem for the earlier adopters as well. The difficulty of the coin has been steadily growing in the last few days and now with an AMD GPU miner available as well it will most likely continue to grow higher.
– To download and try the sgminer-gm-x16r AMD GPU miner for Raven’s (RVN) X16r algorithm…