Bitmain Antminer E3 Firmware Update to Extend the Miner’s Life

30 Mar
2020

It seems that Bitmain has taken seriously the issue with their Antminer E3 ASIC miners intended for Ethash stopping to mine Ethereum Classic (ETC) recently and their upcoming inability to mine ETH as well in the very near future. To ensure Bitmain can provide efficient mining equipment for the Ethereum community, it has launched a new firmware to support the Antminer E3. This new firmware has apparently been designed to allow miners to continue using the Antminer E3, even after March 2020. This new firmware addresses the prior issue of the growth of directed acyclic graph (DAG) files, which limited the capability of the Antminer E3s for mining ETH or ETC. This new firmware will expand the usage of Double Date Rate (DDR) Memory, as more space is needed to process DAG files according to the company.

So, how long will the Antminer E3 last with the new firmware? The new firmware has been designed to better support the Antminer E3, and so Bitmain is confident that miners can continue using the hardware past April 2020. With the new firmware update, the final approximate block height of the Antminer E3 is 11,400,000, so according to calculations, mining can continue until October of 2020. ETC mining will stop again earlier than ETH due to the current DAG Epoch for Ethereum Classic being ahead with about 10 Epochs. Regardless, the new DAG size that the E3 miners would be able to handle seems to be increased to 3.97 GB based on the block number data released by Bitmain. So if you have Bitmain Antminer E3 miners you should make sure to update them with the latest firmware released to be able to extend their life to the maximum possible.

– To download the latest Bitmain Antminer E3 Firmware Update extending Ethash mining support…

New GMiner 2.04 With Support for the New KAWPOW Algorithm

29 Mar
2020

It did not take long and now the latest GMiner 2.04 GPU miner had added support for the new KAWPOW mining algorithm that RavenCoin (RVN) might/could/should/would be forking to sometime in April. The KAWPOW algorithm is a derivative of ProgPOW with parameters specific for RavenCoin, so another miner with ProgPoW support will not work unless specific RVN support is added like in the case of GMiner that already had ProgPoW support, but needed an update for KAWPOW support. Do note that support for KAWPOW is currently only available for Nvidia GPUs and that goes for ProgPoW as well. You can already test KAWPOW support on the RavenCoin test network to get ready your miner, there miner RVNt testnet tokens do not have any value though.

Besides the new algorithm being added, the latest version of GMiner addresses an issue we have noted regarding high CPU usage in Qitmeer (PMEER) support. There is a new “--trim” parameter being introduced to control additional trim round count for Cuckoo24 (Qitmeer) algorithm that should help reduce CPU load, so you can give it a try and see if it helps if you have any GPU mining rigs with lower-end CPUs that have high CPU load issue.

The GMiner miner software was originally only an Nvidia GPU miner, although some algorithms are already supported on AMD GPUs as well. Do note that GMiner is a closed source miner for Nvidia and AMD GPUs with binaries available for both Windows and Linux, there is a 2% developer fee built-in the software.

– To download and try the latest release of the Gminer v2.04 Nvidia and AMD GPU miner…

RavenCoin (RVN) Forking to New KAWPOW Algorithm in April

28 Mar
2020

The RavenCoin (RVN) project is up for another fork sometime in April that will change once more the Proof of Work mining algorithm used in order to fend off FPGA and ASIC miners specifically and allow GPU miners to get back to mining the coin. The first fork to change the mining algorithm in October last year changed the initial algo to a new X16Rv2 and while that did drive off ASIC and FPGA miners for a while off the network, it did not help that much on the long run as apparently specialized mining hardware was quickly adapted to the new algorithm. This time the change in the algorithm is more drastic and should make sure that GPU mining on a level playing field for both AMD and Nvidia GPU miners is available for long…

The new algorithm that RVN will be adopting is called KAWPOW and is a derivative of ProgPOW with parameters specific for Ravencoin. The fork is planned for sometime in April, but a specific block time and expected date is not yet chosen. Meanwhile you are welcome to test the new dedicated miner called kawpowminer software that currently only supports mining the new algorithm and you can test it on the RavenCoin testnet using the MinerMore mining pool to make sure you are ready for the fork.

RavenCoin KAWPOW testnet pool:
kawpowminer -U -P stratum+tcp://WALLET.worker@rvnt.minermore.com:4505

The miner is currently available for both Windows and Linux operating systems, though apparently there is not yet official OpenCL binary for Windows, only CUDA. Since the binary releases do not include the required Nvidia CUDA 10.2 libraries you would also need to have the latest Nvidia CUDA Toolkit installed (or at least the runtime libraries from it). Other popular mining software would most likely add the required support for the new algorithm soon before or after the fork to the new algorithm occurs.

Expected performance on stock settings:
– GTX 1050Ti: ~5+ MH/s
– GTX 1060: ~9.5 MH/s
– GTX 1070: ~14 MH/s
– GTX 1070Ti: ~14 MH/s
– GTX 1080Ti: ~24.5 MH/s

We remind you that unlike with Ethash, PROGPOW does not favor lower-end AMD GPUs as it is not so much memory dependent, thus a lower-end AMD GPU will perform similarly to the same level of Nvidia GPU and a higher-end AMD GPU like a similar class Nvidia GPU when using the new KAWPOW algorithm!

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