Todek TODDMINER C1 CKB (Eaglesong) ASIC Miner Coming Soon

26 Feb
2020

There is apparently a new ASIC miner coming right around the corner called TODDMINER C1 for the Eaglesong algorithm used by the Nervos (CKB) project. The device is made by a new Chinese company with the Toddminer being their first ASIC device apparently. TODDMINER C1 promises to deliver 1.6 TH/s hashrate with 1100 Watts of power usage, a significant improvement over the existing FPGA miners with support for the algorithm. The new ASIC is priced at 28800 Chinese Yuan or about $4100 USD with shipping about to start in March, so in just a few days from now.

Currently a BlackMiner F1 Ultra FPGA manages to do just about 26.5 GH/s with about the same power usage and a daily revenue of about $9 USD, however that is about to change with the new much higher hashrate ASIC miner. So bad news for HashAltcoin and their FPGA miners and the people that use them as CKB was the best performing and most profitable project to mine for a few months already.

– For more information abut the Todek TODDMINER C1 CKB (Eaglesong) ASIC Miner…

RandomX Mining Performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Processor (64C/128T)

25 Feb
2020

AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Processor is the latest and highest-end workstation CPU from AMD offering staggering 64 cores and 128 logical threads to the user or with other words really massive performance if you can manage to take advantage. The Ryzen Threadripper 3990X CPU does not come cheap at a retail price of about $3990 USD it is really expensive, so most definitely not for everyone and unfortunately not the best choice for mining if you want to pay back for it mining crypto at the moment. Nevertheless we managed to get our hands on one of these monsters of CPU power and the first thing we did was to run some RandomX CPU benchmarks in order to see what level of performance we are going to get. You can read our first impressions and results below…

We have started our RandomX testing on the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X CPU with the latest XMRig 5.7.0 that was just recently released and we managed to get all 128 threads at 100% and a hashrate of almost 40 KH/s. Performance wise great result, but still earning you just about 3 and something US dollars per day mining Monero (XMR) that uses the RandomX algorithm, making it pretty pointless to use that particular processor for mining. Mining ARQma (RandomARQ) got us 198 KH/s hashrate, for LOKI (RandomXL) the hashrate was 46.6 KH/s and for WOWnero (RandomWOW) the result was 49.1 KH/s when using the latest XMRig miner. Trying out the latest XMR-Stak-RX got us a bit higher hashrate at 41.3 KH/s for RandomX and the latest SRBMiner-Multi miner did perform even slightly better with 41.8 KH/s as hashrate mining Monero (XMR).

All of the miners for RandomX did manage to properly load all of the available 128 logical cores on the 3990X processor, but be aware that not all CPU miners out there and all algorithms may be able to take full advantage of so many CPU threads for mining. An example of a miner that had trouble automatically using all 128 threads is the PEGNet (PEG) miner at the Orax Pool that did put a load on only half the logical threads available or with other words only 64 threads instead of the full 128. Trying to manually fix the issue by increasing the number of sub miners to 128 from the automatically detected 64 unfortunately does not help to take full advantage of all 128 logical cores that the processor offers.

Are Bitmain’s Antminer E3 Ethash ASIC Miners Becoming Obsolete

24 Feb
2020

It seems that the life of the Antminer E3 ASIC miners from Bitmain is nearing its end with the Ethash miner apparently becoming useless for Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining and soon for Ethereum (ETH) as well, or at least we are getting such reports form users being unable to mine properly ETC these devices anymore. The reason for that is the fact that they do work like video cards with 4GB video memory and as these become obsolete due to large DAG size (even though not yet 4GB in size), so will do the E3 ASIC miners. ETC is the first to drop from the E3 coins to mine as it is ahead with about 10 epochs from ETH (328 for ETC, 318 for ETH), so Ethereum has less than two months left before reaching the same place as ETC did. Of course there are a number of other smaller Ethash-based projects that are far behind with their DAG epochs, so the E3 miners will still be able to be mined with the ASIC miners. The problem is what will happen with profitability with a big influx of hashrate coming from large E3 mining operations, so most likely very soon it will be time to retire the miners.

It is interesting to note that Ethereum (ETH) does have a plan to do another fork and switch to the ProgPow proof of work mining algorithm (GPU-only mining) at some point this year, and the time could coincide with the “E3 miner death” for ETH mining or not. Nevertheless now is definitely not the best time to be buying Antminer E3 even if somebody is offering the hardware at a really low prices as in less than two months it might become pretty useless. If you do have E3 ASIC miners make sure you maximize their use for the remaining time that you should be able to mine ETH with them and start planning what to do with them afterwards.

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