New XMRig 5.1.0 Miner With Improved RandomX Mining Performance

1 Dec
2019

The latest release of the XMRig 5.1.0 just came out after the successfull Monero (XMR) hardfork to RandomX and it brings improvements in performance. RandomX performance is improved up to +6-7% on Intel CPUs and +2-3% on Ryzen CPUs, so if you are mining Monero (XMR) at the moment or any of the other RandomX-based crypto projects such as LOKI, ArQmA or Wownero you might want to update your mining software. The developer of the mining software also notes that you should always disable “Hardware prefetcher” and “Adjacent cacheline prefetch” in BIOS for Intel processors in order to get the optimal RandomX performance with them. With this latest performance improvement XMRig might yet again lead the pack of RandomX miners by a bit, followed by SRBMiner-MULTI and still the bit slower XMR-STAK-RX.

– To download and try the latest version of the XMRig miner with RandomX algorithm support…

Monero (XMR) Has Successfully Switched to RandomX CPU Mining

1 Dec
2019

The expected hard fork of Monero (XMR) happened without issues and now the mining part is being done with CPUs (mostly) using the RandomX mining algorithm as opposed to CryptoNight R that was mostly GPU mined prior the fork. Currently the hashrate of the Monero network is around 500 MH/s with XMR drawing a lot of CPU mining resources from other crypto projects that were already unprofitable to mine anyway, so as a direct consequence some of these might become interesting for mining again with the focus on Monero. The big question at the moment is where all the GPU mining power that was focused on Monero will go now as these were mostly AMD mining GPUs, so most likely other CryptoNight-based projects will have to deal with the extra computing power. After checking a few of the more popular CryptoNight-based projects we don’t yet see big jumps in terms of hashrate after the fork of Monero, and that could easily mean that XMR already had a lot of “free” CPU mining going on even on the old CryptoNight R algorithm.

With the current network hashrate of about 500 MH/s the estimated daily coins you can mine with a single AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU that has about 6 KH/s of hashrate on stock settings is around 0.019 XMR at the moment or a bit over $1 USD if you exchange it for fiat at the current rate. This is better than we could get with the same CPU mining other RandomX coins yesterday. It is about double than mining LOKI yesterday, which was the most profitable one using the RandomXL algorithm, today however things also look different for LOKI as the mined equivalent is actually more profitable than Monero at $1.28 USD with the current difficulty after the outflow of hashrate to XMR. ArQmA (ARQ) is also up almost double in terms of mined equivalent in USD, and WoWnero doesn’t seem to be much affected in any way, remaining the least attractive of the RandomX crypto pack.

The Second Grin Hard Fork is Planned for January 2020

30 Nov
2019

The Grin project has already successfully hard forked once already earlier this year with a change in the C29 PoW algorithm from Cuckaroo29 to Cuckarood29 and now a second hard fork has been planned. Grin’s Hard Fork 2 is planned for block 524160 that should be reached sometime in January next year (around the middle of the month) with the testnet expected to fork a month earlier. Compatible versions of grin node, grin-wallet, and grin-miner will be versioned 3.0.0 or greater with the first releases of these are scheduled for December.

Grin remains true to its commitment to tweak CuckARoo as part of every network upgrade it does in order to discourage manufacturers from building specialized ASIC mining hardware for it, ASICs on the other hand are encouraged and being developed for the other algorithm C31 that Grin uses. As such, the currently used algorithm Cuckarood29 will be deprecated for a new algorithm called Cuckaroom. This means that if you want to be able to continue mining Grin with the C29 algorithm after mid-January next year after the fork happens you would need to update your miner software to support the new algorithm. The first beta binaries of the software should be available in the next couple of days along with details about the new algorithm, so miner software developers will have enough time to integrate the required changes for the new algorithm by the time the hard fork executes.

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