Posts Tagged ‘Ethash

There is a lot of talk going on around the new generation of Ethash ASIC miners for mining Ethereum (ETH) that are expected to be released for order in the following few months, although nothing is official or really 100% confirmed, but both devices are expected to have hashrate higher than 2000 MH/s. We are talking about the Innosilicon’s A11 ETH miner and an upcoming device from a newcomer on the mining market, a company called Linzhi that has been getting some attention for a while now. Linzhi Inc was founded by Chen Min, the former CTO of Canaan, a popular name for everyone that has been into crypto mining for a while already as this is one of the first companies to be making Bitcoin ASIC miners – the Avalon miners.

Currently the Innosilicon A10 Pro ETH Miner is the best performing specialized non-GPU-based miner for Ethash with 500 MHS hashrate and 950W of power consumption and a price of $4388 USD (or 0.125933 BTC) as per the official company website (currently all sold out). The alternative is using GPUs for mining ETH and you even might be able to get the same level of performance as the A10 Pro ETH Miner if you go for Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series – 8x RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070 or 5-6x RTX 3080 or 4-5x RTX 3090 video cards, but unfortunately pretty much all GPUs suitable for mining are currently hard to find and more expensive than usual.

F2Pool did an unboxing and a test of a sample Linzhi Phoenix ETH miner (the video above). The device is supposedly capable of 2600 MHS hashrate for Ethash with a power usage of 3000-3500W. The Linzhi Phoenix E2600M ETH mining devices are supposedly to be up for purchase around March-April this year with a price in the range of 13-15 thousand USD. The main problem with the Linzhi miner is that it has 4.4GB of memory and Ethereum’s DAG file is already over 4GB in size, meaning that the life expectancy of these miners for mining ETH won’t be very long. If they start shipping as announced and you are among the first to get the device you may still end up with just 4-5 months of use for mining Ethereum, though you would still be able to mine other crypto coins with the Ethash algorithm and smaller DAGs. So, maybe everything was great when they started development 2 years ago, but now 4.4 GB is not enough and if they do not manage to increase the available memory by the time of release to the market things might not be looking very good for their sales.

The Innosilicon A11 ETH miner is the other upcoming next-gen ETH ASIC miner. Supposedly the A11 Ethash miner will be delivering 2100 MH/s Ethash hashrate with just 2300W of power usage and should come with 8GB memory. The not so good thing here is that the price will be higher, probably in the range of about 15-16 thousand USD with shipping expected to start somewhere in April-June time. The Innosilicon is probably the better choice if the final end-product specifications turn out to be as the values we are expecting, as even though it may be slower in terms of hashrate, and more expensive as a price, but is also more power efficient and better equipped for long term use with enough onboard memory.

You should also consider the fact that Ethereum (ETH) will be switching from PoW (Proof of Work) to PoS (Proof of Staking) or with other words moving from mining to staking as a model of generating new coins. This transition has already been started, even though mining is still active and will be for maybe 2 years at least, but when looking for a long-term investment in mining hardware you should have things like that in mind. Not to mention that unlike the specialized ETH miners, going for GPUs allows for much better flexibility even though they may not be as efficient in terms of performance for a specific algorithm.

Build of a 720 MHs Ethereum Mining Rig With 6x MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X 24G GPUs…

The latest GMiner 2.43 Nvidia and AMD GPU miner continues improving on Ethash support including compatibility with pools as well as new kernels for Nvidia. The latest update adds two new kernels for Ethash, so that now the miner support 5 kernels for Nvidia GPUs in order to ensure optimal performance depending on your GPU. Gminer automatically selects the optimal kernel by default, but you can also select specific kernel by the --oc command line parameter. The latest version also brings improved handling of device freezing as well as improved auto-tuning.

GMiner 2.43 Nvidia and AMD GPU miner changelog:
– improved compatibility with Ethash pools (shardpool.io)
– improved handling of device freezing
– improved auto-tuning
– added two kernels for Ethash, miner support 5 kernels for Nvidia GPUs, miner automatically select optimal kernel, also you can select specific kernel by --oc parameter

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 standard 2% developer fee built-in the software, though Ethash fee is 0.65% and KAWPOW fee is 1%, but there are some fees that go higher than 2% as well!

To download and try the latest release of the Gminer v2.43 Nvidia and AMD GPU miner…

Team Red Miner is a performance optimized cryptocurrency miner for AMD GPUs with support for a number of algorithms with the latest major version 0.8.0 bringing rewritten Ethash kernels and new mining modes for all GPU types. This means you should get better hashrate at a slightly lower power consumption on most recent AMD GPUs. In general, TeamRedMiner (TRM) behaves similarly to other AMD Ethash miners, the key difference is the additional mining modes (B/C-modes) that use additional VRAM on the GPUs for further beneficial effects.

Key highlights of the TRM 0.8.8 release:
– Polaris: Efficiency and slight hashrate increase. B-mode reintroduced for added hash. B-mode must be enabled with --eth_aggr_mode or --eth_config=Bxxx.
– Vega 56/64: greatly improved base kernel for efficiency. New B-mode that can shave off additional 1-2W on top of the A-mode kernel. B-mode must be enabled manually with --eth_config (--eth_aggr_mode does not apply). Tuning numbers have changed – do NOT keep your old static –eth_config values.
– Radeon VII: huge boost with its new C-mode but requires a special Linux setup. Can now do 100 MH/s on most air cooled VIIs. See tuning guide.
– 5700/5700XT: can shave off as much as 8-9W(!) of power using the new B-mode and dropping core clk+voltage. B-mode now the default mining mode. Unless you retune your core clk+voltage you will see a tiny power draw increase instead and not benefit from the upgrade, so read the migration guide.
– 5600XT: new B-mode has a much smaller effect. A-mode remains the default mining mode. See new tuning guide for more details.
– The DAG cache is NOT compatible with the new B/C-modes. ETH+ZIL switchers have to choose between caching the epoch 0 dag and using the new mining modes.
– Ethash 4GB kernels NOT rewritten in this release, performance remains the same as in 0.7.x.

The miner is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems, a closed source software with 2.5% to 3% development fee built-in for most algorithms except Ethash and KAWPOW, for KAWPOW it is 2% and for Ethash on Polaris GPUs the dev fee is 0.75% and for all other AMD GPUs is 1.0%.

To download and try the latest TeamRedMiner 0.8.0 with improved Ethash performance…


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