POWER9 Could Be A Game Changer For Cryptocurrency Mining

[madscientist159]

L_A_G Thank you for sharing your view on this. On this topic I'm honestly not sure that a permanent, public ledger is a good idea for one reason only: fungibility. Right now, with cash, you don't know the history of any given bill, nor do you care or have a legal obligation to know. Bills can be take out of service and replenished as needed to ensure that one bill can be spent exactly the same as another.

Bitcoin and other public ledger systems don't have this property. You could buy coins one day, later on have some organization link them to illegal activity that happened before you bought them, and suddenly your coins are effectively worthless (or worse, you end up being accused of things you didn't do and had no ties to). I don't know that we, even in the West, are really ready for that level of transparency. Imagine every single person being able to mine your transactions to determine what you like to eat, where you go on certain days, etc. -- it's credit cards all over again but without even the fig leaf of privacy we currently enjoy.

Sure, Monero is quite attractive to criminals for this very reason. So is cash, and Monero has one advantage in that you can cough up a secondary key to allow your transactions to be traced if needed to be cleared of wrongdoing (if I'm wrong here please correct me!). So in that sense it seems to be reasonably designed.

Also, point taken on scientific compute, but one thing that's overlooked here is that the combination of the I/O, large caches, and fast AES units also makes POWER ideal for on the fly data encryption, whether over the network or for storage purposes. That's probably the use case closest to the mining benchmark and where reasonable conclusions can be drawn.

Overall I'm still hampered in terms of benchmarks as we wait for the final silicon at the final (much higher) clock rates, but at least this shows the direction POWER9 is headed....

[L_A_G]

madscientist159
Monero and other "currencies" designed to be ASIC-resistant really aren't that much better at avoiding centralized control by a few groups/organizations who can cough up a lot of money for very efficient mining rigs. The main difference is that monero is right now much closer to the start of the difficulty curve so a much smaller and less efficient operation is still viable, but as the difficulty goes up, as it did with bitcoin, more expensive and specialized setups will be required for the running costs to match the payout.

What it all really seems to come down to is an attempt to allow small players to make money on this racket for a bit longer than bitcoin, which moved from GPUs to FPGAs and then dedicated ASICs a lot faster than most people (myself included) anticipated. These ledger-free crypto "currencies" are ultimately just about people trying to get a cut out of the transactions people want to make untraceable and the reason why they want to make them untraceable is in 99% of cases because they involve illegal activity (narcotics, illegal firearms, forged documents, ransoms, etc.).

As for POWER9s number crunching potential, all this shows is that it's got some pretty good hashing ASICs built in, but proper general purpose number crunching, which is what scientific compute is all about is still best done on actually programmable hardware like GPUs and CPU vector instruction units. POWER9 may have some decent vector instruction hardware, but with this level of efficiency it clearly wasn't being used here as non-ASICs simply can't achieve this level of efficiency.

[OneTimeShot]

Coin mining is rivalling real mining for destroying resources...

[madscientist159]

L_A_G My interest in Monero is mainly to avoid the high degree of miner centralization that has occurred on Scrypt and similar algorithms. What exactly is the difference between a faceless corporation dictating policy in financial matters and a centralized miner farm in some foreign country controlling some large fraction of what is and is not allowed on the network?

CryptoNight (the algorithm Monero uses) is interesting specifically because it is such a memory pig that CPU and GPU mining has remained viable and, in my opinion, the network is stronger due to the number of varying miners owned by many different organisations and individuals. Plus, it's just fun to still be able to mine a currency without requiring an up front payment for extremely special purpose (i.e. useless in <n> months) hardware.

For what it's worth this benchmark was mainly intended to show what POWER9 can do even at this stage. Vega 64 "only" does ~2KH/s and uses more power, so I'd say POWER's a fairly strong contender for CryptoNight mining. This benchmark also hints at what POWER9 can do for scientific compute if your kernel needs to work on larger datasets....

[L_A_G]

Why is POWER9 faster?

Probably because it's got a good chunk of the silicon area dedicated to built-in ASICs for hashing algorithms like versions of SHA (which is what pretty much all crypto "currencies" use). Just about all efficient "mining" hardware is built around ASICs for hashing (there's also FPGA-based hardware but my understanding is that they're way less common). There's also hardware like GPUs that can do the rather simple math most hashing algorithms use at a very high rate, but they can't hold a candle to an ASIC in terms of efficiency, which is why bitcoin went from CPUs to GPUs and then ASICs.

As for monero itself, we are talking about something specifically designed to take up loads of unnecessary memory so it can't be done on pure ASICs, thus wasting loads of energy, and which, thanks to it's lack of a public ledger like bitcoin has, is mostly used to launder bitcoin from illegitimate sources like narcotics, illegal firearms, forged documents and cryptolocker ransom payments. So on the whole it's pretty suspect even for a crypto "currency".

[Drago]

Why is POWER9 faster?

http://i.imgur.com/DkVaxB3.gif

[mudig]

Why is POWER9 faster?

[chuckula]

Yeah, I predict: Nobody will use these for real coin mining given the price and the fact that GPUs/ASICs are going to move forward a whole lot faster than iterations of the POWER architecture.

[SuperIce97]

POWER9 also supports SMT8 (8-way multithreading)

[theriddick]

It would be great for crypto mining to move away from GPU's, but I swear I read somewhere that people were getting 40-43MH/s Eth with tweaked Vega64's. Could be wrong.