Mining Monero On The CPU & Ethereum On The GPU

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mining Monero On The CPU & Ethereum On The GPU

Following his recent article about Mining Ethereum With AMD Threadrippers Paired With Four RX Vega 64 GPUs, Phoronix German reader Thomas Frech is back with another guest post. This time he's talking about his adventures about mining the Monero crypto-currency on the CPU while using the GPUs for Ethereum mining...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Monero-CPU-Ethereum-GPU

[mroche]

The hash-rate limitation seems odd for this miner. I know Claymore does it for his, but I didn't think the STAK miners followed suit. I used it earlier this year and didn't notice a difference. I tried looking through the repo but I couldn't find where this decision was made, nor can I really read C++.

[Luke_Wolf]

good luck tildearrow

[tildearrow]

I don't report typos on non-Michael articles... But if you still want to see...

I benchmarked 4 systems with monero a 1900X a 1920X and a FX8320 and a 8xARM Cortex-A53 MediaTek MT6750 Smartphone.

The result for the 8xARM Cortex-A53 on a playstore monero mining app

The FX 8320 with 32GB 4 DIMM DDR3-1333MHz ram @ 7 threads lands at ~130 H/s
The 1900X with 1 DIMM 16gb 2333MHz @ 8 theads comes to ~650 H/s
And the 1920X with 1 DIMM 16gb 2333MHz @ 12 threads comes to ~600 H/s

Very interesting is that xmr-stak-cpu miner is allergic to Intel's Hyper-Threating if someone uses the full 16 threats on a Threadripper 1900X the result will be very bad only 80 H/s only if you use only 1 thread per real core you will get the full performance. AMDs FX-8320's old architecture instead does not have a slowdown if you use more than 4 threads so there will not be a slowdown if you use 8 threats on this 8-integer-core cpu with only 4 FPU and SIMD units. This on Monero Intel's Hyper-Threating is a full joke.

(also missing comma between "80 H/s" and "only")

Also very interesting is that the 12 core 1920X turns out to be slower on 1 RAMM DIMM than the 8 core I think this is the result of the very strong sensitive to latency means for 12 cores you will need more than 1 RAM DIMM to not slow down the CPU on Monero.

(also missing period between "core" and "I", and comma/semicolon between "cores" and "you")

The moriaxmr.com mining pool is very good it has low fees

Only six because of cooling problems I can only run 3 cards per Desktop-PC with good cooling and for this I have to build in the bottom gpu cards like a cheater asland. With 4 cards per PC it is just impossible to get airflow into the 2. card from the top even not with mechanical cheating like spread the cards to get airflow

(either missing comma/semicolon between "six" and "because" or missing period between "problems" and "I")

(also, "asland"? "cheat"? I'm getting confused)

(also missing comma between "top" and "even")

With my 4 years of electric professional training I can say yes this is the PSU you want for your Desktop PC.
It is ready for 4 AMD-VEGA-64 GPUs and even ready for dual socket style systems with 4*4pin/P4 12Volt lines means full 2x8-pin and you really need that for a AMD Threadripper system or a IBM POWER9 dual socket mainboard. It is fully modular and even has two more cables to plug in than you need this means if you need more SATA you can chose this cable or if you need more old-school molex 5V+12V cables you can chose the other cable.

(missing comma between "yes" and "this")

(also for "need" and "this")

The Freezer 120 is really a easy to use and cheap (57€) CPU cooler it has in my point of view a very low temperature I will not go into details in this article but my 2 ThreadRipper CPUs 1900X/1920 can stay in the highest XFR (+200MHz) modes all the time. this means for the 8 and 12 core you do not need a bigger cooling system if you do not manually overclock the system.

(missing comma between "cooler" and "it")

(missing period between "temperature" and "I")

fresh air to the cpu.

Next time i will test

Also, can I ask? Would it be possible to mine Monero using a GPU?

[nils_]

I don't report typos on non-Michael articles... But if you still want to see...

Yeah this one was pretty terrible. There ought to be some proofreading.

[Michael]

Yeah this one was pretty terrible. There ought to be some proofreading.

It was already significantly changed with my edits to it compared to when it started out. Qaridarium's English skills are limited, but at a certain point in all these edits after a while, decided most people will find more flaws, so it is what it is.

[chadotter]

Why is Intel's HyperThreading referenced at all in this post when an AMD's CPU is used? It should be a comment on AMD's SMT.

I'm not sure about xmr-stak-cpu, but I have an old 4C/8T Core i7 965 and it sees a ~12% improvement when selecting 8 threads vs. 4 thread using the MinerGate GUI on Ubuntu.

[aaronage]

Interesting stuff!

Have you considered using all the CPU and GPU performance for Monero? Not sure if this was explored in an earlier article.

I have 1 x RX Vega 56 and it's doing between 1750H/s with xmr-stak-amd at only around 140w. Configuration is:

• Windows 10 (I know... xmr-stak-amd hasn't been built for Linux unfortunately.)
• AMD Blockchain Driver (Beta 2017-08-08)
• -30% clock
• -20 Power Limit
• HBM boosted to 900MHz
• HBCC enabled

And the xmr-stak-amd config looks like:
"gpu_thread_num": "2"
"gpu_threads_conf" : [
{ "index" : 0, "intensity" : 1512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
{ "index" : 0, "intensity" : 1512, "worksize" : 8, "affine_to_cpu" : false },
],

https://imgur.com/I87sKB6

Along with my Ryzen 1700 at 3.7GHz (stock volts) which produces 620H/s, my box is doing 2370H/s at ~230w. I plan to add a second Vega 56 to bring that number up to 4120H/s at (est.) 380w.

I've seen other people manage 1950H/s with Vega 56 by using higher intensity and higher HBM clocks - though I've yet to explore that myself.

4 x RX Vega 64's plus the 1920X (with 2 x DIMMs, one for each die's memory controller) should manage around 8500H/s total. Possibly at just 750-800w? (assuming the cards are underclocked a little!). My calculations might be a bit off, but I think that would get around 330 EUR a month.

[andrei_me]

qarium nice article but it needs more introductory text, as I don't know much about crypto currency, it seems to me that you jump from one stream of thought to another, without a text bridging them

[nils_]

So Monero really likes many ram-dimms a 4 ram-channel threatripper mainboard maybe works best for monero with 4 dimms.

This is easily explained by the architecture of these CPUs. Since it's basically 2 CPUs on one chip you'll stress the connection between those 2 CPUs when you only connect RAM to one of the CPUs.