i9-11900K may be on par with the RTX 2060 in Ether mining performance

[Random_Person1234]

Summary

In tests, some users of the 11900K have shown that the chip may be the first mainstream CPU to be somewhat suitable for mining. Some users have shown that the 11900K has a hashrate of 27 MH/s on Ether, about the same as an RTX 2060 or RX 5500 XT. This performance is likely due to AVX512 support. However, don't expect miners to buy up all the stock of the 11900K anytime soon. With a max power consumption of 400W, this CPU is nowhere near efficient enough to be profitable.

 

Quotes

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In a rather surprising test, a few users have shown that Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S flagship might be the first mainstream CPU (somewhat) suitable for mining.

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In the above image, you can see the Core i9-11900K mining Ether at a rather impressive 27 MH/s. That’s roughly the same as a GeForce RTX 2060 or a Radeon RX 5500 XT which is a first for a consumer eight-core CPU. This is likely due to the inclusion of AVX512 (512b vector support) on the 11th Gen processors, along with the new Adaptive Boost technology which allows the Core i9-11900K to run all eight cores at nearly 5GHz.

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As you can expect, this does come at a cost, namely a high power consumption of as much as 400W, roughly the same as a GeForce RTX 3080 which has a hash rate of close to 100 MH/s. You’ll also need an expensive AIO cooler to keep the CPU cool which will cost more than $100. So, there you have it. The CPU can miner Ether at a decent rate, but it’s still not quite viable.

 

My thoughts

This is interesting, but at a power consumption of 400W it's not very viable. I do wonder how much tuning you could do to this CPU to make it closer to profitable.

 

Sources

https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-core-i9-11900k-reportedly-on-par-w-the-nvidia-rtx-3060-in-ether-mining-courtesy-of-avx512/

[porina]

Just like with GPUs, if you were to mine with a CPU you wouldn't run it tuned for all out performance. Efficiency will have to be taken into consideration. I don't know where that would be.

 

Co-incidentally I just got an 11700k today which I'm putting through testing now. At stock, yes I'm seeing high power usage with AVX-512 in Prime95 (peaking 216W) but if you work out perf/watt in that workload it is about equal to running Coffee Lake/Comet Lake. More power, more work, and balances out. I've yet to try power optimisation, as it is my suspicion that a lower power limit will increase efficiency further and also reduce the peak cooling demand to more easily manageable levels.

[Not_A_Spider]

I really doubt anyone would use a 10900k for mining, even overnight miners. Mostly because tuning CPU voltages/clocks/power is so much more of a pain than it is on GPUs.

[WhitetailAni]

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i9-11900K may be on par with the RTX 2060 in Ether mining

  

15 minutes ago, Random_Person1234 said:

In tests, some users of the 11900K have shown that the chip may be the first mainstream CPU to be somewhat suitable for mining. Some users have shown that the 11900K has a hashrate of 27 MH/s on Ether, about the same as an RTX 2060 or RX 5500 XT. This performance is likely due to AVX512 support. However, don't expect miners to buy up all the stock of the 11900K anytime soon. With a max power consumption of 400W, this CPU is nowhere near efficient enough to be profitable.

So while it's on par in performance, it's not on par with total income.

[Random_Person1234]

1 minute ago, FakeKGB said:

  

So while it's on par in performance, it's not on par with total income.

I'll edit the title, as I can see that there could be confusion.

[Moonzy]

interesting, interested in the best hash per watt it can do

[porina]

It's not Ethereum. I managed to find the source of the screenshot, which is the video below. Hope timestamp works, if not, go around 6:46. It's something called veruscoin whatever that is, so all comparisons with ethereum are off.

 

 

 

[Random_Person1234]

3 minutes ago, porina said:

It's not Ethereum. I managed to find the source of the screenshot, which is the video below. Hope timestamp works, if not, go around 6:46. It's something called veruscoin whatever that is, so all comparisons with ethereum are off.

 

 

 

Nice find!

What's interesting is that he says its actually profitable when you factor in electricity. He was running at 26 MH/s at 212W, which gives him a daily profit of US 57₵.

[porina]

1 minute ago, Random_Person1234 said:

Nice find!

What's interesting is that he says its actually profitable when you factor in electricity. He was running at 26 MH/s at 212W, which gives him a daily profit of US 57₵.

BTW I was curious enough since I have Rocket Lake, and also Skylake-X with AVX-512 I was considering trying it if I can find out what software was used. I didn't come up with anything in a general search, so I tried to look at the screenshot in the source article. "enhance that" didn't help, too blurry, but I noticed the Son of a Tech watermark on the image, leading to that channel and that video fitted the description. Wonder if Hardware Times even tried to fact check before posting that or was a random post on a Chinese forum enough for them?

 

Thinking more, ethereum is designed to be ram bandwidth intensive. On GPU, you want high performance ram and can reduce core as much as you can to save power without impacting the hashrate. I should have twigged that earlier. CPUs have extremely poor ram bandwidth in comparison, and having faster cores doesn't make up for it.

[BuckGup]

Cool but not really anything meaningful. 

[JediFragger]

The perfect mining cpu......if you get your electricity from the lamppost outside

[AnonymousGuy]

2 hours ago, JediFragger said:

The perfect mining cpu......if you get your electricity from the lamppost outside

I live in the US...my electric cost is about 3.8 cents per kWh.  It's so cheap that it's basically non-factor for my mining profitability.

 

The "catch" is that I have to make sure my peak usage isn't too high.  I can average 6kWh total all day long but if I hit 12kWh peak with AC and dryer running...shit gets expensive.

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, RejZoR said:

*snip*

Nah. Crypto mining is excessively bad for the planet, on the level of powering your computer with coal. The problem is the forum tends to be rather divisive about who is entitled to a GPU, and that just drives the conversation. Nobody's mind is getting changed here. I'd assume most people who are posting here have either dabbled in it, or @home/BOINC and know what they are doing, and it amounts to just screaming at the choir to keep posting about it.

 

You can only have that conversation so many times per week before it gets repetative and angry. That can be resolved by merging posts about crypto into one thread instead of allowing them to take over the news forum.

 

[leadeater]

40 minutes ago, Kisai said:

or @home/BOINC and know what they are doing

I would hardly attribute F@H or BOINC to the GPU supply problems but I do agree there is certainly a crossover between the two, but mostly in one direction. Few miners, very few, participate in F@H or BOINC. Both F@H and BOINC are globally a rather small community and are insignificant in a discussion about mining, plus I suspect most of them wouldn't apricate being lumped in with miners as well.

 

For example at the peak of F@H ever last year during the LTT folding event for it, as well as other groups and a more global collective effort, the total network performance did exceed the single fastest super computer in the top 500 but there is like the list suggest 499 more of them mostly GPU accelerated and the many hundreds more that are not on the list or did not make the list. There were about 7000+ active participants for the LTT folding even (I still have the data so can check) and we were at peak 40% of the total F@H network output. If you run the numbers so can see how F@H (which is vastly bigger than BOINC) is overall nothing in terms of GPUs and impact on the market. Not to mention most of the people participating in the event were primary gaming wanting to help out for that short time and no longer fold and likely won't again.

[RejZoR]

BOINC is just platform, not an actual compute system. They host distributed computations through projects within BOINC (like Rosetta@home for example).

[JediFragger]

14 hours ago, Kisai said:

on the level of powering your computer with coal.

Don't man, you'll give them ideas!!!!

 

[Basher99]

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

I would hardly attribute F@H or BOINC to the GPU supply problems but I do agree there is certainly a crossover between the two, but mostly in one direction. Few miners, very few, participate in F@H or BOINC. Both F@H and BOINC are globally a rather small community and are insignificant in a discussion about mining, plus I suspect most of them wouldn't apricate being lumped in with miners as well.

 

For example at the peak of F@H ever last year during the LTT folding event for it, as well as other groups and a more global collective effort, the total network performance did exceed the single fastest super computer in the top 500 but there is like the list suggest 499 more of them mostly GPU accelerated and the many hundreds more that are not on the list or did not make the list. There were about 7000+ active participants for the LTT folding even (I still have the data so can check) and we were at peak 40% of the total F@H network output. If you run the numbers so can see how F@H (which is vastly bigger than BOINC) is overall nothing in terms of GPUs and impact on the market. Not to mention most of the people participating in the event were primary gaming wanting to help out for that short time and no longer fold and likely won't again.

Not to mention that BOINC didn't have an active gpu project until recently.  OpenPandemics just announced gpu usability so I highly doubt BOINC contributed any to the gpu issues we face.

 

That aside, I was always under the impression that cpu mining was pretty much a waste since the hash rates were abysmal.

[porina]

1 hour ago, Basher99 said:

Not to mention that BOINC didn't have an active gpu project until recently.

There have been BOINC projects using GPUs going back years.

 

The difference is with distributed computing (BOINC and similar) you are usually donating your hardware time and electricity to a project, usually with no more than an abstract credit to indicate work done. Mining is seeking a form of credit which does relate back to real money.

 

1 hour ago, Basher99 said:

That aside, I was always under the impression that cpu mining was pretty much a waste since the hash rates were abysmal.

Mining as a workload isn't that different from other use cases. It all depends on how the code scales. If it suits a GPU, then chances are, a CPU will do relatively poorly in comparison. However GPUs can't do all types of work efficiently so CPU focused crypto do exist.

[Maticks]

it may also be on par with the ability to cook toast like my toaster.

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Maticks said:

it may also be on par with the ability to cook toast like my toaster.

You eat small toast then 

[StDragon]

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

You eat small toast then 

Melba toast 

[Guest willies leg]

Kindof like making a butter sculpture with a sledgehammer

[Maticks]

On 4/9/2021 at 11:50 PM, leadeater said:

You eat small toast then 

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Maticks said:

 

Ah yes my mistake, I was only thinking about the IHS size, how foolish of me.