Cryptominers Target AMD Ryzen CPUs for Their Big L3 Caches

[Lightwreather]

Another controversial one..... getting a lot of 'em these days /s

Summary

According to a recent report from Bitcoin Press, the new Raptoreum (RTM) crypto has the potential to create a shortage of AMD Ryzen processors if enough cryptocurrency miners jump on the bandwagon. Unlike other cryptocurrencies that you can mine with graphics cards or ASICs, Raptoreum favors processors, especially those with huge caches, such as Ryzen, Threadripper or Epyc chips from AMD

 

Quotes

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Having been in testnet for three years, Raptoreum launched earlier this year. It's based on the Proof-Of-Work (PoW) model and the GhostRider algorithm. The latter combines the x16r and CryptoNight algorithms present in Ravencoin and Monero or Bytecoin, respectively. GhostRider likes L3 cache, especially the massive ones, and that's an area in which Ryzen chips excel.

AMD's Zen 3 mainstream processors, such as the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, feature up to 64MB of L3 cache. Based on information from the Raptoreum Mining Profitability Calculator, the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X offer up to 4,247 h/s and 3,557 h/s, respectively. The first could net you 205 Raptoreum a day, while the latter delivers up to 172. At $0.0220255 per Raptoreum and utilizing an energy cost of $0.12/kWh, a Ryzen 9 5950X makes around $4.16 a day, while a Ryzen 9 5900X puts in a respectable $3.43. That means the Ryzen 9 5950X ($739) practically pays for itself in 178 days and the Ryzen 9 5900X ($524) in about 153 days. While the Ryzen 9 5950X delivers a higher hashrate, the Ryzen 9 5900X takes less time to break even.
For the meantime, Raptoreum doesn't seem to have any effect on Ryzen stock, which is a good thing. However, the panorama could change when Ryzen with 3D V-Cache brings chips that can deliver up to 192MB of L3 cache, tripling that of a vanilla Ryzen processor.

 

My thoughts

So...... Here we have another cryptocurrency that uses the CPU, and seems to be more profitable than Monero (XMR). Well, even if that's the case I doubt it'll really take off in any meaningful way. Why? Because there are only so many CPUs you can put into a socket, not to mention that you'll probably need Multiple motherboards, boot drives, PSUs, Memory DIMMs and it's starting to look a lot less appealing now doesn't it? So that's my take on it, please try and keep the discussion civil......

 

Sources

Tom's Hardware
Bitcoin Press
Raptoreum calculator

[tim0901]

 

Guess I'll be going Intel for my next build...

[adarw]

i mean mining at the beginning should be profitable. if i had a ryzen i would honestly mine for a bit just for the fun of it.

[WhitetailAni]

I’m sorry BOINC but I’m doing this while I still make money.

[Brooksie359]

43 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Another controversial one..... getting a lot of 'em these days /s

Summary

According to a recent report from Bitcoin Press, the new Raptoreum (RTM) crypto has the potential to create a shortage of AMD Ryzen processors if enough cryptocurrency miners jump on the bandwagon. Unlike other cryptocurrencies that you can mine with graphics cards or ASICs, Raptoreum favors processors, especially those with huge caches, such as Ryzen, Threadripper or Epyc chips from AMD

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

So...... Here we have another cryptocurrency that uses the CPU, and seems to be more profitable than Monero (XMR). Well, even if that's the case I doubt it'll really take off in any meaningful way. Why? Because there are only so many CPUs you can put into a socket, not to mention that you'll probably need Multiple motherboards, boot drives, PSUs, Memory DIMMs and it's starting to look a lot less appealing now doesn't it? So that's my take on it, please try and keep the discussion civil......

 

Sources

Tom's Hardware
Bitcoin Press
Raptoreum calculator

I always find it funny when people talk about profitability of new cryptocurrency when everyone knows the value is pretty arbitrary so either people get interested in it and the value goes up or people just don't have interest in it ending with the value of the coin tanking. I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't just tank like so many other coins. Sure you can say a coin is profitable in a moment in time but with how volatile they are I would risk building for a coin that isn't even well established. Also at least with most mining rigs you have a few cryptocurrencies to choose from if one becomes unprofitable while with this one you would be more relying on CPU meaning you could really only switch over the mining other cpu heavy cryptocurrencies. 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

I mean... I probably wasn't going to AMD for my next build anyways... but... oh dear lord... 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Another controversial one..... getting a lot of 'em these days /s

Summary

According to a recent report from Bitcoin Press, the new Raptoreum (RTM) crypto has the potential to create a shortage of AMD Ryzen processors if enough cryptocurrency miners jump on the bandwagon. Unlike other cryptocurrencies that you can mine with graphics cards or ASICs, Raptoreum favors processors, especially those with huge caches, such as Ryzen, Threadripper or Epyc chips from AMD

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

So...... Here we have another cryptocurrency that uses the CPU, and seems to be more profitable than Monero (XMR). Well, even if that's the case I doubt it'll really take off in any meaningful way. Why? Because there are only so many CPUs you can put into a socket, not to mention that you'll probably need Multiple motherboards, boot drives, PSUs, Memory DIMMs and it's starting to look a lot less appealing now doesn't it? So that's my take on it, please try and keep the discussion civil......

 

Sources

Tom's Hardware
Bitcoin Press
Raptoreum calculator

I don't think there would be a long time before cryptocurrency starts favouring CPU's with more pins on the bottom.

[GDRRiley]

so what I'm hearing is xeon phi may have a new life?
other than milan-X which already isn't going to be easy for most smaller customers to get for a while, getting harder to find, I doubt this coin will take off

[Skiiwee29]

Main Rig: 5900x

Capture: 3700x

Wife: 3600

HTPC: 2600

 

Sitting in the closet... 1800x... 

 

 

hmmmmmm 

[jagdtigger]

*sigh*

Just outlaw this stupidity already.....

[CT854]

So, how about them 3DVC Zen 3 CPUs?

 

...

 

...

 

Man, it's gonna be a bloodbath, isn't it.

 

On a more serious note, profitability is directly correlated to how the coin retains its value. Chia was hyped as something that'd upend the HDD market until it... didn't.

[porina]

4 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Raptoreum favors processors, especially those with huge caches, such as Ryzen, Threadripper or Epyc chips from AMD

Has anyone actually tested how this behaves under various resource limited scenarios? There will be multiple layers, from the CPU cores themselves, to cache, maybe to ram too. Cache generally matters more when ram performance is out of balance to cores, which hits recent AMD more. Is it bandwidth or latency sensitive? Does merely having a bigger cache improve performance that much? I'll have to poke into this a bit more for a better picture as this has got my interest.

 

4 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Because there are only so many CPUs you can put into a socket, not to mention that you'll probably need Multiple motherboards, boot drives, PSUs, Memory DIMMs and it's starting to look a lot less appealing now doesn't it?

This shouldn't be considered in isolation. Someone looking at mining at scale at CPU probably already is mining at scale on GPU too. Rather than buying the minimal system to support GPU mining, you could get a CPU mining rig supporting those GPUs instead. If anything this could be more efficient. CPU cost goes up, mobo/PSU cost not that different, ram maybe a bit more if you need two sticks for dual channel for performance as opposed to single. Boot drive could be a cheap USB stick so insignificant. I think the main cost delta is the CPU itself. If the miner is not core limited as suggested by cache influence, it wont even need high end cooling.

[porina]

35 minutes ago, porina said:

I'll have to poke into this a bit more for a better picture as this has got my interest.

Having had a look at the results in one of the sources, and playing about with the profitability calculator, I think I have a partial picture but it isn't completely clear.

 

Desktop Zen 2 seems pretty similar to Zen 3 so doesn't seem to be a clear architecture advantage there. However for both, the 16 cores perform much better than the 12 cores, suggesting a core performance difference there. Also there seems to be good scaling with clock within that, which points to core limiting. Going down to 8 cores we see roughly half of 16 cores, and 6 cores slower still.

 

5600H vs 5600X shows about 2x difference. Same core and architecture, but 2x the cache. I wouldn't say it scales with the cache, as we don't know other variables like running clock, but certainly there is a big gap there.

 

Ryzen CPUs older than Zen 2 see a big drop in performance. Intel CPUs listed also perform relatively badly compared to similar desktop Zen 2 or newer.

 

Based on this, my tentative conclusion is that it seems to be first affected by "enough" cache. If you have enough, then it scales with cores better. Given this, I'm not convinced that high cache CPUs would provide better mining value. On the flip side, it implies desktop grade Zen 2 and Zen 3 CPUs are already best for this mining, with the higher core count models probably being best value. 

 

Edit: forgot to say, power usage seems to be quite high, again pointing more to core loading. A better cooler than stock may be beneficial.

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, porina said:

Based on this, my tentative conclusion is that it seems to be first affected by "enough" cache. If you have enough, then it scales with cores better. Given this, I'm not convinced that high cache CPUs would provide better mining value. On the flip side, it implies desktop grade Zen 2 and Zen 3 CPUs are already best for this mining, with the higher core count models probably being best value. 

It should follow GPU mining, in that you need enough VRAM (cache here) and any more does nothing. I can't really see how more would make it faster without some rather specific information about the running algo, larger caches are also slower so performance could well regress, who knows. Since there is no difference between Zen 2 and Zen 3 then it's per core isolated and does not use AVX2, educated assumptions on my part.

[Spotty]

With GPU mining it's pretty easy to scale up, you can have multiple GPUs running off one system. If CPU mining is going to be the next big thing then that's going to require motherboard, memory, storage, and PSU for every CPU. You could have dual and quad socket motherboards, but that would only affect Epyc CPUs not Ryzen or Threadripper. Hopefully that additional equipment cost on top of the cost of the CPUs deters people from just buying as many CPUs as they can. Though it also means that if there is a frenzied rush for Ryzen CPUs that the motherboards and possibly other system essential components will also see shortages, impacting people who aren't even buying AMD systems.

[WolframaticAlpha]

1 minute ago, Spotty said:

-snip-

inb4 pentium ii slot CPUs

 

Also, intel has been using compute elements in higher end nucs. If they move the memory off to a mainboard, and allow the CPU and other circuitry to reside on the compute element, then it might just be viable

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, Spotty said:

With GPU mining it's pretty easy to scale up, you can have multiple GPUs running off one system. If CPU mining is going to be the next big thing then that's going to require motherboard, memory, storage, and PSU for every CPU. You could have dual and quad socket motherboards, but that would only affect Epyc CPUs not Ryzen or Threadripper. Hopefully that additional equipment cost on top of the cost of the CPUs deters people from just buying as many CPUs as they can. Though it also means that if there is a frenzied rush for Ryzen CPUs that the motherboards and possibly other system essential components will also see shortages, impacting people who aren't even buying AMD systems.

I'd like to see that Ryzen 4700S PS5 thingy tested, maybe the GDDR memory bandwidth has improvements with this or other CPU mining. At least then all the miners can go off and buy odd ball Ryzen CPUs (well base systems) that we never were going to lol

[Doobeedoo]

How great.

[Fasterthannothing]

CPU mining never turns out profitability because the entry cost is too high. You can stack 10 GPUs on one board but only one CPU in most boards.

[Spotty]

3 minutes ago, SlidewaysZ said:

CPU mining never turns out profitability because the entry cost is too high. You can stack 10 GPUs on one board but only one CPU in most boards.

In current mining systems the CPU doesn't do much, it's usually just some cheap Pentium CPU that is there just because they need some CPU. The smart thing for miners to do would be their usual GPU mining with multiple GPUs on one board, but swap to Ryzen CPUs to also use the CPU for CPU mining. 

[RejZoR]

Milan-X has almost 800MB L3 cache... I wonder how interesting that is to miners given it's an expensive part meant for servers... Still, cryptomining is cancer that needs to die, but never will unfortunately, because everyone is so naive they'll make quick bucks, meanwhile only few are really making millions from it and the rest are just scraping the bottom of the crypto barrel, breaking even at best in the end. Or have massive losses because of random crypto crash.

[Alder Lake]

7 hours ago, tim0901 said:

 

Guess I'll be going Intel for my next build...

fortunately with 12th gen, that's not really a problem

[Heliian]

Coin hype is what's going to finally kill this childish garbage.  You can't keep making fake money and expect anyone to give you real money for it.

 

 

[Stahlmann]

2 minutes ago, Heliian said:

Coin hype is what's going to finally kill this childish garbage.  You can't keep making fake money and expect anyone to give you real money for it.

So far it seems to be working (sadly)...

[MageTank]

7 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

so what I'm hearing is xeon phi may have a new life?
other than milan-X which already isn't going to be easy for most smaller customers to get for a while, getting harder to find, I doubt this coin will take off

I am over here thinking about Broadwell and its 128mb L4 cache, lol. It's much slower than traditional cache (having only 50GB/s bi-directional bandwidth), but is still very low latency and a decent size for "cache".