AMD suggests profitable mining on Threadripper CPU

[porina]

Quote

We spoke with AMD’s technical marketing manager, Damien Triolet, who believes that massive potential for home mining rigs lies within their HEDT Threadripper CPUs. How does a CPU manage to keep up with a GPU on such intensively parallel tasks? It doesn’t. You just use a type of cryptocurrency that caters straight to your setup.

 

The CryptoNight algorithm is designed for use with regular ol’ CPUs. This algorithm relies on around 2MB of L3 cache required per mining thread in use, which rules out almost all ASIC mining machines so far in production due to profitability, and favours CPUs with a high L3 cache per core ratio - which, as AMD would like to point out, Threadripper is designed for.

Source: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-threadripper-cryptocurrency-mining

Alternate: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/02/01/can-amds-threadripper-deliver-more-mining-profit-than-a-gtx-1080/#6964868f5add

 

AMD, or at least their technical marketing manager, is claiming a Threadripper can pay itself off within a year by mining the right coin. At least, it might have been possible at the time the articles were written, given the ongoing drops in the last day or so.

 

The wider question this opens up, is there something particular about Threadripper that makes it more interesting, than say Ryzen or anything Intel? I'm not familiar with this algorithm and how it behaves at a hardware level, but for a lot of general purposes CPU cores at relatively affordable pricing, Threadripper ticks as lot of boxes there.

 

Given the system level costs, this isn't going to replace GPU mining in terms of ROI so I wouldn't imagine Threadripper farms along similar lines to GPUs. However, if you have the hardware anyway, while it is idle, could it provide more benefit for you mining than leaving it switched off?

[HarryNyquist]

Hopefully everyone bought one while they were reasonably priced...

[Eduard the weeb]

yeah but why would you?

a 1080ti about the same price ( prices could vary between cities and town etc )

would preform better correct ?

 

[dizmo]

Haha, a year is an awfully long time to recoup your initial investment, especially given the volitile nature of crypto currency. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

The South African guy doing replies to Linus' mining videos made one about mining on Threadripper. The possibility of good returns was there, but investing in a whole TR rig just for it is very different to adding a bunch of GPUs to a random computer...

[porina]

1 minute ago, Eduard the weeb said:

yeah but why would you?

a 1080ti about the same price ( prices could vary between cities and town etc )

would preform better correct ?

The argument is not to set up a mining operation based on Threadripper, but more a suggestion those already with or thinking of getting Threadripper for other uses, could gain by doing this on the side.

Just now, dizmo said:

Haha, a year is an awfully long time to recoup your initial investment, especially given the volitile nature of crypto currency. 

For sure. With recent drops it may already be the case it will take longer than that.

[dizmo]

7 minutes ago, Name Taken said:

Ryzen 7 can get 550-600 H/s, Threadripper 1950X 1100-1200 H/s and Vega 56 about 1900 H/s.

 

No one is going to buy Threadripper for the sole purpose of maximum ROI but he is saying you can make the cost back eventually.

It still doesn't really make sense to spend multitudes more on initial hardware costs. 

[Hiitchy]

Judging by the way CC's have dropped in the last day or two, the ROI over a year is speculation... You can't really determine which way a CC will go. Plus, building an overpriced TR4 system in itself is another thing... Where do you find the money to do that, and how can you make it back?

[Doobeedoo]

Imagine now CPUs getting bought all a sudden for mining and skyrocket in price. Oh dear

Inb4

Each PC components 10 times the regular price.

[Dissitesuxba11s]

16 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Imagine now CPUs getting bought all a sudden for mining and skyrocket in price. Oh dear

Inb4

Each PC components 10 times the regular price.

Funny enough, there is BurstCoin that is mined using your hard drive. The more hard drive space you have, the better.

[Dissitesuxba11s]

3 minutes ago, Name Taken said:

You make about $3/TB/month.

Hahaha, I just found out about it. I didn't know it was that unprofitable. 

[RagnarokDel]

1 hour ago, Eduard the weeb said:

yeah but why would you?

a 1080ti about the same price ( prices could vary between cities and town etc )

would preform better correct ?

 

It's of no interest for a miner miner but if you have a threadripper rig and you mine at night, it's some extra doe you can earn on top of what you earn with your gpu.

[UFDisciple]

3 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

The South African guy doing replies to Linus' mining videos made one about mining on Threadripper. The possibility of good returns was there, but investing in a whole TR rig just for it is very different to adding a bunch of GPUs to a random computer...

I'm Murican dangit.  But also, yeah, while TR is the best chip on the market thanks to L3 cache & high core count, it's just a really inefficient way of mining right now.  For every 1 TR CPU, you need an X399 mobo, RAM, SSD, etc.  Whereas with a GPU, you can stack them up to 10+ GPU's on a single rig, sharing the costs of additional components.  It's great extra cash for someone who already owns a TR chip, but not an excuse to really go buy it for mining.  Just an added bonus tbh.

[BluJay614]

3 hours ago, Eduard the weeb said:

yeah but why would you?

a 1080ti about the same price ( prices could vary between cities and town etc )

would preform better correct ?

 

1080ti are currently being priced starting at just under what a Titan Xp is, and going well over.

Quite frankly, this kinda ticks me off at AMD......WHY?!?!?!?!? UGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

[Energycore]

3 hours ago, porina said:

AMD, or at least their technical marketing manager, is claiming a Threadripper can pay itself off within a year by mining the right coin. At least, it might have been possible at the time the articles were written, given the ongoing drops in the last day or so.

This might come down to my own bias but looking at the price charts for Eth and Bitcoin, the dump of yesterday is only a temporary one, and it's bound to climb back up. I say this because the RSI has been showing oversold levels on every single price drop, which suggests that people are selling out of panic rather than out of a rational decision.

 

Crypto traders are generally less experienced (read: they're bad) than your usual stock trader, so whenever there's a bearish (downward) or bullish (upward) move, the price shifts insane amounts as people panic and make bad decisions. Then it bounces back to the mean. For good traders, this added volatility can mean huge gains, sometimes you can increase your capital by 25% in the span of a day if you buy and sell at the right time. This happened today as Eth hit 730 USD, then within an hour shot back up to 960. I missed that unfortunately.

 

But a "bubble pop" that a lot of people are hoping for, in my opinion, would only happen if blockchain was straight out banned on a very major economy like the US, Japan or the EU.

 

I'm hoping we can get cryptos that don't need all this power to be mined though, cuz it's so wasteful to use this much power for our economy. I dare say we're spending more money mining these coins than the Gold Rush pioneers spent on gold mine enterprises (this alone defeats the argument of "bitcoin doesn't cost anything", it costs power, and massive amounts thereof).

 

A lot of this post is my opinion, keep that in mind.

3 hours ago, porina said:

The wider question this opens up, is there something particular about Threadripper that makes it more interesting, than say Ryzen or anything Intel? I'm not familiar with this algorithm and how it behaves at a hardware level, but for a lot of general purposes CPU cores at relatively affordable pricing, Threadripper ticks as lot of boxes there.

You know thinking about this, it miiiiight be profitable to look for a dual LGA 2011 board and mine Monero or another CryptoNight coin on dual LGA 2011 Xeons. There's some 12-core+ parts on that socket that might just turn enough profit. That really depends on the adoption rate of Monero though. Ethereum saw a massive price surge because a lot of businesses are interested in its functionality, both in the token system and the smart contracts it can execute.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

40 minutes ago, UFDisciple said:

I'm Murican dangit. 

As a non-native speaker, I'm not particularly good at accents. Plus dressing up as a Springbok doesn't help  

 

40 minutes ago, UFDisciple said:

 For every 1 TR CPU, you need an X399 mobo, RAM, SSD, etc.  Whereas with a GPU, you can stack them up to 10+ GPU's on a single rig, sharing the costs of additional components. 

Said rig could be an X399 rig, though. So it would be the extra cost between TR and Celeron/Pentium rigs vs mining on the CPU as well. I'm confident the math would still say no, though.

The bottom line remains "we'd have to ignore cost to buy, but..."  

 

[PocketNerd]

Hey, if I could do a little mining on the side when I'm not needing the performance on my PC I'll take it.

Now if only ASICs didn't just dominate everything...

[Misanthrope]

This is potentially a nice excuse for us that really wanted to try a threadripper rig but otherwise have no use for it...my wallet is scared

[AshleyAshes]

4 hours ago, dizmo said:

Haha, a year is an awfully long time to recoup your initial investment, especially given the volitile nature of crypto currency. 

Do you know what else can be much more profitable in less time?  A JOB. D:

[dizmo]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

Do you know what else can be much more profitable in less time?  A JOB. D:

Haha, true, but all of my friends that mine have jobs as well...considering mining requires virtually no effort from the miner.

Just like how my small business really didn't require my full time attention, so I worked another job at the same time *shrugs*

 

[Beskamir]

FUCK! I wanna buy a threadripper chip! Miners please fuck off and don't you dare ruin cpus like you ruined psu and gpus.

[UFDisciple]

39 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

Never understood mining. What if a hundred thousand different cryptocurrencies took off all at once? Suddenly a shit ton of money in the economy coming out of nowhere?

You now completely understand what's happening with the crypto bubble & why things will get REALLY bad when this thing pops.

[leadeater]

15 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

The South African guy doing replies to Linus' mining videos made one about mining on Threadripper. The possibility of good returns was there, but investing in a whole TR rig just for it is very different to adding a bunch of GPUs to a random computer...

You wouldn't do TR anyway, not for pure mining. Dual socket EYPC makes far more sense, at least you have two profit making hardware devices per system instead of one. Marketing people lol.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

You wouldn't do TR anyway, not for pure mining. Dual socket EYPC makes far more sense, at least you have two profit making hardware devices per system instead of one. Marketing people lol.

Time for Linus to re-think mining rig number 1?  

[samcool55]

8 hours ago, UFDisciple said:

You now completely understand what's happening with the crypto bubble & why things will get REALLY bad when this thing pops.

Thing is that most/all of the value from cryptocurrency comes from people believing it has any value. And it's perfectly possible "bubbles" that are created this way stick around for a looong time. Gold is a perfect example for this. It has absolutely no use and should be basically worthless but because everyone thinks it's worth a lot and are prepared to pay a lot of it, it is actually worth a lot. Even tho it's pretty useless stuff.

 

I think we reached a point that just way to many people believe cryptocurrency in general has some value, the bubble might pop but as long as a bunch of people still see some value in it after the pop, it will recover.

 

Don't forget the last time the big bubble popped was because ASIC miners became a thing and ruined profitability on gpu's, this won't cause another pop because ASIC miners won't ruin it this time so it has to be something else. Question is, what will it be? The only thing i can think of that will cause a big pop is when people suddenly stop giving cryptocurrency any value, but what's going to cause such a massive change? Regulations? They might seem to have an effect but not enough to cause a crash. Apart from that, i don't know...