4 ms·

I'm sorta surprised that AMD hasn't made a "smallest Zen with double the biggest Vega" to appeal to the cryptocoin crowd.

detaro 9y ago
I don't see right now how that would have more appeal than dedicated GPUs to them? Is there a market for "normal PC with small mining-capacity on the side" vs fairly dedicated rigs? I'd think nearly nobody is buying <$200 GPUs for mining?
- leetcrew 9y ago
  i really doubt it. in a mining rig all power spent on components other than the GPU is essentially pure overhead that cuts into the thin margin of a consumer setup. you need several discrete GPUs before it starts to be worthwhile at all.
simion314 9y ago
I think everyone is expecting mining to fall and they don't want to invest the R&D and create the manufacturing , build the hardware and in the end it won't sell. Mining seems like a gamble so I would personally not risk it, if they want the miners can buy the regular GPUs
- oreo81 9y ago
  Is this a joke? I really can't tell if you're being sarcastic.
- cslarson 9y ago
  I recently (yesterday) calculated[0] that Ethereum is roughly 64% of the GPU mining market by power. That's a lower bound - it's likely much higher, maybe 75+%. Hybrid POS/POW is expected in the fall and will likely come with a healthy drop in the block reward. Following that will be full POS (2019?) after which, at least on the main Ethereum chain, there will be no mining. I'd like to see the block reward dropped much sooner but that's a long shot request. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7wufiq/ethereum_is_64_of_all_gpu_mining_by_power_09gw_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7wufiq/ethereum_i...
bryanlarsen 9y ago
It sounds like Samsung is making something like that, based on vague announcement on their earnings call. They've been working on a new GPU for several years now, making a miner from it may help them validate the design while they're working on the drivers for general purpose & gaming usage.
dragontamer 9y ago
BTC is ASIC based now. No GPU will ever compete in the BTC realm. Etherium is Dagger-Hashimoto, which tries to be RAM-bandwidth bound. GDDR5 and HBM2, which can achieve RAM-bandwidths of 500+ GB/s (compared to a typical CPU+ Dual-channel DDR4 with only 50GB/s), so Etherium's best machine are the cheap GPUs with GDDR5. HBM2 (Vega64 and Titan V) are faster, but I don't remember if they win in price/performance. HBM2 might win in ongoing costs due to being more power-efficient. Monero is Cryptonight, which tries to be memory-latency bound (Ideally: executing out of L3 cache of CPUs). Unfortunately, it seems like the miners have figured out how to parallelize it, as HBM2-based cards manage to perform incredibly well in Cryptonight. Basically, the only cryptocoin that MIGHT be worthwhile on an APU connected to DDR4 is Monero / Cryptonight. Even then, because Cryptonight is primarily memory-latency bound, I doubt that the GPU-portion would be any faster than the CPU. The majority of the algorithm is waiting for L3 cache to respond. The L2 Cache in GCN (and probably Vega) is 512kb and shared between 4 compute units. So its too small to execute Cryptonight. As such, why execute from the on-board GPU when the CPU already maxes out the L3 cache? Cryptonight requires 2MB of low-latency access per instance. Threadripper with 16 cores and 32MB of L3 is basically the most ideal CPU setup. But Vega64 managed to outperform Threadripper by significant margins, probably because HBM2 RAM is incredible (and there seems to be some kind of unexpected parallelization trick in the Cryptonight algorithm)
- icelancer 9y ago
  >> Basically, the only cryptocoin that MIGHT be worthwhile on an APU connected to DDR4 is Monero / Cryptonight. Even then, because Cryptonight is primarily memory-latency bound, I doubt that the GPU-portion would be any faster than the CPU. The majority of the algorithm is waiting for L3 cache to respond. Good guess. The CPU is nearly twice as fast as APU, and limited by L3 cache as you correctly noted. http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-5-2400g-mining-performance-nicehash-xmr-stak_202662 http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-5-2400g-mining-perform...
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    Thanks. Its always good to see real benchmarks. One "qualm" is that AMD's APU is a very interesting platform, which can share pointers and memory between the CPU and GPU. Some degree of caching is shared between the CPU and GPU since both are on the same die! Its not a big deal for cryptonight (which basically pushes AES-NI instructions: so its fastest on the CPU anyway. And L3 is so small that only 2-instances can run on the Ryzen 5 2400G). But in the general case (say: maybe Ethash, which isn't as latency bound / L3 bound), there may be custom code that can be written to take advantage of AMD's HSA platform. Code which doesn't exist yet (and therefore can't be benchmarked). In part, the ROCm project doesn't even have Raven Ridge support yet, so HSA coding / CPU/GPU sharing can't really take place yet. But looking forward: it might be an interesting project to see EtHash implemented as HSA / ROCm code.

detaro 9y ago

I don't see right now how that would have more appeal than dedicated GPUs to them? Is there a market for "normal PC with small mining-capacity on the side" vs fairly dedicated rigs? I'd think nearly nobody is buying <$200 GPUs for mining?

leetcrew 9y ago
i really doubt it. in a mining rig all power spent on components other than the GPU is essentially pure overhead that cuts into the thin margin of a consumer setup. you need several discrete GPUs before it starts to be worthwhile at all.

simion314 9y ago

I think everyone is expecting mining to fall and they don't want to invest the R&D and create the manufacturing , build the hardware and in the end it won't sell. Mining seems like a gamble so I would personally not risk it, if they want the miners can buy the regular GPUs

oreo81 9y ago
Is this a joke? I really can't tell if you're being sarcastic.
cslarson 9y ago
I recently (yesterday) calculated[0] that Ethereum is roughly 64% of the GPU mining market by power. That's a lower bound - it's likely much higher, maybe 75+%. Hybrid POS/POW is expected in the fall and will likely come with a healthy drop in the block reward. Following that will be full POS (2019?) after which, at least on the main Ethereum chain, there will be no mining. I'd like to see the block reward dropped much sooner but that's a long shot request. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7wufiq/ethereum_is_64_of_all_gpu_mining_by_power_09gw_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7wufiq/ethereum_i...

bryanlarsen 9y ago

It sounds like Samsung is making something like that, based on vague announcement on their earnings call. They've been working on a new GPU for several years now, making a miner from it may help them validate the design while they're working on the drivers for general purpose & gaming usage.

dragontamer 9y ago

BTC is ASIC based now. No GPU will ever compete in the BTC realm. Etherium is Dagger-Hashimoto, which tries to be RAM-bandwidth bound. GDDR5 and HBM2, which can achieve RAM-bandwidths of 500+ GB/s (compared to a typical CPU+ Dual-channel DDR4 with only 50GB/s), so Etherium's best machine are the cheap GPUs with GDDR5. HBM2 (Vega64 and Titan V) are faster, but I don't remember if they win in price/performance. HBM2 might win in ongoing costs due to being more power-efficient. Monero is Cryptonight, which tries to be memory-latency bound (Ideally: executing out of L3 cache of CPUs). Unfortunately, it seems like the miners have figured out how to parallelize it, as HBM2-based cards manage to perform incredibly well in Cryptonight. Basically, the only cryptocoin that MIGHT be worthwhile on an APU connected to DDR4 is Monero / Cryptonight. Even then, because Cryptonight is primarily memory-latency bound, I doubt that the GPU-portion would be any faster than the CPU. The majority of the algorithm is waiting for L3 cache to respond. The L2 Cache in GCN (and probably Vega) is 512kb and shared between 4 compute units. So its too small to execute Cryptonight. As such, why execute from the on-board GPU when the CPU already maxes out the L3 cache? Cryptonight requires 2MB of low-latency access per instance. Threadripper with 16 cores and 32MB of L3 is basically the most ideal CPU setup. But Vega64 managed to outperform Threadripper by significant margins, probably because HBM2 RAM is incredible (and there seems to be some kind of unexpected parallelization trick in the Cryptonight algorithm)

icelancer 9y ago
>> Basically, the only cryptocoin that MIGHT be worthwhile on an APU connected to DDR4 is Monero / Cryptonight. Even then, because Cryptonight is primarily memory-latency bound, I doubt that the GPU-portion would be any faster than the CPU. The majority of the algorithm is waiting for L3 cache to respond. Good guess. The CPU is nearly twice as fast as APU, and limited by L3 cache as you correctly noted. http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-5-2400g-mining-performance-nicehash-xmr-stak_202662 http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-ryzen-5-2400g-mining-perform...
- dragontamer 9y ago
  Thanks. Its always good to see real benchmarks. One "qualm" is that AMD's APU is a very interesting platform, which can share pointers and memory between the CPU and GPU. Some degree of caching is shared between the CPU and GPU since both are on the same die! Its not a big deal for cryptonight (which basically pushes AES-NI instructions: so its fastest on the CPU anyway. And L3 is so small that only 2-instances can run on the Ryzen 5 2400G). But in the general case (say: maybe Ethash, which isn't as latency bound / L3 bound), there may be custom code that can be written to take advantage of AMD's HSA platform. Code which doesn't exist yet (and therefore can't be benchmarked). In part, the ROCm project doesn't even have Raven Ridge support yet, so HSA coding / CPU/GPU sharing can't really take place yet. But looking forward: it might be an interesting project to see EtHash implemented as HSA / ROCm code.