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Mining Ethereum on M1 Mac GPU
- toomim 6y ago> Is it worth it? > Um. Not really. At current Ethereum prices (2021-02-26), it generates $0.14 of profit per day. It’s still a profit, but very miniscule. The real question is if it makes more money than it costs in electricity. Apple claims it uses 39 W max. That adds up to 0.936 kWh of electricity per day, which we can approximate at 1 kWh. Electricity prices range from ~4¢ to ~20¢ per kWh in the USA, which means that depending on where you live, you'll be making a profit or a loss of -6¢ to +10¢ per day. So yeah, this thing can be profitable. But the capital cost required to buy the M1 in the first place is going to be really hard to pay off.
- gruez 6y ago>The real question is if it makes more money than it costs in electricity. profit implies that costs are taken into account. If I plug 2 MH/s, 30W, $0.1/kWh into a mining calculator I get a profit of 11 cents per day against 18 cents of revenue.
- ogre_codes 6y agoWell the word profit implies they are, but many people use the word incorrectly. It would inspire a little more confidence if the author had posted what the gross was or his electric bill.
- irjustin 6y agoUnless a post explicitly mentions all operating costs, I would not assume that. There's too many different versions of the word profit and in this case it looks like gross instead of net/EBITDA.
- vmception 6y agoall ethereum mining calculators are dead wrong. in the assumptions they all tell you "2 ethereum per block", Ethereum has been averaging 5-7 ether per block for the past year. hit like 13 ether per block just the other day. so just multiply by 3, or like 7, up to you
- CallMeMarc 6y agoIs electricity really that cheap in the USA? The cheapest price I've found for my city here in Germany is like 0,24 EUR. And this is already including a new customer discount and cashback. Not even guaranteed green energy... 0,24 EUR is currently ~0,29 USD. That's 0,29 USD for my cheapest price against your most expensive price with 0,20 USD.
- ogre_codes 6y agoVaries greatly based on state or even county. Hundreds or maybe thousands of utility districts each with a unique set of regulations and resources.
- CallMeMarc 6y agoIs there any state or nation wide search for good utility prices? We've got Check24[1] in Germany which basically is a no brainer to find good price for stuff like this. [1] https://www.check24.de/strom/ https://www.check24.de/strom/
- ogre_codes 6y agoNot really sure. Most places I've lived we haven't had a ton of options on pricing so haven't dug around.
- kube-system 6y agoThe approach to utility regulations varies a good bit by state, and things are always changing so I doubt there’s a good lookup beyond the data the federal government collects. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ Although, the states that are “energy deregulated” will often have a marketplace type website where you can compare suppliers. In those states, the utility commission sets rates for your local utility to run the transmission and local distribution wires, but allows you to choose which supplier generates the power on the grid on your behalf. Really, the best way to figure out utility rates in the US is to check with that state’s utility commission or directly with the utility that provides physical infrastructure in a particular area.
- varenc 6y agoThe 39W max draw probably assumes the display is on? Will probably draw less in clamshell mining mode.
- soheil 6y agoHmm what if you have the speakers on max volume with pretty much all the other sensors all maxed? Here are a few I can think of: keyboard backlight, wifi, bluetooth, accelerometer, speakers, mic?, camera, proximity sensor, touch id, maxing out CPU, GPU, ML engine, SSD, ram, typing on the keyboard, using the trackpad. Using those all at once must surely draw more than 39 W if not then not using most of them must also mean it probably draws a lot less than 39 W during normal operation.
- jointpdf 6y agoTired: carbon clams ingesting solar energy (tiny plants) and outputting pearls Wired: silicon clams ingesting solar energy and outputting dogecoin
- bitexploder 6y agoOne has high meme potential. One is a bunch of carbon.
- tito 6y agocarbon removal needs more memes, see $100 meme contest here: https://twitter.com/titojankowski/status/1354124284705181696 https://twitter.com/titojankowski/status/1354124284705181696
- n3k5 6y ago> The 39W max draw probably assumes the display is on? No, this is the number for the Mac Mini, which is the obvious choice if you wanted a machine for maxing out an M1 24/7. (The Air peaks at about 30W, which it can't sustain for long unless it's in a rather cold environment.) So it has nothing to do with the display's power consumption. Maxing out just the GPU while the rest of the machine isn't doing much would get you well below 39W, though.
- soheil 6y agoYou can pick up a 50 W solar panel pretty cheap nowadays so compared to the cost of the laptop that's nothing. Hopefully its battery will charge up enough on the extra 11 W to last during the night.
- discordance 6y agoYou must mean, watt hours or amp hours.
- soheil 6y agoI must
- speedgoose 6y agoAnd you don't take into account the environmental cost.
- tshaddox 6y agoBut precisely as much as you don’t take into account the environmental cost of every other unit of electricity you use.
- lalaland1125 6y agoThis is part of why we need a carbon tax
- 127 6y agoOnly problem with this is I can't figure out how to spend all the money generated by the tax. Obviously it should be used at a technology or process to reduce carbon from the atmosphere, but I don't think that's what governments are going to decide to do. Add a new tax, waste most of it. Or worse, use it to fund societally harmful things. That's what the history shows.
- csnover 6y agoDoes it really matter if the money is wasted, so long as it’s not wasted on something that generates more air pollution? The main purpose of a carbon tax is to stop polluters from externalising the cost of their pollution, so that they pollute less because it’s more cost effective not to. The extra revenue is just a bonus.
- pmalynin 6y agoThe money will be used to wage war to protect the petro-dollar.
- newacct583 6y ago> Only problem with this is I can't figure out how to spend all the money generated by the tax. It doesn't matter. Pay debt. Dig holes. Build bridges. Just rebate it to whoever on a per-capita or per-tax-paid basis. Literally do anything with it. The point is to incentivize conservation, not to raise revenue. You could get the same thing with a regulatory carbon penalty too, but it's simplest to administer as a tax.
- em3rgent0rdr 6y agoThough capital costs can be ignored if this is something the user already purchased.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomgp 6y agoRe the capital cost: Assuming profit of 10c/day and that an M1 mac is about $1000 it'll be about 274 years before you pay that off.
- trollied 6y agoYou’re a factor of 10 off. (1000/0.1)*365=27.4
- tomgp 6y agoDoh! You’re right of course
- yreg 6y agoPresumably you already have an M1 mac and mine only while you have no use for it.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoI have a friend who's been getting into it. As he tells me prices and how much can be made per day with various video cards, versus dedicated mining ASIC's, I do quick mental calculations. It seems like all of the options seem to be market priced at a payback around 8-10 months. Given the current mining furor, I'm doubting that consumer-grade equipment will be very profitable in another year. If you already had the hardware for Bitcoin, you're probably cleaning up on Etherium, but to start now? You're really only going to make money once the next currency catches on. I don't know. Maybe this is only a fiction I tell myself to avoid feelings of missing out on something fun and interesting, and potentially profitable.
- tinus_hn 6y agoYou could buy the computer to use as a computer and then use it to mine while you’re not using it.
- ianai 6y agoQuick, rough calculations suggest to me that the RTX 3080 is about what you need to turn a profit - based on 200k annual revenue you need 600k in hardware. Three years to pay itself off - about the lifetime of the hardware, my guess. That's if you could find the hardware - and I didn't include stuff like motherboard/rack/etc. If it's that hard to make a profit on the RTX 3080 then I doubt the M1 Mac Mini was ever in the running.
- scottlamb 6y agoWith free power? iirc the RTX 3080 draws 200+ W.
- OldHand2018 6y agoI mined Ethereum about 3 years ago using the Nvidia 1060 and they never drew max power. Conversely, you could use nvidia_smi to limit their power draw without making much of an impact on hash rate. I’d be surprised if it was any different with the current lineup of cards. It would be really interesting to see what the M1 draws doing this. Probably not much. But then it’s not doing a whole lot of hashing either.
- ianai 6y agoWas there any critical reason you stopped mining?
- OldHand2018 6y agoI didn’t like the noise and the price had collapsed. I sold the cards for a very good price. I would have made 5 or 6 figures if I had just left them on. Oh well, it’s not the worst financial decision I’ve ever made. Hell, I bought TSLA at $15 and sold at $30. F me.
- RL_Quine 6y agoReally? A 1080 TI still produces a few dollars a day easily.
- supernova87a 6y agoI thought the main strengths distinguishing the performance of the M1 were the idle power chips that saved a lot of energy, and the shared CPU/GPU memory. Am I remembering that right? Do either of those things equal better intensive mining efficiency, much over a dedicated traditional rig, where you're flat out all the time and emphasizing GPU?
- ianai 6y agoNo, and Apple even tells you that when they indicate the processor is geared toward running simplified AI for applications purposes and not meant for training new models. Mining coins seems clearly more like training new models.
- lunixbochs 6y agoThe neural engine for simplified AI models is separate silicon from the GPU.
- andreaorru 6y agoCool experiment. But I don't recommend getting into Ethereum mining now, as the network is on the verge of switching to Proof of Stake as part of the migration to Ethereum 2.0.
- bsaul 6y agoDoes proof of stake truely ends the GPU arms race ?
- andreaorru 6y agoYep. You can run a validator node by staking at least 32 ETH (or any amount through a staking pool). Nodes will still verify transactions and execute smart contracts, of course. But there's no hash lottery to be won for mining blocks.
- imhoguy 6y agoI wonder if this may cause some correction on hardware stocks as market would be flooded with used GPUs.
- 0-_-0 6y agoThere are plenty of other cryptocurrencies to mine
- andreaorru 6y agoThere are a few (mostly Bitcoin forks), and you can probably make some profit mining them, but they are not big enough to have a significant impact on the global demand for GPUs. At this point, most crypto projects with any real traction (with the obvious exception of Bitcoin) are either ERC-20 tokens running on Ethereum, or other PoS chains that claim to be better than Ethereum (i.e. Cardano). Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs anymore.
- 6y ago
- syntaxing 6y agoHow do you know that the mining application is using the M1 GPU and not the M1 CPU?
- gyf304 6y agoYou can see this line from the log. Using Device : Intel GPU 0.0 Apple M1 OpenCL 1.2 Memory : 10.67 GB (11453251584 B)
- krebspsycho 6y agoIt's not crazy, but it's telling the software that it's an intel GPU, and taking into account no optimizations targeted at the GPU's strengths. I could see this becoming more useful if it was coded to apple's GPU characteristics, but I'm not even sure anyone outside of Apple knows what those are right now and how to optimize mining software on their GPU.
- Scene_Cast2 6y agoNo-one has mentioned that ETH mining is memory bandwidth bound. M1 macs, unfortunately, have slow GPU memory compared to your discrete GPU's GDDR6X. Here's a great post showing that - https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memory-hardness-explained https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor... - GPU mining is only 10% slower than the theoretical memory-bound maximum (if compute was infinitely fast).
- gyf304 6y agoI suspected that as well. Since M1 CPU and GPU shares memory, this also means you really can't do anything else while mining. You can't even scroll a webpage smoothly.
- chillacy 6y agoShouldn’t it be better to mine RandomX using the CPU?
- krebspsycho 6y agoGenerally yes. The RandomX dev seems to have some issues getting to to work well on apple silicon, however the Xmrig dev has it working, but seems it caps out at 2.3kh/s due to not being able to take advantage of JIT or large pages. (At least from what I read of their respective GitHub repos https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/issues/196 https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/issues/196 And https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/issues/1991 https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/issues/1991). RandomX mining is better at the moment, but that may be because nobody's developed a GPU minter tailored to the uniqueness of apple's GPU, if that's even possible.
- optimalsolver 6y agoYes, yes, miners. Please go bother the Apple community and leave NVIDIA GPUs alone.
- lostmsu 6y agoIf mining speed is any indication of GPU performance (I am thinking TensorFlow training), M1 is about 50 times slower, than RTX 3090, and about 18 time slower, than 1080 Ti.
- john4532452 6y agoWhats the spec of M1 Mac GPU ?