Mining Monero Cryptocurrency On The Open-Source POWER9 Raptor Blackbird

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mining Monero Cryptocurrency On The Open-Source POWER9 Raptor Blackbird

A Phoronix reader has talked about the efficiency of using Raptor Computing Systems' open-source Blackbird POWER9 desktop system for Monero cryptocurrency mining in 2019...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Monero-Blackbird-Crypto-Mining

[edwaleni]

Excellent write up. Brief, succinct.

I am curious now because at the OpenPOWER summit, lots of hay was made saying that POWER9/NVLink/Volta was the ultimate miner engine. Based on this article, seems NVidia is really doing the heavy lifting.

While I love this write up for the data, it leaves me asking many more questions.

[schmidtbag]

Nice well-written article. I don't care much for crypto mining, but, I hope to see more articles like this from Lauri.

[cynical]

According to the miner author, it is fully optimized already.

Author is bullshitting you, or didn’t know you were asking about POWER. Yeah it’s fully optimized... for x86. The best you could hope for is to benefit from GCC due to x86 intrinsics being used and automatically translated to POWER specific instructions. That’s not nearly full support, but it’s better than nothing. It of course depends on proper compilation with GCC too.

So believe me, there is plenty of room for optimization.

In RandomX, the guy is literally generating x86 assembly instructions. You aren’t going to compete with that unless you do the same for POWER.

I’m not complaining, it’s to be expected, I’m just saying that whatever the full potential of POWER is, we’re not able to observe it using this code.

[curaga]

I used nioroso-x3's xmrig, not the official one. Nioroso's version is fully optimized for POWER according to the author, it has the JIT as well as the crypto support. It's true the official one does not have the POWER code.

[Zan Lynx]

also why only 2K display support whats wrong with 4K displays ?

Are you referring to the graphics that are included on the Blackbird motherboard? That chip is one of the few open ones they could find, as I understand it. It's quite limited, and really is intended just to run server consoles.