Bitcoin Forum

I have heard that ARM CPUs, despite being less powerful than x86 CPUs such as those used by Intel and AMD, are actually more efficient and thus more powerful per unit watt. When it comes to mining profitability, I would think that performance per watt is more important than sheer performance alone. Now obviously I'm not talking about attempting to mine BTC or LTC with such a setup or even any altcoin where GPUs have a significant advantage over CPUs but there are still a few coins out there which do not have GPU miners or ASICs developed for them yet. One such example is Riecoin. A few others can be found here (http://www.cpucoinlist.com/).

So if I were to mine riecoins, does this mean that mining on an ARM CPU such as those found in smartphones or tablets would generate a higher profit once electricity costs are taken into account? While they might be less powerful, they are also more efficient and thus consume far less power, correct?

Some resources which discuss the power efficiency advantages of the ARM architecture:

http://www.androidauthority.com/arms-secret-recipe-for-power-efficient-processing-409850/

http://www.quora.com/What-makes-ARM-based-chips-relatively-power-efficient

http://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_is_the_ARM_processor_more_energy_efficient_than_Intel

New ARM cores have hardware AES, so may be Monero mining on recent mobiles will worth electricity.