Bitcoin Forum

Other => CPU/GPU Bitcoin mining hardware => Topic started by: skeeterskeeter on March 06, 2013, 01:13:57 PM



Title: Not sure if its been hit upon yet, but Raspberry Pi mining cluster?
Post by: skeeterskeeter on March 06, 2013, 01:13:57 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
GPU Specs: "GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 (requires license purchase from raspberrypi.com) high-profile decode, GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure"

So has anyone bought/tried/heard of mining on a raspberry pi?

So the highest price model is $35.
Best GPU Mhash/s/$ is the 5830 with 3.28, Best FPGA Butterflylabs Mini Rig 1.64 Mhash/s/$, and  Avalon ASIC 52 Mhash/s/$.

So for it to beat out any of the 3 hardware types so far at $35 a pop
To at least match the efficiency of each hardware type

FPGA
1.64 Mhash/s/$ = X (Mhash/s)/ $35
X = 57.4 Mhash/s

GPU
3.28 Mhash/s/$ = X (Mhash/s)/ $35
X = 114 Mhash/s

ASIC
52 Mhash/s/$ = X (Mhash/s)/ $35
X = 1820 Mhash/s

So for the Pi to beat out FPGA's in effciency it would need to hash at 58 Mhash/s, to beat GPU's 114 Mhash/s, and to beat the mystical ASIC 1820 Mhash/s.

Think a Pi could do it?


Title: Re: Not sure if its been hit upon yet, but Raspberry Pi mining cluster?
Post by: AmDD on March 06, 2013, 01:31:37 PM
I think someone tried and posted about it. If I remember right it got less than 5mh/s. Not worth mining on but could be used to control FPGA/ASIC units via usb.


Title: Re: Not sure if its been hit upon yet, but Raspberry Pi mining cluster?
Post by: skeeterskeeter on March 06, 2013, 01:42:55 PM
Just bought one on Ebay, I guess I'll see what I can do. Otherwise I still wanted a Pi!


Title: Re: Not sure if its been hit upon yet, but Raspberry Pi mining cluster?
Post by: Soros Shorts on March 06, 2013, 03:37:40 PM
I got cgminer running on a BeagleBone.  The scary part is I could have been racking up the BTC back in the early days with a rig like this.
At my current hash rate I should be getting 1 share every 7-8 hours or so.  8)

https://i.imgur.com/385GO.png

This guy only got 156 Kh/s on a Beaglebone. Doesn't a Beaglebone have a slightly better processor than a Raspberry Pi (ARM 11 vs. ARM Cortex A8)?


Title: Re: Not sure if its been hit upon yet, but Raspberry Pi mining cluster?
Post by: 2112 on March 06, 2013, 07:00:50 PM
GPU Specs: "GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 (requires license purchase from raspberrypi.com) high-profile decode, GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure"
The real GPU development on Raspberry Pi requires the Broadcom/VideoCore toolchain. It is only available through an NDA to the large-scale developers and Broadcom partners. It isn't open-source, it isn't even available for a normal purchase.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore

From the very limited public information about the VideoCore one can surmise that the architecture resembles the old Texas Instruments VLIW DSP chip TMS320C80 MVP (multimedia video processor).


Title: Re: Not sure if its been hit upon yet, but Raspberry Pi mining cluster?
Post by: skeeterskeeter on March 08, 2013, 12:57:58 PM
I got cgminer running on a BeagleBone.  The scary part is I could have been racking up the BTC back in the early days with a rig like this.
At my current hash rate I should be getting 1 share every 7-8 hours or so.  8)

https://i.imgur.com/385GO.png

This guy only got 156 Kh/s on a Beaglebone. Doesn't a Beaglebone have a slightly better processor than a Raspberry Pi (ARM 11 vs. ARM Cortex A8)?

Hmm. Ok. 1 share per 7-8 hours, lets be nice say 7. 

Guy on BTCGuild overall has 1,589,694,471 shares, with a Pi that would take 11127861297 hours, or 463660887 days, or 1270303 years, or 1,270 millenia.

Same guy has a speed of 3,651.67 Gigahash. We run a 0.000976563Mhash or on the same scale 9.5367e-7 GHash. So we only need 3829070852 Pi's to match his speed! Or roughly $134017479841.

But that's only .8% of our (USA) national debt. Congress should look into getting some Pi's?