Bitcoin Forum

lets put the pressure on them to make them good miners then we get a games console with an inbuilt custom asic at the mass production rate

If it cant mine why bother buying it right ? of course it has to be great at playing games too  :)

The new Mac Pro may be a good miner. With dual ATI and 7TerraHash, Tim even said it supports openCL, maybe apple is secretly mining. The difficulty rate has nothing to do with ASICs, it's Johhny!

TeraFlops, not TeraHash :P

You are better off buying a 7950, and its not close

The days of commodity hardware being good at bitcoin mining are over. Don't look to generic hardware any more to make any kind of impact, only dedicated hardware will matter (ignoring altcoins).

Playstation 4 GPU: 18 compute units, theoretical peak performance of 1.84 TFLOPS
7970: 32 compute units, theoretical peak performance of 3.79 TFLOPS

So (in theory!) a PS4 should do ~300 MHash/s mining SHA-256 coins or ~350 KHash/s mining scrypt coins. Not sure about the effects of it's unified memory architecture, etc.

We'll see "in two weeks" (BFL time) or in Q4/2013 (earth time) ;)

The question would be whether it's worth it to have it mining while you're not using it, provided you are going to have it.

Likely so, but I don't know if it's going to be easy to install stuff in it outside of the official channels. There's going to be "homebrew" but I would be very surprised if it happens outside of a controlled walled garden. We're talking about Sony here.

LOL, your reference to "BFL time" could catch on!  :)

Reporter to the President: "Guantanamo Bay was meant to be closed already last year. When will the detention camp be closed?"

President to Reporter: "I am reliably informed by Congress, 60 days", in a barely audible voice... "or longer", whispers... "BFL time".

It's using a custom AMD APU. We already have APUs today to base performance on, and it's nothing spectacular.

Play station 4 can mine BTC like a champ im sure.

The smart guy will be the one who makes his own alt-coin that can be mined by Ps3/PS4.

maybe in 2012, not now , certainly

Any scrypt coin will do.

you only want to know how

I would assume 250 - 300 Mhash.

Given new console reliability while looking back at PS3 and Xbox360... It would die within 1 to 6 months depending on how clean your place is and if you have a cat.

Ooh, I didn't know pussies could mine!

rather stick with ASIC's  :-X

I really think it would suck compared with even the cheapest ASIC.

Maybe it will perform better using a modified CPU miner with HSA+hUMA enabled, rather than try to use OpenCL...

+1

around 300-350 Khash in scrypt

I often thought that a crypto coin could be the currency of games! Could you imagine wow or a mine craft game or gta paying in a crypto coin that could be exchanged for BTC or [ltc] ? It could be called gamecoin and if its script based game machines could mine it. Ok someone make now ;D

All new Apple computers support OpenCL, it was Apple who invented OpenCL anyway. And this OpenCL was made to be run on CPU and all sorts of GPUs, the makers of these mining programs just don't have a Mac to use Xcode and make this sort of app. Or the knowledge to code in Objective-C.

I don't think you know what that word means.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Sony does not like randoms using their hardware for whatever they want (mining). Take for example with the PS3 where you could install linux for a long time, but then Sony released an update that entirely removed the boot to linux option and all support for it via the Sony GUI. Of course there are ways around this... eg. install earlier firmware from before that update.

This thread entirely assumes it will be easy to integrate mining software into the PS4 and also that Sony wont take steps to make the hardware incompatible for such purposes. But it's been shown that even low-mid range AMD cards will outperform PS4 in terms of hashing capability so I suppose it's irrelevant anyway.

zero cause you won't be able to run unsigned code.

+1

You said the following "The difficulty rate has nothing to do with ASICs"

Would you mind explaining that to me? I am newer to the whole mining field and wasn't sure how to take that? Does that mean that the technology behind ASIC's mining units are not as effected by the block difficulties and if so why not?

Thank you!

Console Hardware Specifications

CPU
Number of Cores/Threads: 8/8 [1]
Frequency: speculated to be running a base clock speed of 1.6 Ghz on a 2.75 Ghz capable chip
Shared L2 Cache: 2 x 2 MB [2]
Manufacturing Process: 28 nm [3]
Custom CPU for background processing such as downloading and recording gameplay.
GPU: AMD next-generation Radeon based graphics engine
Peak Shader Throughput: 69.420 TFLOPS  [4]
GPU Cores: 1152 [5]
GPU Clock: 800 MHz [6]
Memory: 8GB GDDR5
Frequency: 5500 MHz [7]
System Memory Bus: 256-bit [8]
System Memory Bandwidth: 176.0 GB/s [9]


is there any way to utilize the whole ps4?

Everyone here is missing the elephant in the room:  Make a PSN game that mines for bitcoin or an Xbox Arcade game that mines for BTC.  It will be miniscule, like a 1.25 7990 which is 6GB ddr5.  I would suppose that puts a PS4 within the ballpark of 1.25 MH or 1250 KH. 

HOLY CRAP 7990s are ridiculously overpriced right now they used to only be like 675 a pop, I should've invested in some to resell.  So yes, it does seem like a good idea If and Only if a good open source port of cgminer or bfgminer could be brought to the network.  Furthermore, you would need to perhaps have it run at less than 100 percent to preserve the life of the console.  There is also the bigger challenge of needing to wrap the altcoin scrypt miner into an actual game so that it can be used.  Could someone more technical than me confirm/constructively deny my hypothesis posited above?

---^---
Overestimated.
I would expect between 0.2 to 0.25 MH/s. That doesn't makes elephant smaller. Make addictive freeware game and solo hashrate doesn't matter at all...

The idea of using resources of unsuspecting gamers for mining is disingenuous and would be a great way of landing yourself in legal trouble. PSN would also take action pretty quickly I'd assume.

The console could manage at most 300 kH/s scrypt. That's like a old 6870 card or a lower end 7xxx or R-series. You can get 6870's for less than $80 on ebay... easily. The card would compare comparatively to the console in terms of overall efficiency too.

Seems like a very misguided way of going about mining in either case.

Who said that gamers would be unsuspecting? It can be way of payment for playing the game. I would have much more games installed than I have now if there was payment only with my processing power during gaming...

 :) ;)

How about, ONLY mined on the PS3/PS4? :D

I'm afraid usage of custom miner would be much better then PlayStation 4. Actually it would be rather waste of money compare to power given, especially since you can't upgrade and modify properly. Not to mention cooling would be nightmare. I'm guessing that you haven't even considered xbox for it :P

How much new Mac Pro can have MH/s ? :)