ARM processors with Mali Octacore - ignored by mining coders, why?

[jeyjey]

Hi, sorry for my English. I live in a place where the Electric power is very expensive. Every activity is not profitable other than the trading. I noticed that Linux can be well configured to create clusters. Create cluster will increase the power of a mining station. If I create a cluster with very little credit card boards I could get mining power with a low cost. A very simple CPU as H5 (OrangePi) has 4 cores. And it is not ended: it has a hexa core Mali450 GPU! I suppouse that it should be good to try to mine with these cores. And it supports OpenCL and every core is a 64bit core. ARM processors can work very very well with ARMBIAN Distro!! It is fantastic! I can have a very BIG computer in only one credit card. It means that I can create a cluster with twenty micro PC. Why miners ingore this? It should be a miner software to get this usefull power. Please can anyone collaborate? Thanks.

[1715074635]

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[1715074635]

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[wacko]

Why miners ingore this? It should be a miner software to get this usefull power. Please can anyone collaborate? Thanks.

You're talking about low-power hardware designed for mobile devices. With no proper cooling whatsoever (because it doesn't really need it since it's, well, low-power). You want as much power as possible for mining purposes, a single high-end graphics card for PC will be like 100+ times more powerful than any of those chips for mobile devices you mentioned. They just don't make sense to mine with, they're designed (and better suited) for other purposes.

[fanatic26]

If there was a way to mine and make a profit without using a lot of electricity every single person on here would be doing it. If you want to mine, move to somewhere with reasonable power rates.

[dagarair]

I live in Dallas Texas i pay 7 cents BUT i also have 105 F days in the summer hehe!

[Branko]

If there was a way to mine and make a profit without using a lot of electricity every single person on here would be doing it. If you want to mine, move to somewhere with reasonable power rates.

But maybe jeyjey is smartest person around by far, and none of us can see profitability because we're all stupid?

Since those 8 cores in ARM GPU are 64-bit, they must be much better than those 2304 cores in RX580, right?

[jeyjey]

My friends! Thanks for interesting in this topic! I am sorry I explained the project without the rest: I want to use solar panels in a sunny, windy and hot place. I live in a island and there is a lot of wind and sun! We use four big Diesel Engines to product electricity. It is mutch more nonsense to use megawatts for frac/Bcoins rather than low voltage, but free, for Monero or Zcash. I automated my OrangePi that it boot after the sun rises! The ARMBIAN should lounches the miner after boot. It boots with 5volts! I would like to mine some Altcoins ASIC resistant. But the only miner seems to be BFCminer. Please could anyone spend few minutes to tell me where I can find a miner for ARM processors? Many thanks and greetings from Italy!

[wacko]

I want to use solar panels in a sunny, windy and hot place.

It doesn't matter what your source of power is. Modern GPUs that are widely used for mining will outperform the mobile hardware you're talking about in terms of hash/watt. And they'll greatly outperform it in terms of $/hash. That's why there's no mining software for arm, it's just not practical to write it.

[Branko]

My friends! Thanks for interesting in this topic! I am sorry I explained the project without the rest: I want to use solar panels in a sunny, windy and hot place. I live in a island and there is a lot of wind and sun! We use four big Diesel Engines to product electricity. It is mutch more nonsense to use megawatts for frac/Bcoins rather than low voltage, but free, for Monero or Zcash. I automated my OrangePi that it boot after the sun rises! The ARMBIAN should lounches the miner after boot. It boots with 5volts! I would like to mine some Altcoins ASIC resistant. But the only miner seems to be BFCminer. Please could anyone spend few minutes to tell me where I can find a miner for ARM processors? Many thanks and greetings from Italy!

One of strongest arm processors out there, thunderX cavium, does 51 H/s at 10W TDP (so pretty power hungry for ARM processors)

51H/s will net you 14 cents a day as you can see here

https://whattomine.com/coins/101-xmr-cryptonight?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=51&p=0&fee=0.0&cost=0.1&hcost=0.0&commit=Calculate

Your processor is probably 3 times slower.

Draw your own conclusions


(just for comparison, you'll need about 120 of your processors to get same hashing power as single Vega graphic card for mining monero)

[QuintLeo]

My friends! Thanks for interesting in this topic! I am sorry I explained the project without the rest: I want to use solar panels in a sunny, windy and hot place. I live in a island and there is a lot of wind and sun! We use four big Diesel Engines to product electricity. It is mutch more nonsense to use megawatts for frac/Bcoins rather than low voltage, but free, for Monero or Zcash. I automated my OrangePi that it boot after the sun rises! The ARMBIAN should lounches the miner after boot. It boots with 5volts! I would like to mine some Altcoins ASIC resistant. But the only miner seems to be BFCminer. Please could anyone spend few minutes to tell me where I can find a miner for ARM processors? Many thanks and greetings from Italy!

One of strongest arm processors out there, thunderX cavium, does 51 H/s at 10W TDP (so pretty power hungry for ARM processors)

51H/s will net you 14 cents a day as you can see here

https://whattomine.com/coins/101-xmr-cryptonight?utf8=%E2%9C%93&hr=51&p=0&fee=0.0&cost=0.1&hcost=0.0&commit=Calculate

Your processor is probably 3 times slower.

Draw your own conclusions


(just for comparison, you'll need about 120 of your processors to get same hashing power as single Vega graphic card for mining monero)

 Or better yet - NVidia GTX 750 ti (which is GENERATION OLD hardware on 28nm technology that's almost 5 years old now) pulls 250 hash/s or so on about 30 watts actual power usage.

[jeyjey]

Please see this: http://cluster.bitscope.com/

I would make a cluster with these boards and put it in a windy place with FREE and GREEN energy. I have the NVIDIA card 750 ti, already in my computer and I know what you all want to mean. But it is unbelieveable that no coders tryed to create a miner for the Mali450 processors and Cortex processors.

[wacko]

But it is unbelieveable that no coders tryed to create a miner for the Mali450 processors and Cortex processors.

How is it unbelievable considering that these devices are so much less efficient in terms of h/w? Why would someone spend their time and effort writing code for the hardware that no one in their right mind is gonna use for mining on any significant scale?

I would make a cluster with these boards and put it in a windy place with FREE and GREEN energy.

Combining any number of ARM devices into a cluster doesn't change anything in terms of their efficiency. It's just you either have one device that sucks or you have a bunch of those working (and sucking) together. That "FREE and GREEN" energy could be used to power more efficient GPU rigs, and instead you want to waste it on your ARMs.

[ronnylov]

Here is a miner that use ARM CPUs for Verium Mining:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2254852.0

[CryptBoy:)]

Try this http://ethembedded.com/

[kuroman]

Hi, sorry for my English. I live in a place where the Electric power is very expensive. Every activity is not profitable other than the trading. I noticed that Linux can be well configured to create clusters. Create cluster will increase the power of a mining station. If I create a cluster with very little credit card boards I could get mining power with a low cost. A very simple CPU as H5 (OrangePi) has 4 cores. And it is not ended: it has a hexa core Mali450 GPU! I suppouse that it should be good to try to mine with these cores. And it supports OpenCL and every core is a 64bit core. ARM processors can work very very well with ARMBIAN Distro!! It is fantastic! I can have a very BIG computer in only one credit card. It means that I can create a cluster with twenty micro PC. Why miners ingore this? It should be a miner software to get this usefull power. Please can anyone collaborate? Thanks.

There are two fundamental issues with those SoC, the first one is the market share, You see, every one or almost every one has a computer with X64-X86, PC components are available everywhere and can be adapted or scaled by almost anyone.
The other one is in terms of computational power even from a brute flops perspective these SoC are getting closer to the average CPU GPU, they still not there especially if you compare apples to apples.
So like you've mentioned before to get anything decent you need to build a proper cluster of those, but when you do that you you are eliminating the efficiency factor and it becomes quite expensive.

So to resume I feel like there is a huge potential with these chip, but they should be used to mine something that goes with their strengths and not go with a general mining machine, because you cannot beat something that is already available everywhere without having a clear advantage in anything (power consumption is not if the cost to build  a,d effort or the performance is not there )

[Branko]

Try this http://ethembedded.com/

6 KILOWATTS???

You call that green? 6KW worth of Vega cards would outperform those out of the water, and still be cheaper,
cause $150 per (weak) node is extremely expensive

[QuintLeo]

If there was a way to mine and make a profit without using a lot of electricity

 BURST

 Not high profits though, but them hard drive sure don't eat a lot of electric.

[kuroman]

Try this http://ethembedded.com/

6 KILOWATTS???

You call that green? 6KW worth of Vega cards would outperform those out of the water, and still be cheaper,
cause $150 per (weak) node is extremely expensive

6kW where do you read such a value, can you please show it to me because that's shocking, I doubt a full cluster with a 500 of those would reach 6kW, I think it's 6W per SoC.

Heck the 6W figure is probably for the full board, the SoC it self should consume around 2W
As for the price 150€ is just too expensive for such SoC it's not the latest or greatest, I'm pretty sure one can find much cheaper elsewhere.

[Branko]

Try this http://ethembedded.com/

6 KILOWATTS???

You call that green? 6KW worth of Vega cards would outperform those out of the water, and still be cheaper,
cause $150 per (weak) node is extremely expensive

6kW where do you read such a value, can you please show it to me because that's shocking, I doubt a full cluster with a 500 of those would reach 6kW, I think it's 6W per SoC.

Heck the 6W figure is probably for the full board, the SoC it self should consume around 2W
As for the price 150€ is just too expensive for such SoC it's not the latest or greatest, I'm pretty sure one can find much cheaper elsewhere.

Sorry, quoted wrong post, here is link from jeyjey post I was referring to:

http://cluster.bitscope.com/

[kuroman]

Sorry, quoted wrong post, here is link from jeyjey post I was referring to:

http://cluster.bitscope.com/

Ah yes this, a cluster of 1000 of those the only problem with this is that raspberry uses old SoC from 4 years ago or so If I'm not what I call efficient by any mean, but if a similar solution with let's say a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 or a Tegra X1 or something similar could do wonders and beat out a out RX Vegas in specific operation since an RX vega consumes between 250 and 300W around 20 of those could consume the same amount of power as a thousand and this without counting the power consumption of the boards cpus and other components, I'd say 15 Vegas is a more realistic number vs a cluster of a 1000 of those so that's a ratio of around 67 SoC per Vega card.

Now the question that should be asked is, is a Vega 56 is more powerfull than 67 X1 for example, the X1 is 1Tflops of peak 16FP calculation where as the Vega around 21 Tflops which means that the Cluster has more potential than the Vega cards, but the software to take fully advantage is not there.


And the big elephant in the room is that  I'm not factoring the costs, obviously the amount of work and the price of component is in favor for the classic mining rig with vega cards. so Tl;dr, the ARM route can be more powerefficient if the software is there, but it is right now just more expensive and not fully optimised to be the better solution for mining. but for other use cases it is much more interesting.

[NiHaoMike]

At one point (over a year ago), it was profitable to mine with cheap ($20 or less) smartphones, but now it won't return enough to break even in a reasonable time.