The fastest HD 69xx miner. 250 BTC.

[mrb]

Faster than Phoenix 1.3 by 6.3%[1] on HD 69xx.
Faster than ArtForz's private calminer on HD 69xx.
hdminer is a miner I developed for AMD Radeon cards using the low-level CAL interface (as opposed to OpenCL). Its target market is cluster owners who operate 20+ GPUs and are power or cooling constrained, yet need that +6.3% perf improvement without increasing power consumption or cooling needs.

• 840 Mhash/sec on a Radeon HD 6990 (BIOS switch at "overclocked" position 1; with "aticonfig --odsc=960,1260" to further overclock the GPU to 960 MHz and mem to 1260 MHz)
• 802 Mhash/sec on a Radeon HD 6990 (BIOS switch at "overclocked" position 1; with "aticonfig --odsc=915,1260" to further overclock the GPU to 915 MHz and mem to 1260 MHz)
• 746 Mhash/sec on a Radeon HD 6990 (BIOS switch at "overclocked" position 1) -- this is higher than the theoretical 723 Mhash/s I would expect for this clock because hdminer leaves some TDP headroom which allows AMD PowerTune to dynamically adjust the clock to a value averaging more than 880MHz
• 708 Mhash/sec on a Radeon HD 6990 (BIOS switch at "default" position 2) -- this speed has been measured with Catalyst 11.1. Catalyst 11.2 through 11.4 contain a performance regression affecting my compute shader that downgrades the speed to 683 Mhash/s. However because aticonfig in Catalyst 11.1 does not support the HD 6990, I advise users to initially install Catalyst 11.4 or later, run aticonfig to generate xorg.conf, then downgrade to 11.1 for operating hdminer on a day-to-day basis.
• 569 Mhash/sec on a Radeon HD 5970 (stock clock 725MHz)

On the HD 69xx series this is about 6.3%[1] faster than the fastest publicly available miner (Phoenix). (On the 5xxx series, hdminer is less optimized and appears to be currently 5% slower than Phoenix.) I am selling it for 250 BTC. Email me m.bevand@gmail.com. Check my user rating on irc/freenode: my nick is "mrb_". What you get:

- Source code (compiles for Linux)
- Supports AMD Radeon HD 5000/6000 series only (HD 4000 and earlier not supported)
- No 100% CPU busy loop! Most combinations of OpenCL miners/Catalyst drivers/SDK versions suffer from a "busy event loop" bug, but not hdminer because it is written in CAL, so does not use OpenCL. A pinky single-core AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz is amply sufficient to handle the speed of 3 x HD 6990 for example.
- Internal SHA-256 implementation uses BIT_ALIGN and BFI_INT instructions (the first miner ever to do so; read about what is and how I added BFI_INT support to another GPGPU app I wrote: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=43)
- Supports as many GPUs as the Catalyst driver can support (currently AMD supports 8 GPUs on Linux, such as 4 x HD6990, or 4 x HD5970)
- Simple command line interface (see screenshot below)
- Connects to bitcoin via the standard RPC 'getwork' interface (compatible with bitcoin version 0.3.19 and up)
- Compatible with mining pools

[1] HD 6990 stock GPU 830MHz clock, stock memory clock, stock GPU VDDC, stock memory voltage: hdminer 708 Mhash/s vs. Phoenix 666 Mhash/s source: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2949.msg106238#msg106238

Screenshot of it running on a 4 x dual-GPU HD 5970 computer (8 GPUs total):


Dead easy guide to set it up from scratch from a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 install:

Code:

These steps have been tested on a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid lynx) install.

1. Install the dependencies for compiling the Catalyst driver and hdminer:
  $ sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-generic dkms libqtcore4 lib32gcc1 libglu1-mesa libxrandr2 libxinerama1 libcurl4-gnutls-dev

2. Download the Catalyst driver (eg. ati-driver-installer-11-3-x86.x86_64.run):
  http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
  And install it:
  $ sudo sh ati-driver-installer-11-3-x86.x86_64.run
  (Select all default options.)

3. Create /etc/X11/xorg.conf (and fix the wrong perms set by aticonfig):
  $ sudo aticonfig --initial -f --adapter=all
  $ sudo chmod 644 /etc/X11/xorg.conf

4. Reboot to make sure that the Catalyst kernel module fglrx.ko loads correctly
  and that X11 starts properly configured:
  $ sudo reboot

5. Download the APP SDK (eg. AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz):
  http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/Pages/default.aspx
  And extract it in /usr/local:
  $ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64.tgz

6. In hdminer, in the Makefile, edit SDK_PATH to point to the SDK:
  SDK_PATH = /usr/local/AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4-lnx64
  And compile it:
  $ make

7. Mine! (By default, hdminer connects to the bitcoin JSON-RPC endpoint on
  localhost, on the default port 8332, and authenticates with the user/password
  bitcoin/password):
  $ ./hdminer
  To specify non-default values (eg. to mine on a pool):
  $ ./hdminer -s servername -p 8332 -a user:password
  See help:
  $ ./hdminer -h

[davout]

Would you open source it for a 400 BTC bounty ?

[mrb]

Would you open source it for a 400 BTC bounty ?

Well, out of respect for previous buyers who spent their hard-earned BTC on it, no, I should not...

[jwalck]

Would you open source it for a 400 BTC bounty ?

Well, out of respect for previous buyers who spent their hard-earned BTC on it, no, I should not...

I'd rather be inefficient than proprietary. The client looks nice though! Is it using OpenCL?

To be honest, I think if you get youtipit or a web page describing your effort with the repository and a donate address, you'd make plenty too. And + on happiness and goodness in the world.:)

[jorgen]

Can you implement the miner for PS3 console?
If yes, could you make it open source and post it here for reasonable bounty?

[mrb]

I do feel that selling proprietary software (the first time for me) is somewhat contrary to my own values as everything else I write and use is open source :-)

hdminer is written in CAL IL (Compute Abstract Layer - Intermediary Language), a pseudo assembly language.

The PS3 is not good for mining. 7 usable cores (6 SPU + 1 PPU) with 128-bit registers at 3.2GHz makes it only about as fast as a cheap 6-core AMD Phenom. Both are handily beaten by low-end GPUs.

[mrb]

I changed my mind.
I am now selling the source code of hdminer as well.
Price remains the same: 400 BTC.

(However it does not mean it is open source. Again people have paid money for it, I don't think they would appreciate it to suddenly become open source.)

[hacim]

Maybe if the people who paid for it don't want it to be freely available could offer you some amount to keep it closed. Then the bidding war can begin.

Another option would be to offer a certain amount to those who purchased it to accept the opening of the source, so they don't feel bad.

In any case, those who did purchase it have benefited from having it far earlier than anyone else.

[ElectricGoat]

You could also open-source it, but not release it for free. I'm not convinced people who pay for a slightly faster miner would rush to distribute it for free if they were allowed to.

[mrb]

Actually davout's idea would work: a bounty of about 2500 BTC for me to open source hdminer would be high enough that I could refund most of the money to the buyers who already paid 400 BTC.

[jorgen]

Can you compile a windows version of your hd miner?

[mrb]

If more than 1 user is interested in Windows, I might consider compiling for Windows.

[comboy]

Please share donation address. Your blog is fuck*** awesome.

[Garrett Burgwardt]

I'd love a windows client! Would be excellent

[Mahkul]

I'd love a windows client! Would be excellent

I would love one too!

[kiba]

Please share donation address. Your blog is fuck*** awesome.

Or maybe he could put up ads space for bitcoin with http://www.operationfabulous.com

[mrb]

Ugh. I wasn't expecting that much Windows demand.
Oh well I guess I'll have to set up that Windows dev environment which I am not looking forward to

[bitjet]

so whatever happened to the super miner? poclbm seems to match these numbers.

[dingus]

With poclbm I get ~270 m/h/s with both cores at stock speeds. I am not sure this is worth 400 btc.

[bitjet]

yep. Im getting around 315 per core overclocked.