Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: limits of ZEC mining
by
TheRider
on 14/11/2016, 05:21:51 UTC
...

Therefore a reasonably efficient equihash implementation will do 5 * 64 * 1 million bytes (320MB) of IO per round.  With 9 rounds that means 2.88GB per itteration, or 77.8 itterations per second on a Rx 470 with RAM clocked at 7Gbps (224GB/s memory bandwidth).  At 1.88 solutions per iteration, that's an average of 146 solutions/second, or about 25% faster than Claymore v5.

The theoretical equihash performance limit on a Rx 470 is likely about 25% faster than 146 solutions, but it involves using 64-byte data structures that requires a lot more memory.  So much memory that I think it will not be possible with 4GB cards.  At least it will be something for owners of 8GB Rx 480 cards to be happy about.

A few noob questions if you don't mind.
What's the theoretical limit on the RX 470 8G Nitro cards with RAM clocked at 8Gbps (256GB/s)? Also, does overclocking the memory result in a linear increase in performance?
Does this all mean that equihash solving isn't GPU compute limited, but rather memory limited? If so, I wonder why GPU-Z shows 100% GPU load vs sub-40% memory controller load (whereas mining Eth fully loads both core and mem controller...)

Fascinating stuff. Thanks in advance.