Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: limits of ZEC mining
by
nerdralph
on 14/11/2016, 20:30:40 UTC
On a more serious note: if you state the performance is now at 80% of theoretical maximum, we're basically there, right? ETH miners also peak at about 80-85% of the theoretical maximum. Does the same rule apply here?

I still have some work to do before I write my own miner from scratch.  I like to *really* understand the problem before I start writing code, and there's still some parts of the GCN architecture that I'm figuring out.

Eth miners max out at around 93% of the theoretical maximum.  24Mh/s is the theoretical max for a R9 380 with 6Gbps memory, and I've been able to get 22.3Mh out of a couple cards.  You'll never reach 100% due to the fact that refresh consumes some of the bandwdith, perhaps as much as 5%.

p.s. I also have another idea that should work on 4GB cards.  The miner could use 12-slot bins of 32 bytes, just like silentarmy, but use a new table every round instead of using 2 tables in a double-buffered fashion.  This would use 384MB * 9 =~ 3.5GB, but then your first write to any row could write 32-bytes of dummy data along with the 32-byte collision record.  This would avoid the read-before-write. You could do this with the 2nd through 6th write by filling the even slots before the odd ones.  This would reduce the average IO per round to 2^20 * 3 * 64-bytes, or 192MB per round and 1.728GB per iteration.  That would be a theoretical max of 130 iterations per second on a Rx 470 with a 7Gbps memory clock, which would be around 240 solutions per second.  Using 93% of the theoretical limit taken from eth mining, that would give real-world performance of 225 sols/s.