Supply of the high end graphics cards almost always runs out first.

I think the southern islands will be the last iteration of the VLIW design so we have another year or two before supply of effective graphics cards are non-existant.

I've recently got into bitcoin mining using my PS3.

On Anandtech they have previewed the future of AMD graphics cards. They are moving away from a VLIW design and moving towards SIMD.

It looks like that the new GPU design will be moving towards something more nvidia like and therefore bad at bitcoin mining.

Apart from moving to ASIC's and FPGA's it looks like GPU bitcoing mining is going to slowdown dramatically.

You need to install linux, using either OtherOS on firmware 3.15 or lower, or using custom firmware and AbestOS.

Once you have a working linux environment you compile cellminer and off you go.

There is one clear advantage to using custom firmware. No hypervisor. That means you can access the 7th SPE to increase hashrate by 3.6Mh/s and if they ever develop the driver, access the RSX. However it is unlikely you'll be able to use it for CUDA or openCL.

21 Mh/s for a CPU is not bad.

Its only got 6 working SPE's. How many stream processors does an ATI video card have? hundreds!

If IBM ever released the 4 PPU + 32 SPE Cell, given the current cellminer (which I think could be optimised further if it was written using stream processing) it would do 115 Mh/s.

Is that mind shattering? No its not, but I think its still remarkable given that everyone likes to compare the Cell to a GPU. TDP would be around 100W, but alas we are talking about a product which will not see the light of day unless Sony decides to stay with the cell for PS4.

Hi,

I'm new to pool mining but I'm trying to track down whether this is a bug or not.

I am running cellminer on my PS3, for no reason other than I like putting the cell broadband architecture to good use.

According to cellminer the ps3 should be doing 21.470 Mh/s. I am currently contributing to the Eligius US pool.

According to the pool's stats I am only doing ~7.9 Mh/s.

Which is correct? Or is there some way that both are correct and that my miner is somehow wasting cycles calculating old hashes? I dunno, is someone able to please enlighten me.