As the saying goes, “mining comes and goes”. After long periods of dearth on the GPU side, it’s starting to take hold on the CPU side. Ryzen processors, in particular the Ryzen 9 7950X, seem to be paying the price!
Ryzen 9 7950X: the victim of its success with miners!
Until now, the most popular cryptos have been mined using GPUs, but for others, it’s more interesting to mine them using the CPU. With the rise of Bitcoin ( €67,000), other cryptocurrencies are being pulled up, including Qubic.
Clearly, the algorithm for mining it seems to like Ryzen processors, and more particularly their AVX2 and AVX512 instructions. If we take the case of the 7950X, despite a TDP of 170W, including energy costs, the CPU generates revenues of $3/24h. However, this is a processor that can easily be optimized by greatly reducing its power consumption without sacrificing too much performance!
The trouble is, there aren’t really any other solutions that are much more profitable. Here, graphics cards offer lower profits, especially in view of their price. For example, an RTX 4090 consuming 450W generates a profit of $1.7 to $1.9… While the initial investment is much higher.
As for Intel processors, support for the AVX512 has simply been dropped to focus on the Xeon offering.
Let’s hope this hype doesn’t last. With Zen5, we can expect AVX512 performance to be doubled.
