TECH NEWS – This time, cryptocurrencies are being mined with different components, so be prepared for a shortage of them, which will make them much more expensive to find in stores…

Between 2020 and 2022, crypto mining will be rampant. If you were lucky, you could buy Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3000 cards early on (and that was excellent value for money, they weren’t inflated yet!), but if you were unlucky, you could hardly find a sufficiently modern card, or if you did, you could be charged up to three times the price. GPUs were good for mining Ethereum, but by September 2022 the problem had subsided and cards were easy to come by again.

A year and a half later, the frenzy is back, but this time it’s not graphics cards that are in short supply, but AMD’s Ryzen processors. Bitcoin is on the rise again, and it tends to drag other cryptocurrencies with it. WCCFTech looked at the mining profitability of proof of work (PoW) coins, and as proof of their findings, nothing is better than the fact that the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X was selling for $741 instead of $700 on Newegg (an online sales platform) and there was a shortage of stock. This is even higher than the 7950X3D’s price of $592. The 7950X was released over a year ago. So the problem is not supply, but demand.

Monero and some PoW coins use the RandomX algorithm. Looking at the XMRig benchmarks, multi-core AMD processors dominate the top of the list and we see the Ryzen 9 7950X in 118th place with 26783 points. Intel’s Core i9-14900K has been tested by fewer benchmarks, but is only in 211th place with 16278 points. For CPU mining algorithms, the more L3 caches or AVX instructions, the better. Add to that the low power consumption of AMD processors and we’ve got the Ryzen 7000 CPUs covered. The cheaper Zen 4 processors are not being bought en masse, but Zen 5 performance will be even better, and when the AVX-512 instruction set becomes mainstream, it will be hard to find 8000 processors in the shops, as Intel CPUs do not support AVX-512.

Don’t be surprised if AMD follows Nvidia’s lead and releases LHR (low hash rate) versions of their products so that they are not bought en masse.

Source: PCGamer, WCCFTech, XMRig