M1 Max Ethereum Mining Test

[bmustaf]

I've been using the hastily ported ethminer-m1 (not m1 or m1 max optimized, just basically ported to build and run) on the new M1 Max (fully maxed out config) Apple MacBook Pro 16".

No, I am not trying to turn a profit and won't use it for mining regularly. I am just trying to get a good understanding of how it stacks up for my own curiosity. There are many differences in intent, design, target market, etc between this SoC (and its GPU cores) and discrete PCI cards used for mining, yes.

Running ethminer-m1 I get consistently 10.25 Mh/S whether on battery, mains, whatever.

Looking at powermetrics output for GPU, CPU, and SoC (Package) power use while at "idle" (keeping all other things as constant as possible) and while running ethminer-m1 (after a few min to get the system heat up and let fans start to kick in, etc well after the DAG is loaded and cores have been working a bit) I am seeing about a 19.4W difference in total package use (mostly all in the GPU, as one would expect).

Works out to about 0.528 Mh/W.

Super rough as per-process power use is a bit tough to measure on Mac OS X and an SoC in general...but definitely puts it in a very competitive stance (if not almost leading?) with the traditional GPU-based mining crowd (and ethminer-m1 is not really M1 optimized let alone M1 Max optimized).

Thoughts on ways to better test are welcome and input on methodology, etc is very welcome!

 

[velocityg4]

Glad it's a horrible hashrate. Hopefully it doesn't get better than that. Because no miner will want to touch it as it stands. When you consider the cost of the computer vs hashrate.

While the energy efficiency is good. The cost of the computer kills the savings. It would take way too long to break even on energy savings.

 

[Pressure]

I suppose things won't get really interesting until miners ditch OpenCL and use Metal instead.

 

[Turribeach]

My ETH mining rig has 305Mh at about 0.323 Mh/W so that means the M1 Max would mine 67% more efficiently. But at 10Mh/s is just not worth it. Even at 30Mh/s and ignoring electricity costs that's about $77/month - $924/year at current prices. Most people mining use open air rigs that can be easily air cooled. Removing the back cover might a possible way to increase cooling but who knows what the long term effects of 24x7 operation might be?

Still I do think that if someone decides to write a properly optimised ETH miner there could be some interesting results. ETH mining is a particularly memory hard problem hence why GPUs with lots of RAM do better. And the M1 Max can be loaded with 64 GB of unified memory, which is unheard of in a laptop and quite niche on the x86 world. But I think to be attractive to miners or even MBP owners it should really get to 60Mh/s which will generate $1850/year excluding electricity. That will mean that a fully maxed 14" MBP could be paid off in 2 years, again excluding electricity costs.

 

[dgdosen]

Isn’t ETH supposed to go proof of stake?

 

[mi7chy]

Isn’t ETH supposed to fill proof of stake?

Pushed back to mid 2022 last I heard.

 

[DeepIn2U]

My ETH mining rig has 305Mh at about 0.323 Mh/W so that means the M1 Max would mine 67% more efficiently. But at 10Mh/s is just not worth it. Even at 30Mh/s and ignoring electricity costs that's about $77/month - $924/year at current prices. Most people mining use open air rigs that can be easily air cooled. Removing the back cover might a possible way to increase cooling but who knows what the long term effects of 24x7 operation might be?

Still I do think that if someone decides to write a properly optimised ETH miner there could be some interesting results. ETH mining is a particularly memory hard problem hence why GPUs with lots of RAM do better. And the M1 Max can be loaded with 64 GB of unified memory, which is unheard of in a laptop and quite niche on the x86 world. But I think to be attractive to miners or even MBP owners it should really get to 60Mh/s which will generate $1850/year excluding electricity. That will mean that a fully maxed 14" MBP could be paid off in 2 years, again excluding electricity costs.

Seems like with the upcoming Mac Pro and proper rewriting of the code to use Metal maybe the ideal hardware on Macs?

Isn’t ETH supposed to go proof of stake?

What does that even mean?

 

[dgdosen]

Seems like with the upcoming Mac Pro and proper rewriting of the code to use Metal maybe the ideal hardware on Macs?


What does that even mean?

It means they won't use 'mining' to maintain the blockchain. That means there will be less reliance on energy gobbling hardware to perform that task...

Have to add this link because it's a classic:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1030225104234373121

 

[mr_roboto]

What does that even mean?

Most cryptocurrencies to date are built on "proof of work": Solve a really hard math problem whose solution is trivial to verify (this is mining), get rewarded with some meaningless tokens which crypto promoters claim are going to go to the moon because obviously the whole world wants to abandon conventional money and switch to crypto. The claims are all pump and dump nonsense, but we live in interesting times, so we haven't gotten to the end of the pumpers creating crypto bubbles to profit off the gullible.

Anyways. PoW uses enormous amounts of electrical power. This is by design: the act of solving those hard math problems is also tied to how a cryptocurrency network signs off on transactions (i.e. Bob has 5 coins and wants to pay Alice three of them). The idea is that by forcing anyone who wants to propose including some transactions in the globally visible public ledger to prove that they burned a substantial amount of compute power working on a meaningless math problem, you can make it too expensive for individual bad actors to try to push cheating transactions (e.g. pay the same "coin" to two different people) into the ledger.

But if the world actually ran on PoW crypto, we'd end up using more energy on mining than industrial and residential uses put together. As public awareness about this problem rises, crypto promoters have been searching for a solution. It's hard to sell people on the idea that crypto is Money 2.0 if adopting Money 2.0 means accelerating global warming and harming the economy.

The only one that's gotten much traction so far is Proof of Stake. However, it amounts to "Let those with the most cryptocurrency make the rules". This appeals to the people who hold a large amount of crypto and want to become the new oligarchs of the world without actually doing anything of merit. I probably do not need to tell you why this is not likely to actually work in the real world.

Also, while crypto promoters have been claiming PoS is about to be real for a long time, it never quite materializes.

Also, even if you solved PoW, crypto would still face enormous problems taking over global finance. It turns out that despite what the pumpers claim, cryptocurrencies are terrible at actually being currency at any kind of large scale.

 

[Macintosh IIcx]

Most cryptocurrencies to date are built on "proof of work": Solve a really hard math problem whose solution is trivial to verify (this is mining), get rewarded with some meaningless tokens which crypto promoters claim are going to go to the moon because obviously the whole world wants to abandon conventional money and switch to crypto. The claims are all pump and dump nonsense, but we live in interesting times, so we haven't gotten to the end of the pumpers creating crypto bubbles to profit off the gullible.

Anyways. PoW uses enormous amounts of electrical power. This is by design: the act of solving those hard math problems is also tied to how a cryptocurrency network signs off on transactions (i.e. Bob has 5 coins and wants to pay Alice three of them). The idea is that by forcing anyone who wants to propose including some transactions in the globally visible public ledger to prove that they burned a substantial amount of compute power working on a meaningless math problem, you can make it too expensive for individual bad actors to try to push cheating transactions (e.g. pay the same "coin" to two different people) into the ledger.

But if the world actually ran on PoW crypto, we'd end up using more energy on mining than industrial and residential uses put together. As public awareness about this problem rises, crypto promoters have been searching for a solution. It's hard to sell people on the idea that crypto is Money 2.0 if adopting Money 2.0 means accelerating global warming and harming the economy.

The only one that's gotten much traction so far is Proof of Stake. However, it amounts to "Let those with the most cryptocurrency make the rules". This appeals to the people who hold a large amount of crypto and want to become the new oligarchs of the world without actually doing anything of merit. I probably do not need to tell you why this is not likely to actually work in the real world.

Also, while crypto promoters have been claiming PoS is about to be real for a long time, it never quite materializes.

Also, even if you solved PoW, crypto would still face enormous problems taking over global finance. It turns out that despite what the pumpers claim, cryptocurrencies are terrible at actually being currency at any kind of large scale.

Very nice summary!

One really annoying (IMHO) curve ball that is going on currently is NFT. It has got a lot of creatives to jump on the crypto bandwagon without knowing jack s**t about cryptocurrencies. If they knew about the environmental impact, they might think twice, but all they see is easy money. /rant off

 

[TarkinDale]

Most cryptocurrencies to date are built on "proof of work": Solve a really hard math problem whose solution is trivial to verify (this is mining), get rewarded with some meaningless tokens which crypto promoters claim are going to go to the moon because obviously the whole world wants to abandon conventional money and switch to crypto. The claims are all pump and dump nonsense, but we live in interesting times, so we haven't gotten to the end of the pumpers creating crypto bubbles to profit off the gullible.

Anyways. PoW uses enormous amounts of electrical power. This is by design: the act of solving those hard math problems is also tied to how a cryptocurrency network signs off on transactions (i.e. Bob has 5 coins and wants to pay Alice three of them). The idea is that by forcing anyone who wants to propose including some transactions in the globally visible public ledger to prove that they burned a substantial amount of compute power working on a meaningless math problem, you can make it too expensive for individual bad actors to try to push cheating transactions (e.g. pay the same "coin" to two different people) into the ledger.

But if the world actually ran on PoW crypto, we'd end up using more energy on mining than industrial and residential uses put together. As public awareness about this problem rises, crypto promoters have been searching for a solution. It's hard to sell people on the idea that crypto is Money 2.0 if adopting Money 2.0 means accelerating global warming and harming the economy.

The only one that's gotten much traction so far is Proof of Stake. However, it amounts to "Let those with the most cryptocurrency make the rules". This appeals to the people who hold a large amount of crypto and want to become the new oligarchs of the world without actually doing anything of merit. I probably do not need to tell you why this is not likely to actually work in the real world.

Also, while crypto promoters have been claiming PoS is about to be real for a long time, it never quite materializes.

Also, even if you solved PoW, crypto would still face enormous problems taking over global finance. It turns out that despite what the pumpers claim, cryptocurrencies are terrible at actually being currency at any kind of large scale.

A great summary. Would it be okay to share elsewhere?

 

[dgdosen]

My personal favorite for understanding a blockchain using proof of work (and why it works):

 

[mr_roboto]

A great summary. Would it be okay to share elsewhere?

Go for it!

 

[Turribeach]

Yeah ETH will move to Proof of Stake (PoS) at some point which will make mining profit go down a lot. Having said that the ETH 2.0 release has been rumoured for years and was went to come last year so it might still some time for it to appear. Anyway miners will simply move to another Proof of Work (PoW) crypto and carry on. While in general currently ETH miner is the most profitable one, there will be another one quickly adopted if ETH moves to PoS.

 

[ChainfireXDA]

I'd be very interested what kind of hash-rate UselethMiner (CPU-only) can produce on your M1 Max. Built just for the fun of it, I was surprised to find the M1 (first edition, Mac Mini) produced 4 MH/s at better efficiency than my GTX1080TI.

Info here: https://github.com/Chainfire/UselethMiner

Package here: https://github.com/Chainfire/UselethMiner/releases

Reddit thread here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/nk91n0

 

[BenRacicot]

I'm interested for sure, we all should be. If someone wrote a miner to leverage the M1's GPU and its 64Gb it would certainly be worth mining on it.

Anyone know of a native miner?

 

[diamond.g]

Since M1 Pro/Max have large cache you guys think Raptoreum could be profitable?

New Raptoreum Crypto Mining Algorithm Turns AMD Ryzen CPUs With Huge L3 Caches In To Money Making Machines

AMD's Ryzen, Threadripper & EPYC CPUs are now being used for mining in Raptoreum Crypto algorithm due to their large L3 cache size.

wccftech.com

 

[Turribeach]

Since M1 Pro/Max have large cache you guys think Raptoreum could be profitable?

New Raptoreum Crypto Mining Algorithm Turns AMD Ryzen CPUs With Huge L3 Caches In To Money Making Machines

AMD's Ryzen, Threadripper & EPYC CPUs are now being used for mining in Raptoreum Crypto algorithm due to their large L3 cache size.

wccftech.com

Very interesting diamond! I will certainly try when I get my M1 Max but it only comes at the end of Nov.

 

[metapunk2077fail]

What does that even mean?

Proof of stake. Staking.

It's another elitist blockchain system that says the nodes or wallets with the most coins have the biggest votes, most power and they earn the most rewards.

Same like mining, it is also very centralised and controlled by big players. Specialist companies rent big office blocks full of PCs to host validator nodes and control the networks. The biggest proof of stake companies are the biggest validators on all the popular proof of stake chains.

All the real money that comes into this economy is mostly cashed out by the big fish to cover their costs and to share the profits with their big investors.

Normal individuals are just beggars in the blockchain world. Getting the crumbs while the big fish eat the whole meal. There is an illusion that everyone's a winner because of clever marketing, but the volatility and market rigging means for most average people the odds are against them.

 

[januarydrive7]

Proof of stake. Staking.

It's another elitist blockchain system that says the nodes or wallets with the most coins have the biggest votes, most power and they earn the most rewards.

Same like mining, it is also very centralised and controlled by big players. Specialist companies rent big office blocks full of PCs to host validator nodes and control the networks. The biggest proof of stake companies are the biggest validators on all the popular proof of stake chains.

All the real money that comes into this economy is mostly cashed out by the big fish to cover their costs and to share the profits with their big investors.

Normal individuals are just beggars in the blockchain world. Getting the crumbs while the big fish eat the whole meal. There is an illusion that everyone's a winner because of clever marketing, but the volatility and market rigging means for most average people the odds are against them.

It's like the stock market, but more public.

 

[hajime]

Hope the Mac are not good for mining. Otherwise, more shortage and raised prices like what happened to Nvidia GPUs few years ago.

 

[metapunk2077fail]

It's like the stock market, but more public.

It's worse obviously because most of these tokens, which are securities just like stocks, aren't based on any company making profits or having tangible product. So their value is just a guess and open to even worse manipulations and disappearing whenever they please.

 

[mi7chy]

Complexity goes up with time so hashrate is king while efficiency is secondary. If you look at the top profitability dGPUs they're all higher wattage.

https://whattomine.com/gpus

 

[mikeeekim]

Most cryptocurrencies to date are built on "proof of work": Solve a really hard math problem whose solution is trivial to verify (this is mining), get rewarded with some meaningless tokens which crypto promoters claim are going to go to the moon because obviously the whole world wants to abandon conventional money and switch to crypto. The claims are all pump and dump nonsense, but we live in interesting times, so we haven't gotten to the end of the pumpers creating crypto bubbles to profit off the gullible.

Anyways. PoW uses enormous amounts of electrical power. This is by design: the act of solving those hard math problems is also tied to how a cryptocurrency network signs off on transactions (i.e. Bob has 5 coins and wants to pay Alice three of them). The idea is that by forcing anyone who wants to propose including some transactions in the globally visible public ledger to prove that they burned a substantial amount of compute power working on a meaningless math problem, you can make it too expensive for individual bad actors to try to push cheating transactions (e.g. pay the same "coin" to two different people) into the ledger.

But if the world actually ran on PoW crypto, we'd end up using more energy on mining than industrial and residential uses put together. As public awareness about this problem rises, crypto promoters have been searching for a solution. It's hard to sell people on the idea that crypto is Money 2.0 if adopting Money 2.0 means accelerating global warming and harming the economy.

The only one that's gotten much traction so far is Proof of Stake. However, it amounts to "Let those with the most cryptocurrency make the rules". This appeals to the people who hold a large amount of crypto and want to become the new oligarchs of the world without actually doing anything of merit. I probably do not need to tell you why this is not likely to actually work in the real world.

Also, while crypto promoters have been claiming PoS is about to be real for a long time, it never quite materializes.

Also, even if you solved PoW, crypto would still face enormous problems taking over global finance. It turns out that despite what the pumpers claim, cryptocurrencies are terrible at actually being currency at any kind of large scale.

On PoW, I totally agree with you, but you are not correct about Proof of Stake. There's lot of people working very hard to make PoS fair and not 'oligarchal'. Please have a look at Cardano, which has solved the PoS problem in a pretty equitable manner.

 

[JMacHack]

It's worse obviously because most of these tokens, which are securities just like stocks, aren't based on any company making profits or having tangible product. So their value is just a guess and open to even worse manipulations and disappearing whenever they please.

I point you to the EV company market.