06-20-2017, 12:19 AM
https://www.techpowerup.com/234482/eth-m...le-in-time
Quote:Hold on to your ETH hats: you will still be able to cash in on the ETH mining craze for a while. However, you should look towards your 3 GB and 4 GB graphics cards with a slight distrust, for reasons that you should know, anyway, since you have surely studied your mining cryptocurrency of choice. Examples are the GTX 1060 3 GB, or one of those shiny new 4 GB RX 480 / RX 580 which are going at ridiculously premium prices right now. And as a side note, don't you love the mechanisms of pricing and demand?
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Currently, an epoch takes about 4 to 5 days to conclude until a new one is started. That means that in around five month's time, a user with an RX 470 4GB will see an almost 30% decrease in hash-rate, with the same power consumption of today. And as you know, in mining, power/performance ratio is all that counts for profitability. It is expected that NVIDIA cards being used currently, such as the GTX 1060 3 GB, will see decreases as well. And there are other performance-affecting details that originate from the increased worker size as well, such as TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer) trashing, which could see performance degradation even before the memory pool of your graphics card of choice is fully loaded, provided the TLB is itself being overflowed... With Polaris, AMD implemented a TLB cache which was, before, absent from the GCN architecture. The small size of this TLB cache means that Polaris graphics cards will likely see performance penalties from TLB trashing before the DAG size increases to their memory limits. Just another point for you to consider.
Now granted, if you know anything about Ethereum, you probably won't even care about this: the passage from PoW to PoS (Proof of Stake) is expected to occur by November 1st of this year. This means that ETH mining will simply cease to be a thing (though this implementation could see some delays, unlikely as that is.) And it lines up nicely with the 5 month, 30% computing power decrease estimation above. So maybe you don't have to worry that much about ETH mining ceasing to be profitable in 5 month's time. But if you are looking to buy into the mining craze and invest in hardware, you should study this market, and this technology, first (and pay attention to this article as well.) Likewise, if you have just recently bought into the mining hardware market with those exorbitantly-priced RX 400 and RX 500 - do the math and be ready to look for alternatives, either in cryptocurrencies or mining solutions. Don't let yourself be burned just because you want to follow the train.