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by Scene_Cast2 1935 days ago
No-one has mentioned that ETH mining is memory bandwidth bound. M1 macs, unfortunately, have slow GPU memory compared to your discrete GPU's GDDR6X.

Here's a great post showing that - https://www.vijaypradeep.com/blog/2017-04-28-ethereums-memor... - GPU mining is only 10% slower than the theoretical memory-bound maximum (if compute was infinitely fast).

2 comments

I suspected that as well. Since M1 CPU and GPU shares memory, this also means you really can't do anything else while mining. You can't even scroll a webpage smoothly.
Shouldn’t it be better to mine RandomX using the CPU?
Generally yes. The RandomX dev seems to have some issues getting to to work well on apple silicon, however the Xmrig dev has it working, but seems it caps out at 2.3kh/s due to not being able to take advantage of JIT or large pages. (At least from what I read of their respective GitHub repos https://github.com/tevador/RandomX/issues/196

And

https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/issues/1991).

RandomX mining is better at the moment, but that may be because nobody's developed a GPU minter tailored to the uniqueness of apple's GPU, if that's even possible.