Anyone who was in the market for GPUs between 2020 and 2022 will remember the exorbitant prices driven by demand from miners. Among other reasons related to the pandemic, GPUs were particularly strong in Ethereum mining, leading to a shortage of graphics cards. Thankfully, that came to an end in September 2022, but now that 2024 is nearing, could we be witnessing a new mining crisis? This one for CPUs, specifically AMD Ryzen .
An analysis by Wccftech examines the mining profitability of some of the best performing proof-of-work (PoW) coins on CPUs. With Bitcoin reaching a new all-time high, mining profitability has skyrocketed. This tends to spread to the altcoin market as well. Even if some of these coins are basically garbage, they can still be profitable, which means PC hardware is in high demand.
At the time of this writing, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X was out of stock at Newegg with a list price of $741, higher than its launch price of $699. It's also more expensive than the 7950X3D's current price of $592. It's clear that demand-side factors are at play, as we don't expect to see any supply-side issues with the 7950X more than a year after its launch. And it seems that the cause lies in the mine.
RandomX is an algorithm used by Monero and several other PoW coins. If you look at the XMRig benchmark, you'll see that AMD chips with higher core counts dominate the list. Scroll down to find the mainstream CPUs and you'll find the 7950X in 118th place with a benchmark result of 26,783. The Intel Core i9 14900K certainly has far fewer entries, coming in at #211 with 16,278 results.
Some CPU mining algorithms thrive on large L3 caches, while others benefit from AVX instructions. In addition to the power efficiency, which is appealing to minors, it pretty much leverages the main strengths of AMD's Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. They are good at mining. A little-known cryptocurrency called Qubic can generate up to $3 per day.
At least gamers will still be able to buy cheap Zen 4 chips even if there are a ton of CPU-grabbing miners, but will the same be true for AMD's next Zen 5 model? If AVX-512 becomes widely adopted, the mining performance of AMD chips will be further advanced considering that Intel's challenger does not support his AVX-512.
AMD is called Zen 5 version with lower hash rateThis is reminiscent of Nvidia's LHR graphics cards at the height of the mining boom. However, I don't really believe AMD will go down that path.
If Bitcoin continues to rise and money continues to flow into the crypto market, the profitability of coin mining, which is neither crap nor shit, will only increase. This isn't good news for anyone looking to buy a high-core count Zen 5 CPU in the coming months. Let's see how things turn out.
