I’ve heard alot of talk about bminer lately. It is..
Yet Another Closed Source Equihash Miner, from here we’ll just call bminer YACSEM-B.
This YACSEM is is getting alot of attention. It does provide a slightly higher hashrate. And by slightly I mean <3% difference on all cards I’ve tested it on.
Why am I not rushing off to implement this you may ask?
Well here’s why:
Not all miners are created equally.
Bminer.. or YACSEM-B uses _alot_ more cpu than dstm-zcash or ewbf-zcash on the same hardware.
Equihash is already cpu bound if you have many fast GPUs (1070(ti)/1080(ti))
I was seeing cpu load spikes going up to 10 on my 16gpu rig during testing at miner startup. It did eventually plateau, but spikes like this _will_ cause some rigs to crash on startup. Not a good thing.
The other thing: All of these miners are from…well….not so well known developers. This new miner has not been vetted by me personally for inclusion into ethOS yet. As such, its not as simple as just slapping it in, creating a hash gather and calling it a day. It has to be properly inspected before inclusion.
For a sub 3% gain, and having to implement yet another miner, which uses more CPU (maybe its getting that extra 3% by shifting more work to the cpu.) It is simply not worth it. Also, dstm-zcash has proven reliable given sane overclocks, as well as ewbf-zcash.