I’d be worried about the price crash coming soon… x_X.
I just got burnt myself.
Possible…
Recommended Customer Price $4129.00 :–O
Wow. So much drama in this thread…
Anyway, I think some people are mining at a slight loss for the possibility of future profitability.
I expect BTC will go up (and XPM with it). Am I alone in thinking this?
On the other hand I do worry that most miners will stop mining now, and the coin will gradually fade because mining is too difficult/unprofitable…
Interesting question. What is going to happen if more and more miners stopped mining?
Difficulty decrease to keep up the block time? More shares for the rest of the miners?
Interesting question. What is going to happen if more and more miners stopped mining?
Difficulty decrease to keep up the block time? More shares for the rest of the miners?[/quote]
Good question, can someone answer this?
Yes that is correct as less miners mine with a decreased hash rate or pps the difficulty lowers to keep the block spacing consistent. The fact that difficulty increased shows either more miners or more powerful miners. Also primecoin block reward will increase if difficulty decreases.
Be thankful for sliding difficulty adjustments as opposed to having to mine at high difficulty for set number of blocks till next difficulty adjustment while everyone abandons the mining of the coin till difficulty drops … this is how it was and IS I’m btc
Fuzzybear
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[quote=“DanglingPointer, post:39, topic:1179”]Wild guess here but perhaps someone has recompiled or modded a miner to run on Xeon Phi, tested it, then scaled up.
Xeon Phi has the potential to be the “GPU mining” version of primecoins on a PCIE x16 slot.
Whoever it is, is probably not sharing their mining code yet to milk the system.
But that is just my guess
processor count per card…
What is sad about it all, is the rich get richer because they can afford these kind of super-rigs… 
I might just stick to the stock market…[/quote]
Xeon Phi’s are in-order Pentium based multi-core co-processors with hyperthreading with 4 logical threads per core. It also has 512 bit SIMD registers, twice as large as the AVX registers. The one ideal for CPU bound computation, is the 3100 series, which has 57 cores at 1.1ghz for ~$1600. One core is used for the operation system, so 56 effective cores.
Even with 4 logical threads and the 512-bit SIMD registers, core per core it wouldn’t beat a modern hyper-threaded core in performance. Due to clock speed and architecture.
Without specific optimizations I don’t think just recompiling GMP with the flags to use the 512-bit SIMD registers would garner much improvement either. I actually am curious to see if AVX would be much of an improvement without specifically optimizing for it. I know some clients use it, but it is trivial to add a compiler flag and label it AVX. I have not really heard anything about improvements from it.
I would say a Xeon Phi 3100 will at most outpace 14 hyper-threaded 4 core machines, as the upper bound. I think it is lower than that. Also consider for a Xeon Phi it is recommended that you use a Xeon E5 series processor and the motherboard has to have special support that isn’t normally found in desktop motherboards. There aren’t a lot of motherboards that advertise support for Phi co-processors and they are socket 2011 and expensive. That is about $600-$700 minimum overhead just for the processor and motherboard.
Now if you want to start running multiple of them in the same computer you are going to have to find these server motherboards that support Phi and have enough x16 slots for it. That is going to be very expensive. Each card takes 250 watts. You will need enough power for all of them. Don’t forget about the cooling. These cards are not designed to provide sufficient cooling by themselves. In fact only one of the cards comes actively cooled. There were designed with the expectation that sufficient cooling is provided externally.
If you are serious about running more than two or three at a time that pretty much leaves you buying it from one of the major server vendors, like Dell or Supermicro. So add that markup too.
I guess my point is, these machines are going to be very expensive and (in my opinion) at most have the computing power of 14 separate computers. They would have still had to buy a lot of them at a very large cost.