Wednesday, March 13th 2024
Qubic Cryptocurrency Mining Craze Causes AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Stocks to Evaporate
It looks like cryptocurrency mining is back in craze, as miners are firing up their old mining hardware from 2022 to cash in. Bitcoin is now north of $72,000, and is dragging up the value of several other cryptocurrencies, one such being Qubic (QBIC). Profitability calculators put 24 hours of Qubic mining on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-core processor at around $3, after subtracting energy costs involved in running the chip at its default 170 W TDP. "Zen 4" processors such as the 7950X tend to retain much of their performance with slight underclocking, and reducing their power limits; which is bound to hold or increase profitability, while also prolonging the life of the hardware.
And thus, the inevitable has happened—stocks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X have disappeared overnight across online retail. With the market presence of the 7950X3D and the Intel Core i9-14900K, the 7950X was typically found between $550-600, which would have added great value considering its low input costs. CPU-based cryptocurrency miners, including the QBIC miner, appear to be taking advantage of the AVX-512 instruction set. AMD "Zen 4" microarchitecture supports AVX-512 through its dual-pumped 256-bit FPU, and the upcoming "Zen 5" microarchitecture is rumored to double AVX-512 performance over "Zen 4." Meanwhile, Intel has deprecated what few client-relevant AVX-512 instructions its Core processors had since 12th Gen "Alder Lake," as it reportedly affected sales of Xeon processors. What about the 7950X3D? It's pricier, but mining doesn't benefit from the 3D V-cache, and the chip doesn't sustain the kind of CPU clocks the 7950X manages to do across all its 16 cores. It's only a matter of time before the 7950X3D disappears, too; followed by 12-core models such as the 65 W 7900, the 170 W 7900X, and the 7900X3D.
Sources:
MEGAsizeGPU (Twitter), Wccftech
And thus, the inevitable has happened—stocks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X have disappeared overnight across online retail. With the market presence of the 7950X3D and the Intel Core i9-14900K, the 7950X was typically found between $550-600, which would have added great value considering its low input costs. CPU-based cryptocurrency miners, including the QBIC miner, appear to be taking advantage of the AVX-512 instruction set. AMD "Zen 4" microarchitecture supports AVX-512 through its dual-pumped 256-bit FPU, and the upcoming "Zen 5" microarchitecture is rumored to double AVX-512 performance over "Zen 4." Meanwhile, Intel has deprecated what few client-relevant AVX-512 instructions its Core processors had since 12th Gen "Alder Lake," as it reportedly affected sales of Xeon processors. What about the 7950X3D? It's pricier, but mining doesn't benefit from the 3D V-cache, and the chip doesn't sustain the kind of CPU clocks the 7950X manages to do across all its 16 cores. It's only a matter of time before the 7950X3D disappears, too; followed by 12-core models such as the 65 W 7900, the 170 W 7900X, and the 7900X3D.
61 Comments on Qubic Cryptocurrency Mining Craze Causes AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Stocks to Evaporate
People in mining just throw a dice, choose a coin and hope that coin one day to become the next bitcoin. We can laugh at them today, they could end up laughing at us in 10 years. Of course today it's probably extremely more difficult to have a case like bitcoin again.
History is littered with people who had wallets full of far more than 1 BTC and just forgot about them, never to get back to them. It's part of why the coin inflates so. Not because it's useful really, but because it wouldn't surprise me if half or more of the fixed amount is friggin MIA.
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Please show me a MB that does not have Networking. If you are like me, you have stuff lying around anyway to mitigate some of the costs. With the way that crypto is currently going CPU mining is pretty much academic, if the conditions are right. I probably won't do it right now but I keep seeing the 7900 for $499 and that is tempting me to take $700 out of my wallet and invest in that. to start an AM5 rig. No DGPU is very tempting from a price and power perspective for a mining rig.
Likely oversight but you show no region hehe
But by the links I'd guess Canada :cool:
Buying second-hand CPUs is very low-risk. Buying second-hand GPUs with new VRAM is also usually fine, if they've been put together competently.
Looked it up - and it ended up worse than I thought...
Economics doesn't work at all(with gazillion coins in the works, 8% already minted not even two months in active existence, and already "burning" reserves to bump price if you take their word for it), and that's without even mentioning the whole concept of distributed AI training. It's going to be so inefficient and potentially so expensive that for any potential customer it will definitely be cheaper and faster to rent whatever next DGX Jensen Huang will announce tomorrow.
The only "potential" use case is simply baking a bunch of pretrained models to sell them after the fact, but you need to find buyers before justifying that ridiculous $680M market cap.
The "founder" is also bonkers. Claims he invented or participated in nearly every major crypto project (including him being Satoshi Nakamoto in the flesh).
On the bright side:
1) It's mineable on GPUs too (on windows via WSL) with better "performance" (whatever that means in this context), so the CPU fever will end quite soon with many freshly bought chips going to the used market.
2) QUBIC is already on the downtrend. I doubt in 6mo anyone will even mention it
3) It's market cap is overblown already, mostly by the fact that most of trade volume(initially it was as much as 90%) is happening on SafeTrade - another barely known exchange that basically does only QUBIC trades for the past month and all of that volume is assuringly "backed by SafeCoin" (e.g. someone's old socks, bottlecaps and baseball cards).
Miners/Crypto are like roaches. Nobody like them running in the fresh food, but don't mind if they inhabit where they should be. Crypto should get only stuff that has served the purpose. Nobody would complain this way, and the miners/crypto will get their HW anyway. Why people should buy after them and be grateful for the spoiled stuff, that is not even eligible for RMA, and risk of getting the waste products of the deliberately harmful use.?
In other words, VRAM degrades much faster than CPUs.
Case in point: me, circa about 2 years ago. The only money I ever laundered was a $20.00 bill in my pants pocket and personal washing machine.