Jakarta – Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) raided a crypto mine in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, and confiscated hundreds of GPUs, dozens of processors, and…3,800 PS4s.
The choice of components to increase mining speed is now various. One of them is GPU, which although rare, but the supply is starting to improve. And of course the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) specifically for mining crypto-.
But crypto miners in Ukraine instead chose the 2013 console, whose GPU capabilities were only equivalent to the RX480 — PS4 Pro only –. In fact, even the faster RX580 is already fairly inefficient for mining Ethereum. So, what’s the point of mining using PS4?
His limited ability was ‘paid for’ by a very large amount, reaching 3800 units. Oh yes, the PS4 variant used in this mine is the PS4 Slim which was released in 2016, which is not faster than the original PS4 and definitely slower than the PS4 Pro.
This PS4 seems to have been chosen because Ethereum mining also relies on memory bandwidth, not just on computing capabilities. This is where the PS4 and PS4 Slim shine, because these consoles have a bandwidth of up to 176GB/s from the GDDR5 memory chip used.
Indeed, the Pro variant has more bandwidth (217.6GB/s) as well as the same type of chip for PC (256GB/s). But not far behind in terms of calculating TFLOPS which is often used as the basis for measuring console capabilities.
Then the thing that is also important to consider is the price of the PS4 and its availability. This console is sold at a relatively cheap price and a large supply, different from the choice of other components, which, although faster, are more expensive and in limited supply. []
Also Read: 4 Terms in Crypto Analysis
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