Anyone who was in the market for a GPU from 2020 to 2022 will remember the ridiculous prices caused by demand from miners. Among other pandemic-related reasons, GPUs have been particularly powerful in Ethereum mining, leading to a shortage of graphics cards. Fortunately, that ended in September 2022, but now that we're in 2024, are we seeing a new mining crisis? This is in the form of CPUs, specifically, the AMD Ryzen range.
Analysis by Wccftech looks at the mining profitability of several Proof of Work (PoW) coins that perform best on central processing units (CPUs). Mining profitability has surged on the back of new all-time highs in Bitcoin. This tends to have a trickle-down effect on the altcoin market. Even if some of these coins are garbage, there is money to be made, and that means demand for PCs is on the rise.
At the time of writing, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is out of stock at Newegg, and has a list price of $741 – higher than its launch price of $699. It's also higher than the current price of $592 for the 7950X3D. You wouldn't expect supply-side issues more than a year after the 7950X's launch, so the demand-side factor is clearly at play. Mining appears to be the culprit.
RandomX is the algorithm used by Monero and many other PoW currencies. A look at the XMRig benchmarks shows that the list is dominated by high-core-count AMD chips. If one scrolls down to find the mainstream CPUs, the 7950X is in 118th place with a benchmark score of 26,783. Intel Core i9 14900K – With far fewer entries, it ranks 211th with a score of 16,278.
There are CPU mining algorithms that thrive on using large amounts of L3 cache, while others take advantage of AVX instructions. Add to that attractive power efficiency, and you've pretty much nailed down the key 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.
Even if we encounter a bunch of miners snapping up CPUs, gamers will at least still be able to buy the cheaper Zen 4 chips, but can we say the same about AMD's upcoming Zen 5 models? If AVX-512 is widely adopted, the mining performance of AMD chips will move forward since Intel's competitors do not support AVX-512.
There is even speculation that AMD may launch a so-called Zen 5 versions have low hash rate, which is reminiscent of Nvidia's LHR graphics cards during the height of the mining boom. I'm less inclined to think AMD will go that route though.
If Bitcoin continues to rise, and money continues to flow into the cryptocurrency market, the profitability of cryptocurrency mining will increase. This isn't good news for those of you looking to purchase a high-core Zen 5 CPU in the coming months. Let's see how things go.
