[SOLVED] APU mining?

[kurdtnz]

I know pretty much next to nothing about bitcoin/et al mining but with the global shortages of GPU's, can you not mine using an APU? Just curious..

 

[Lutfij]

APU's would probably melt and ruin an entire desktop, also, if that were the case, people would've moved away from discrete GPU's and then ruined the APU and iGPU market as well.

 

[InvalidError]

can you not mine using an APU? Just curious..

The two most common crypto-currencies are BTC and ETH. BTC hasn't been cost-effective to mine on GPUs because ASIC miners are several times more power-efficient and make GPUs uneconomical. ETH is memory-intensive ("memory-hard") and would be bottlenecked by the IGP only having access to DDR4 memory over a 128bits bus. On top of that, you can only have one IGP per system, which means a huge power-efficiency penalty if you wanted to make a mining farm out of those. Since power and cooling are major costs to crypto-mining, power-efficiency is critical for breaking even.

In short, nobody mines on IGP because it makes no economic sense - costs more to run than you are likely to earn.