As a former ETH miner I learned the hard way that saving a few bucks on hardware may not be worth operational issues.
I had a miner running with Nividia cards and a miner running with AMD cards. One of them had massive maintenance demand and the other did not. I will not state which brand was better imho.
Currently I estimate that running miners and running gpu servers has similar operational requirements and finally at scale similar financial considerations.
So, whatever is cheapest to operate in terms of time expenditure, hw cost, energy use,… will be used the most.
P.s.: I ran the mining operation not to earn money but mainly out of curiosity. And it was a small scale business powered by a pv system and a attached heat pump.
I ran 150,000+ AMD cards for mining ETH. Once I fully automated all the vbios installs and individual card tuning, it ran beautifully. Took a lot of work to get there though!
Fact is that every single GPU chip is a snowflake. No two operate the same.
Have you ever written about this enterprise? This sounds super unique and I would be very interested in hearing about how it was run and how it turned out.
It was unique, not many people on the planet, that I know of, who've run as many GPUs as I have. Especially not working for a giant company with large teams of people. For the tech team, it was just me and one other guy. Everything had to be automated because there was no way we could survive otherwise.
I've put a bunch of comments here on HN about the stuff I can talk about.
what type of cards did you have? what did you do with them after PoS? How did you even buy so many cards? Sorry, like the other commenter I'm extremely curious
Primarily 470,480,570,580. We also ran a very large cluster of PS5 APU chips too.
Got the chips directly from AMD. Since these are 4-5 year old chips, they were not going to ever be used. It is more ROI efficient with ETH mining to use older cards than newer ones.
Had a couple OEM manufacture the cards specially for us with 8gb, heatsinks instead of fans (lower power usage) and no display ports (lower cost).
They will be recycled as there isn't much use for them now.
I had a miner running with Nividia cards and a miner running with AMD cards. One of them had massive maintenance demand and the other did not. I will not state which brand was better imho.
Currently I estimate that running miners and running gpu servers has similar operational requirements and finally at scale similar financial considerations.
So, whatever is cheapest to operate in terms of time expenditure, hw cost, energy use,… will be used the most.
P.s.: I ran the mining operation not to earn money but mainly out of curiosity. And it was a small scale business powered by a pv system and a attached heat pump.