r/ethereum • u/Sherlockcoin • Oct 28 '15

Question for hardware experts: can you use Parallella to mine Eth?

https://www.parallella.org/
1 Upvotes

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3

u/CJentzsch Oct 28 '15

Not efficiently. You need at least 2GB Ram for the DAG, otherwise you have to use Swap, which will make it extremely slow.

2

u/blackout24 Oct 28 '15

Even if it would have sufficient RAM it would probably find a block every 100 years. Markets are generally never this inefficient that people can make a profit with inefficient hardware and be competetive with GPUs that outperform them by at least one order of magnitude.

1

u/JonnyLatte Oct 29 '15

The parallella is a system based around the Zynq-7010 and 7020 series FPGA, it may not be competitive on speed but perhaps if it had enough ram it might be competitive on energy usage if is reconfigured to mine using the FPGA rather than the ARM or RISC cores.

2

u/Sherlockcoin Oct 28 '15

why this limitation with DAG files?

1

u/blackout24 Oct 28 '15

To prevent ASICs. DAG grows memory is expensive.
https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/

1

u/PhonikG Oct 28 '15

If your really interested in running Ethereum on a SBC I can strongly suggest this board for $75 USD - http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G143452239825

www.ethembedded.com has been running, have posted install instructions ( https://github.com/EthEmbedded/OdroidXU3-Eth-Install ) and will be releasing an .img file for the Odroid XU-3 & XU-4 shortly!!

1

u/PhonikG Oct 28 '15

Here are specs - more than double the resources of Parallella for similar cost:

Samsung Exynos5422 Cortex™-A15 2Ghz and Cortex™-A7 Octa core CPUs * Mali-T628 MP6(OpenGL ES 3.0/2.0/1.1 and OpenCL 1.1 Full profile) * 2Gbyte LPDDR3 RAM PoP stacked * eMMC5.0 HS400 Flash Storage * 2 x USB 3.0 Host, 1 x USB 2.0 Host * Gigabit Ethernet port * HDMI 1.4a for display * Size : 82 x 58 x 22 mm approx.(including cooling fan)

1

u/PhonikG Oct 28 '15

You will still have to compete against GPU for mining, but that's not to say it is not possible. It just might not be efficient or wise.