this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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Not sure that's true. And mining on a CPU is even less efficient. Your hash rate will be way lower unless you've got a really high-end system with a really low latency bus and RAM. And if your hashrate is too low, it would take months for you to find a single block unless you're pooling with a bunch of others and splitting the profit. It's quite variable, but very, very few people can make profit on any popular coins. Too many people to compete with to find a block.
Oh and don't forget cooling cost. The fans in the computer, the fans in your house, and your air conditioner in your house need to disipate the heat and there's a lot more generated per clock cycle from a CPU than a GPU using comperably old technologies. If you live somewhere that you're producing more electricity with solar than you consume, then it's probably not a cold climate.
I thought Monero was designed to be mined on CPU.
Even if the algorithm will perform better on CPUs than other crypto algorithms, there's still the fact that the processor in a GPU is much less complex and so: many more tasks can run in parallel because they're all very similar, the bus is much shorter, bandwidth to memory is much higher, and memory is generally much higher performing. So overall, mining on a GPU will generally be more energy efficient than on a CPU. And of course crypto becomes harder and harder to mine as they grow, by design.
What I've read about mining Monero, specifically, is that CPU is so much better, no one uses GPU for it.
Right, but taxing a CPU, PC Bus, and PC memory takes more electricity than doing the same amount of "work" on a GPU with longer, more specialized pathways, allowing more work on a single cycle, but less flexibility on the type of work. So if it takes 1hr fully taxing a CPU, PC bus, etc, vs 1 hour fully taxing a GPU and its integrated memory and bus, the one using the GPU is going to take more electricity. Also, you can chain GPUs which can't be done the same with CPUs since GPUs all have their own discrete bus and memory on a single card. Problem became that GPU production couldn't keep up with demand so they became more expensive for the hardware, but overall, the cost of electricity vs value of the blocks combined with producing fewer blocks on a CPU once the chains reach a similar complexity as a competing cryptocurrency, means that overall you're more likely to make more profit from GPU based mining than CPU based mining.
It's a complex calculation to figure out and many people mine without realizing the money they're spending on electricity, home cooling, and parts wear is more than they're making on the crypyo.