Today we have some exciting results to share. The AMD EPYC 7601 dual processor system we have in the lab has set a world record for dual socket Monero mining, by an enormous margin. While we are not going to call this an official number since it is using pre-production firmware and we did essentially zero optimization, the performance is stellar.

Wait, Why Monero Mining?

At STH, we pioneered using off-peak processing capacity to offset operational costs. Our Docker-based mining images are deployed on large swarms. The case is simple, utilize wasted resources to offset data center operational costs. To this end, our most popular public and free Docker Monero mining image has over 100,000 pulls on Docker Hub (despite the fact we recommend using many of our others.)

Monero is one of the few cryptocurrencies that is both large (top 10 cryptocurrency market cap) and can be efficiently mined on general purpose x86 CPUs. As such we have started helping others to push Monero mining on their servers to utilize off-peak data center capacity to mine Monero.

Over the last few months, we have seen this pushed over 10’s of thousands of servers in data centers. We have also done pieces on mining efficiency both using Intel Xeon CPUs as well as AMD Ryzen CPUs.

Setting a New 2P World Record Using AMD EPYC 7601 with Monero

Even using pre-production firmware where we have been asked not to provide formal benchmarks, we wanted to show Monero mining performance as it is significantly better than anything we have seen in two sockets previously. Here is the video:

For those who cannot watch, this is 3.5KH/s performance using 100% of resources. Breakeven even on expensive Northern California data center power occurs around 40% of time spent Monero mining. This is transformational as it can change the ROI of colocation versus cloud operations if the cost of housing the server can be offset using 40% downtime roughly equivalent to nights and weekends.