Monero has declared war on ASICs, but their bullets bounce harmlessly off of XTend. That is what XTend Online has learned from Monero’s planned PoW algorithm change on Oct. 18. XTend Online’s Hyperminers have proven totally resistant to the change. The developers for Monero have promised semi annual forks of their PoW algorithm in order to thwart the move toward ASIC mining that has become commonplace in the industry. With the new release only days away, and with this being the first actual PoW change in accordance with Monero’s new policy, It has given XTend an unprecedented opportunity to verify how the Hyperminer Advanced Mining Acceleration Platforms (AMAPs) will actually perform in the field.

The Cryptonight v7 algorithm had been previously implemented and characterized on the Hyperminer AMAP architecture by XTend’s engineers months ago during the Hyperminer design phase, so the upcoming fork to v8, codenamed “Berylium Bullet” by the group at Monero, is really the first chance to see exactly how adaptable the revolutionary new architecture truly is. Since the details of how the PoW algorithm would be tweaked were unknown when the Hyperminer architecture was designed, the performance after the fork provides a useful insight on the flexibility of the radical, new programmable mining fabric.

The new Cryptonight variant, commonly called Cryptonight v8 or Cryptonight Monero v2, makes some small tweaks to the memory address calculations, but importantly adds a new manipulation during every round that requires performing an effectively 45bit floating point square root and an integer divide. After making the required modifications to the Cryptonight Monero algorithm on the Hypermesh engine, the engineering staff at XTend reported an anticipated hash rate change of only 0.125%. For all intents and purposes, the hash rate for Monero, whether mining with variant 1 or variant 2, remains at approximately 19Khash/sec for an HMP16 PCIe card, and expected performance of the industrial HM100 shoebox remains unchanged at 76.8Khash/sec. Compared with GPU cards that struggle to achieve even 1000 Hash/sec and most often provide only a few hundred on the algorithm, XTend Hyperminers are in a class of their own.

Hyperminer AMAPs are a radically new, programmable mining technology that promises to redefine the standard of digital mining. As fast an ASIC, more configurable than a GPU, and without all the price and inherent inefficiencies of FPGAs, AMAPs get both their performance and programmable nature through an extremely flexible Hypermesh fabric developed by XTend specifically for the digital mining industry. With an engineering team of Silicon Valley veterans that have produced some of the world’s original massively parallel supercomputing hardware and FPGA technologies, XTend was able to create an entirely new device from the transistor level up that is totally optimized to the types of problems digital miners need to solve. In development for more than a year already, Hyperminer AMAPs are expected to be available in 2019.

With regard to the excellent results obtained on the new Cryptonight variant, XTend Online CEO Chris Ziomkowski said “After a year’s worth of effort, it is just so satisfying to see such an unqualified success of the architecture. We have always knows this technology will redefine the industry, and watching the Cryptonight v8 results confirm all of our predictions has magnified our excitement over the future.”

To learn more about XTend Online’s Hyperminers, or to invest in this technology, please contact [email protected], or visit XTend’s website at http://www.xtend.online