Repurposed PS5 APUs for cryptomining
ASRock’s mining resolution out for grabs on eBay.
AMD BC-250 Mining card was a real Frankenstein of a card. Not solely it options one of many form Sony PlayStation 5 APU, it was designed for the least anticipated workloads for this APU: cryptomining. The final two years have been loopy sufficient for some corporations to even contemplate doing this in scale, which they did. However now, with the crypto craze over, these options are now not worthwhile to make use of.
ASRock’s system, which was listed for round $15K when it got here out, featured twelve BC-250 playing cards and in a full mining chassis. These playing cards are geared up with Ariel/Oberon processors, which mix Zen2 and RDNA2 graphics. These APU/SoCs had been utilized by PlayStation 5 gaming consoles. On this case, nevertheless, these are usually not absolutely practical chips, however the leftovers with partially disabled graphics which had been additionally used for the AMD 4700S desktop kit.
Upon its launch, the system was anticipated to ship a hash fee of as much as 610 MH/s in each ETHASH and ETC, due to its configuration. Every card options 16GB of GDDR6 reminiscence, a passive cooler and unusual interfaces for a mining card comparable to USB or Ethernet.
Nonetheless, the crypto-economic panorama has modified considerably since its introduction final 12 months. Initially providing a revenue of round $2 per day for every GPU, the present situation paints a unique image, with earnings dropping to simply $0.2 per day. Consequently, the system has turn into financially impractical for utilization.
The eBay provide reveals $500 value for one card, which is hardly a very good deal contemplating you’ll be able to simply purchase a working PlayStation 5 with a completely operational SoC for a similar value. However perhaps there some is a few collector’s worth right here, or materials for an fascinating tech assessment.
Supply: eBay through KOMACHI_ENSAKA