Bitcoin miners are resorting to different ways to increase their income by changing the ASIC firmware. The most popular are overclocking and ASIC autotuning. Which of these methods is more profitable and efficient?
Interest in the cryptocurrency industry is growing every year. Despite the Bitcoin halving that took place in May and the decrease in the miner’s reward to 6.25 BTC, cryptocurrency mining remains a profitable business.
However, increasing competition and economic uncertainty in global markets lead to the fact that miners have to look for ways to increase their income. Basically, miners have two ways to achieve this goal: buying new hardware or improving the performance of existing devices.
Buying new equipment is the most risky of the two, as it usually involves a lot of upfront costs. The return on investment can take many months or even years, depending on the bitcoin rate. At the same time, the improvement of existing devices is a fairly popular solution among miners.
However, overclocking is not the only way to increase ASIC hashrate. An equally effective way to increase miners’ income is firmware auto-tuning.
ASIC overclocking – more hashrate, lower efficiency
Around the beginning of 2018, miners began experimenting with overclocking ASICs to increase revenue. This method changes the way the ASICs work so that they consume more power, hash at higher frequencies, and perform better than the default settings. For example, the Antminer S9, which has a typical performance of 13.5 TH / s at 1200 W consumption, can be overclocked to 16 Tx / s at 1600 W.
Due to the fact that the complexity of Bitcoin grows in the long term, despite periodic drops, and more ASICs are connected to the network, the income of a single device usually decreases significantly over time.
![]("https://bits.media/upload/medialibrary/9cf/181120_braiins_oc_vs_autotuning_1.png</p)
The hash cost ($ / Tx hash rate) has steadily declined over time as the difficulty increased.
Therefore, miners strive to get the most out of their devices as soon as possible, before their income drops due to the increasing complexity. By overclocking, ASIC efficiency is increased, which allows miners to increase their income in the short term. However, potential improvements to the firmware are not limited to this method alone.
Auto-tuning – hashrate more, higher efficiency
A lesser known tool for improving ASIC performance is called autotuning. Both overclocking and autotuning involve changing the frequencies on the hash cards, resulting in better ASIC performance. The difference between overclocking and auto-tuning lies in the intelligence and the level of complexity of the settings.
https://bits.media/upload/medialibrary/855/181120_braiins_oc_vs_autotuning_2.png
Review in the Telegram Braiins OS group from the miner, which increased the performance to 17.5 Tx / s on two Antminer S9.
Overclocking is a pretty tough setting, which means simply increasing the hash card frequency to increase the device hash rate. Auto-tuning, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Instead of increasing the frequency of the entire hash board, the firmware can change the frequency for each chip.
In other words, autotuning finds the optimal frequency for each individual chip by assigning higher frequencies to higher quality microcircuits or lower frequencies to lower quality microcircuits.
The end result of autotuning is an increase in W / Th efficiency at whatever power setting the miner chooses. When combined with overclocking, autotuning can provide an even higher hash rate or a similar increase in hash rate while reducing power consumption.
For example, the Antminer S9, which typically has a performance of 16 Tx / s with a consumption of 1,600 W after overclocking, can reach 17.5 Tx / s with a consumption of 1,600 W with autotuning for each chip.
https://bits.media/upload/medialibrary/fc7/181120_braiins_oc_vs_autotuning_3.png
Review in the Telegram Braiins OS group from the miner
Experienced miners understand how rapidly the industry is developing. Although a relatively small number of miners are still using autotuning, this tool is likely to become standard practice in the next two years.
Autotuning is especially useful for miners outside of China who have to wait longer and pay higher prices for next-generation mining hardware. The ASIC autotuning firmware is being developed by Braiins, the operator of the world’s oldest mining pool, Slush Pool.
Braiins Business Development Director Edward Evenson recently revealed in a podcast that Braiins OS + firmware is competitive in cost and performance, but is also unique in other key areas. The company has a long history of being in the open source industry under the General Public License (GPL) and has a solid reputation in cryptocurrency mining, as well as seven years of experience in this area.
