Apple M1 is capable of mining Ethereum. Mining Ethereum has become a very lucrative business, especially after the huge boom that this cryptocurrency has experienced, a growth that, as many of our readers will know, has been affected by the “boom” of Bitcoin. Yes, both cryptocurrencies are closer than it seems, so much so that when one goes up, so does the other, and vice versa.
To mine Ethereum we do not need anything special, although to get a good result it is essential to resort to graphics cards that can achieve a good rate of MH/s while maintaining, also, a relatively low power consumption. The selling price also has an influence, since the lower the cost of the equipment to mine Ethereum, the sooner we will amortize it, and the sooner we will start to obtain net profits.
It is said that, with the arrival of Ethereum 2.0, it will be impossible to mine Ethereum using graphics cards, something that, if confirmed, could generate an “avalanche” of graphics cards to the second-hand market, and that would end up benefiting PC gamers, since crypto mining with graphics cards has been, without a doubt, the big culprit that right now it is impossible to buy a graphics card without having to pay crazy prices.
Apple M1 SoC’s GPU can mine Ethereum, but it is not cost-effective
As we anticipated in the title of the article, the Apple M1 SoC can mine Ethereum, but it is not possible to use it directly, as it is not on the “ethminer” whitelist. The software engineer Yifan Gu was able to overcome that limitation using a process that he explains in detail in his official blog, and the truth is that the results are very clear: it is not worth it.
The GPU of the Apple M1 SoC, which has a power of 2.6 TFLOPs in FP32, was only able to achieve a performance of 2 MH/s. According to his tests, this would generate an approximate return of 14 cents on the dollar, a figure from which the wear and tear of running his MacBook Air all day would have to be deducted. Every month, the net profit, excluding such wear and tear, would be $4.34, and $52.08 on an annual basis.
For comparison purposes, we seem to recall that the 6GB NVIDIA GTX 1060 was capable of between 17 and 23 MH/s, so as we can see, the difference is so great that the Apple M1 SoC’s GPU is not even capable of reaching the level of a graphics card from almost five years ago.
