Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is making sure its consumers get the best out of their central processing units (CPUs), as the company suggests people utilize their Threadripper processors for mining cryptocurrency.
Doing so will apparently help them save quite a good amount of money on upgrades according to AMD. With this in mind, AMD also wants to dispel assumptions that cryptocurrencies can only be mined using graphics processing units (GPUs) instead of CPUs since this is actually a more affordable option.
AMD also thinks that using Threadripper CPUs as an alternative or substitute for GPUs in cryptocurrency mining should address or at least alleviate the shortage in supply of GPUs due to bulk purchasing of miners. It is worth noting that AMD's own brand of GPUs, the Radeon, has been hit the hardest in terms of supply shortage because their graphics cards are better at mining, leading to inflated prices.
AMD's technical marketing manager, Damien Triolet, also weighed in on the matter saying, "The reason why crypto mining is a good fit for GPUs is that they have a lot of compute power they can run thousands of threads in parallel, and they have huge memory bandwidth to feed all that. So, running crypto mining on the GPU is a very good fit, and because it's such a good fit on a GPU it seems unnatural that it would also be a good fit on the CPU because their profiles are so different."
Tiolet is spearheading a campaign that aims to prove AMD's Threadripper CPUs are also capable of mining most of the cryptocurrencies. He explains that Threadripper's large caches are one of the qualities that make it a competitive choice for cryptocurrency mining. This could make it potentially run 16 mining threads all at once, churning out profitable results for miners.
Though this still depends on the type of cryptocurrency being mined since some of them still require the raw compute power of GPUs like Ethereum. On the other hand, the cost of a Threadripper CPU ranges from $915 to as low as $722, but if used for mining a specific cryptocurrency like Monero, the CPU can basically pay for itself.
