GPU Mining in Iron Age Testnet

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It appears Quai will be using the Blake3 hashing algorithm in the Iron Age Testnet. Is it possible to mine Blake3 with a GPU, or is it CPU bound? Does anyone have any details or insight on configuring a GPU to mine a new hashing algorithm (or has anyone already done it for Blake3)?

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Blake3 is “ASIC friendly”, meaning, someone could build a very efficient Blake3 ASIC if there was economic incentive to do so. I’m not aware of any Blake3 ASICs today though.

I know GPU Blake3 mining software exists, but I haven’t personally used it. I would be very interested in a working GPU miner, if anyone has one.

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Listen, this is very interesting, I would like to try using a GPU with my friend during the Iron Age, because he was mining Ethereum and didn’t have time to sell the equipment in time, haha, we will have a wonderful moment to try to experience this. As far as I understand, no one can say for sure whether it is more efficient to use the GPU in the upcoming stage, is it so?

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I believe that it will be more efficient to use a GPU than a CPU if we are able to find or optimize a GPU miner.

After some light digging, I discovered a “Vulkan Implementation” of Blake3 that does allow for GPU hashing, but shows no improvements over even a single-core CPU. Seems that an optimized GPU miner doesn’t yet exist.

“Since the performance results weren’t satisfactory, I don’t think this code should be merged as is, but it could be useful as a reference, or perhaps someone more experienced with GPU programming could fix it to be faster.”
-Vulkan implementation of b3sum by cesarb · Pull Request #80 · BLAKE3-team/BLAKE3 · GitHub

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Thank you for the information, I will need to read and figure it out, as well as turn to people who understand this more than me or professionals in general, because if we can optimize it, then we may be the first to be able to test it, why not. I am sure that it will be useful to absolutely everyone.

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We haven’t updated this post in a while, but within the last few months we’ve implemented ProgPow instead of Blake3’s hashing algorithm to become more resilient in terms of ASIC resistance. We’ll drop a new discussion post soon, but for now here’s there link to the Docs and a further delineation on our implementation of ProgPow: Miner Overview - Quai Network