When you consider the impact of cryptomining, you generally look at the graphics card market and start cussing miners. This is because CPUs lack the same bandwidth and level of parallel compute power as GPUs. However, that has started to change, to an extent, but CPUs are still far from feasible for cryptomining, primarily due to the higher power draw and low hash rates with mining algorithms. In a rather surprising test, a few users have shown that Intel’s 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S flagship might be the first mainstream CPU (somewhat) suitable for mining.
Update: It turns out that the below quoted hash rate is from Venus Hash rather than Ether hash. [Source]
In the above image, you can see the Core i9-11900K mining Ether at a rather impressive 27 MH/s. That’s roughly the same as a GeForce RTX 2060 or a Radeon RX 5500 XT which is a first for a consumer eight-core CPU. This is likely due to the inclusion of AVX512 (512b vector support) on the 11th Gen processors, along with the new Adaptive Boost technology which allows the Core i9-11900K to run all eight cores at nearly 5GHz.
As you can expect, this does come at a cost, namely a high power consumption of as much as 400W, roughly the same as a GeForce RTX 3080 which has a hash rate of close to 100 MH/s. You’ll also need an expensive AIO cooler to keep the CPU cool which will cost more than $100. So, there you have it. The CPU can miner Ether at a decent rate, but it’s still not quite viable.
