Mining Litecoins: ZedBoard or Raspberry Pi?
Keywords:Bitcoins? crypto currencies? Zynq? ZedBoard? Raspberry Pi?
Now, I must admit straight off that using only the CPU on both of these systems (as opposed to offloading some of the processing to programmable FPGA fabric) will take a considerably long time to generate a Litecoin. Since I had both boards available, however, I thought it would be a fun little experiment to determine their hash rates.
In order to provide the best comparison, I used the same mining programme, cpuminer, on both the Zynq and the Rapsberry PI. I also ran them both from the command-line (as opposed to a GUI) so as to ensure optimal performance.
In the case of the Zynq, I installed Xillinux on a SD card for the ZedBoard before installing the mining programme. By comparison, the Raspberry Pi already came with a Linux distribution, so all I had to do was install the mining programme.
Both the Raspberry Pi and the Zynq contain ARM processorsthe ARM11 in the case of the Raspberry Pi and dual Cortex-A9 processors in the case of the Zynq. The ARM11 is capable of 1.2 DMIPS/MHz, whichoperating at 700MHz, as the Pi doesgives 840 DMIPS. Meanwhile, the Cortex-A9 is capable of 2.5 DMIPS/MHz. Since the Zynq on my ZedBoad is running at 666MHz, this means that each processor on the Zynq provides a maximum of 1,665 DMIPS (nearly double that of the Pi for each of the Zynq's processors).
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Figure 1: The Zynq following commencement of Litecoin mining operations. |
Once the mining program has been launched on the ZedBoard, the Zynq implementation of Xilinux uses the OLED display on the ZedBoard to show the loading on the processors and SD card. During the mining operation, the load on the SD card is low, but the processors are heavily loaded.
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Figure 2: CPU Loading on the Zynq on the ZedBoard. |
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