New MacBook Air was not suitable for cryptocurrency mining

The fall of the cryptocurrency market over the past weekdid not weaken the community's attention to digital assets, which are still profitable to mine even with a general shortage and high cost of video cards. Chinese enthusiasts began to actively use laptops with a GeForce RTX 3060 video card for mining the Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency. Users of the new MacBook Air on the M1 processor also had the opportunity to find out how profitable the business of “mining” Ethereum would be.

On GitHub, the owner of the MacBook Airhas published the test result for mining ETH cryptocurrency using an 8-core GPU in Apple's new SoC. It is noted that the graphics performance of the M1 can compete with the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, but at the same time, Apple computers use the slow LPDDR4X-4266 memory subsystem, which reduces the efficiency of mining.

As a result of the tests, it was found thatThe MacBook Air generates just 2 megahash per second (Mh / s), which translates into a profit of about $ 0.14 per day. The enthusiast also had to tweak the Ethereum code by whitelisting the Apple GPU, presenting it as an Intel GPU. The experiment was conducted on February 26, since then the price of Ethereum has dropped from $ 1530 to $ 1300, which made mining ETH on a MacBook Air even more dubious.