Thought some of you may be interested in this - will capture the information and how to the crypto currency miner that I am building based on VIM2 boards.
First part - case design - https://youtu.be/AbHATe59z_c
Case has arrived and populated with switches, power supplies, fans, dust covers etc. Everything fits!! Waiting on backplane PCBs and VIM2’s to arrive then can get cabling up!
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Looking forward for the first miner based on VIM2, rock up!
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Looking forward to having it running!
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Backplane PCBs done and test mounted two vim2’s - all looks good! Now it’s down to FedEx to get the rest of my boards here!
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Are you able to also utilize the Mali GPU or is all done on the A53 CPU cores?
this is only using the CPU cores, as the target algorithm isn’t efficiently executable on a GPU core (memory hard with lots of random accesses over several hundreds of megabytes)
also, the maximum of 3GB DDR on the S912 gives barely enough RAM to use the 8 CPU cores to full capacity (it requires ~385MB per thread with full 3-issue optimization, ~128MB with slower single issue threads)
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It is possible but as @g4b42 says - current setup uses all available ram. It has been done thou but don’t want to link another OEM from here. Tends to slow the CPU mining down without enough benefit from the GPU side to outweigh it in the algos I’ve tested (ram aside). Plus it sucks more power
Can I ask which algos you tested?
On other boards (Tinkerboard, Odroid HC1), I’ve found that GPU mining is much more cost effective than CPU for Lyra2rev2 and Skein, with minimal impact on the CPU speed (maybe a 5-10% frequency reduction due to SoC overheating, depending on the cooling efficiency).
Primarily verium which is script with an n size of 1024 or scrypt squared as they like to call it. Bit mostly anything that is CPU only. Lyra2z, skein etc have GPU miners so will be much more efficient on the GPU than on the cpu. Wouldn’t try stuff like that on these boards unless you get in early before the diff goes up too much. The extra heat, power and specifically memory means when mining verium the GPU part isn’t useful. Not to say it won’t be on other coins though
Yes, definitely not worth if you want to do “serious” mining. But it is interesting in order to compare performance/consumption ratio, and also the performance of different mali GPU’s. For example, I found out that Mali T6xx and Mali T7xx have the same performance per core at the same frequency. I have not made the test in the VIM2’s T8xx yet, but I want to do it as soon as I can get OpenCL to work in Linux.
Well, I’m getting a bit off-topic. Great job, and happy cost-effective mining!
Heatsinks all mounted - my thumb now has heatsink shaped dents in it 
Also have a few spare antennas if anyone needs them lol!
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Very impressive. Do you have the cases as well or could you do an OEM deal without cases?
I don’t Crypto mine, but I have enjoyed watching your progress.
Hope your thumb recovers.
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I don’t have cases I just bought the bare boards from khadas - sure @Gouwa can sort you out if you want to do the same. I can put together kits of the rest of the parts including the rack mount case if you want them
Thanks! I mostly build these for the challenge of building and seems others like to see progress do always try and document it! Hopefully will be able to get it sorted this weekend as actually have some time!
