Anyone who was in the GPU market between 2020 and 2022 will remember the ridiculous prices driven by demand from miners. Among other reasons related to the pandemic, GPUs were particularly strong in Ethereum mining, which led to a shortage of graphics cards. Thankfully that ended in September 2022, but as we enter 2024, we are witnessing a new mining crunch.

An analysis by Wccftech looks at the mining profitability of several proof-of-work (PoW) coins that perform best on CPUs. Mining profitability has skyrocketed against the backdrop of bitcoin's all-time highs. This tends to spill over into the altcoin market. Even if some of these coins are basically garbage, there is money to be made, which means there is a growing demand for PC hardware. [As of this writing, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is out of stock at Newegg, with a list price of $741, higher than the $699 it cost at launch. It is also higher than the 7950X3D's current price of $592. Clearly demand-side factors are at work, as it is hard to imagine any supply-side issues more than a year after the 7950X's launch. And mining seems to be the cause.

RandomX is the algorithm used in Monero and several other PoW coins, and the XMRig benchmarks show that AMD chips with the highest number of cores dominate. Scrolling down to find mainstream CPUs, the 7950X is in 118th place with a benchmark result of 26,783. The Intel Core i9 14900K, admittedly with far fewer entries, drops back to 211th place with a result of 16,278.

While some CPU mining algorithms thrive on large L3 caches, others benefit from AVX instructions. Add to that power efficiency, which is also attractive to miners, and you've pretty much covered the main strengths of AMD's Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. A little-known crypto called Qubic, which is good for mining, can generate up to $3 a day.

If AVX-512 becomes widely adopted, the mining performance of AMD's chips will advance even further, given that Intel's challengers do not support AVX-512.

There is even speculation that AMD may release a so-called low hash rate Zen 5 version. This is reminiscent of Nvidia's LHR graphics cards at the height of the mining boom. However, I am not too inclined to believe that AMD will go down that path.

If Bitcoin continues to rise and money continues to flow into the crypto market, the profitability of mining shitty and not-so-shitty coins will only increase. Not good news for those looking to buy a Zen 5 CPU with more cores in the next few months. Let's see what the future holds.