I have benn dealing with crypto currencies for the last few days(especially on Raspberry Pis) and now I'm wondering how a Raspberry can have such a bad hashrate(1-20H/s)... Mining is just doing SHA/CryptoNight hashing(and submitting them)...

If I use python to generate a SHA hash it doesn't take me one second to generate 20 hashes.. It's ways faster....

So what is the RPi doing when not hashing?


You cannot compare hash-rates for SHA and CryptoNight as they have different characteristics. CryptoNight requires 2MB of processor cache per thread and if you don't have that, the hashing will be significantly slower than other algorithms.

Raspberry Pi 3 to my recollection only has 512KB L2 cache so it's always going to be slow hashing CryptoNight compared to hashing on most desktops.

  • What's about sha? How much cashe does it need? – Fipsi Jun 26 '18 at 4:56
  • 2
    It doesn't need cache. That's a key difference. CryptoNight is designed to be memory hard. – jtgrassie Jun 26 '18 at 11:41

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