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APU Mining?

Vagabond

New member
I recently built my first mining rig, and for the processor I went with the AMD A10 7850K APU (8 GPU cores). I also bought 3 MSI 270x cards (they were on sale for the same price as the 270's) that I haven't installed yet. Before I started mining with the actual video cards, I wanted to try to see what I could get out of the APU. So far my results are not impressive.

I'm running Kubuntu 14.04, I've installed the AMD Catalyst 14.501 drivers, then I downloaded and compiled the sgiminer 5.0.1 from github sgminer-dev/sgminer.

$ fglrxinfo
display: :0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: AMD Radeon(TM) R7 Graphics
OpenGL version string: 4.4.13283 Compatibility Profile Context 14.501.1003​

I've gotten sgminer connected successfully to the darkcointalk mining pool. The problem as I see it though is that I'm getting ~80Kh/s, which seems to me to be remarkably low for 8 GPU cores.

sgminer 5.0.1-16-g387b - Started: [2014-12-17 21:55:58] - [0 days 12:25:33]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(5s):79.28K (avg):83.31Kh/s | A:1 R:0 HW:0 WU:0.001/m
ST: 1 SS: 0 NB: 289 LW: 40912 GF: 10 RF: 0
Connected to mining {dot...this sneaky url thing is getting annoying} darkcointalk (stratum) diff 0.004 as user username.1
Block: 38ce8c41... Diff:4.38K Started: [10:20:47] Best share: 0.707
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[P]ool management [G]PU management S]ettings [D]isplay options [Q]uit
GPU 0: 1.0C | 79.70K 83.32Kh/s | R: 0.0% HW:0 WU:0.001/m I: 8​

My sgminer execution looks like:

$ GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100 GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1 ./sgminer --kernel darkcoin -o {removed} -u username.1 -p password -g 2 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 25​

I've been going through and playing with different sgminer parameters, but so far the tweaks that I've done has not led to any increase in hashrate. I'm just about ready to install these video cards and try to get some real hashrates going, but I figured before I jumped into that I'd see if anyone on here has had any luck with mining with an APU yet? Is there something I'm missing in the sgminer parameters or config that I need to look at?

Thank you all for this community, I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have without your comments and guides.
 
I don't think you're going to get much better than 80Kh/s with an onboard gpu, but you could try to up the intensity - by default its set to 10 or 11 iirc - add "-I 18" to the end of your script. You could also try to up the thread concurrency - I have no idea what your APU can push, but I'd try out 256, then increase in increments of 128 until it falls over.
 
I will try out increasing the threadcount and intensity, thank you for the ideas.

I'm having a hard time swallowing these hashrates, since my first attempt at drk mining was with a virtual machine that I allocated 2 cpu's to and used cgminer to get above 200Kh/s. Some of the reading that I've done has indicated that the mining software itself might not know how to interact correctly with the 8 gpu cores on this... the word CAL is in my memory but I don't recall where I read that late last night or what it means. The idea that sgminer doesn't know how to interact correctly with my gpu cores makes sense to me since this this APU hasn't been on the market for that long, about a year.

Something that might explain the hashrate decline I'm seeing from APU mining vs CPU mining could be as simple as the clockspeed between each of them, where the CPU clock speed I was using on my VM was 3.6GHz and the gpu cores on this APU I believe are clocked at 720MHz...but then when I look up clockspeeds for real video cards, they don't seem that much higher than my APU gpu core clock speeds.
 
For GPU,try xintensity for 5% extra at maybe 268.
Your kernel should be 'darkcoin-mod' or 'x11mod' not 'darkcoin' as its way slower being the first unoptimized kernel.
For latest optimized kernel say a big thanks to Wolf0 for a 40% speed up or more, you can paste in his bin files and rename them to original (make sure work size is 64) else it will create another.
http://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/2o1yoz/rewritten_x11_binaries/
Think you need the Pitcairn chipset .bin for r9 270x.
You could copy and paste x11mod kernel from somewhere and try that as well if you want to experiment (I only find its better on older cards like 6950's)
I get nearly all my sgminer files from nicehash.com btw, its safer as no virus's (but I check anyway)
https://www.nicehash.com/?p=software
 
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=8877
''more slow than the cpu itself?
Actually, yes. The CPU has as a quad core, 4 OpenCL compute units. The APU has only got 2.

As a comparison, my Radeon HD7870 GPU has 20 OpenCL compute units. The GTX660 that Rebirther points out will have between 15 and 21, depending on which version one has.

uhm... i see. :(

so, more or less, is about 50% slower than the cpu... ''
 
You guys are rocking on the recommendations. So far I've tweaked the intensity, thread-count and kernel and I'm now pushing 600Kh/s.

For now I'm going to stay away from precompiled binaries, I'm still working to establish a baseline for what I can do with a reasonably 'vanilla' setup before I start swapping out binaries (I will do this at some point and appreciate the urls).
 
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