How is equihash different from ethereum’s mining algorithm?
Both are based on memory hardness and memory bandwidth. Ethereum’s mining is basically all done on GPUs at this point.
So why would equihash expect anything different?
Edit:
Also, gpus are roughly 100 times more efficient than cpus for mining ethereum, at the same prices for hardware. So we should expect the same for ZCash. correct?
Update:
Ok I think the efficiency comes from the typical laptop’s bottleneck for ZCash mining to be the number of cores, rather than memory. So for a macbook pro-retina, you’d only have 2 cores, so you can’t even utilize all the RAM. Whereas on a GPU for a fourth of the price, you can get 32 cores with 5-10x memory bandwidth. So the multiplier might be something like 16 * 10 * price multiplier. Someone correct me if I’m wrong?
Update 2:
Does anyone have benchmark numbers for how long context switching takes for ethereum / zcash mining? And how often do context switches tend to happen, ect. That may prove or disprove the core bottleneck hypothesis.