If you underclock an S9 the efficiency gain can be more than 20% in some cases. When an ASIC is close to break-even, such as the majority of S9s it makes sense to underclock them to make them more profitable. By underclocking and chip tuning miners can squeeze out extra efficiency of their miners. Underclocking on the other hand is primarily focused on increasing profit margins (vs driving top-line revenue). You may still get efficiency gains depending on the firmware but definitely not as much as underclocking. Generally if a miner has a fixed electricity costs they want to overlock them, especially if they have cheap energy to get the maximum hashrate as possible (Th/s). Two of the most popular features of custom firmware is the ability to overclock and underclock an ASIC.īoth options are good depending on the situation of the miner. This is especially true in China, where there is a low penetration of custom firmware. Historically miners have distrusted custom firmware given that there were few credible companies offering it with an SLA that had recourse in the case something went wrong. We estimate that less than 10EH (8% of the network) is using custom firmware from players like Braiins OS+, Vnish, ASICSeer & MSK.
In 2020 there was some drama in the firmware industry as some miners threatened some ASIC manufacturers and firmware developers with GPL violations for using CGMiner’s open-source code for-profit.Īs of Aug-2020 there hasn’t been a large penetration of custom firmware.
I recommend reading Braiin’s blog post for more back story on their firmware. This firmware provided a transparent alternative to the factory firmware. At this time they also verified overt AsicBoost on Antminer S9s in 2018, enabling miners to improve their efficiency by 13%. In 2018, Braiins launched Braiins OS as a fully open-source firmware written from scratch in the Rust language, the first alternative to CGMiner based products. Companies like Vnish and ASICseer built on top of it to create new custom firmware for ASICs. Since that point, CGMiner has become outdated as not a lot of new development has been made on it. The open-source code was taken by the ASIC manufacturers and modified to develop their own firmware. CGMiner quickly became the industry standard in mining. In 2011, CK announced the launch of CGMiner, an open-source ASIC miner written in C.