TL;DR: It’s possible to mine Ethereum on a M1 Mac GPU. Hashrate is about 2Mh/s.
I’ve had my M1 MacBook Air for a bit of time now, and I also recently started mining Ethereum. I can’t help asking myself: What’s Ethereum mining performance like on a M1 Mac?
The obvious thing to do first is to run the off-the-shelf ethminer, which gives the following error:
ethminer 0.19.0-alpha.0
Build: darwin/release/appleclang
Unrecognized platform Apple
Error: No usable mining devices foundNot good. Apparently Apple GPUs are not whitelisted in ethminer. That should be easy to fix. Relevant lines are in libethash-cl/CLMiner.cpp, and I added Apple GPUs to the whitelist, pretending it’s an Intel GPU.
Then boost won’t compile since it’s trying to compile with a -fcoalesce-templates argument, which doesn’t exist in recent clang versions. So I have to update boost to the latest version, and fix relevant asio code since ethminer was using deprecated asio APIs.
I also need to upgrade OpenSSL to the latest version to have it support darwin + arm64.
After getting everything to compile. Here’s the result:
ethminer 0.19.0-17+commit.ce52c740.dirty
Build: darwin/release/appleclang
i 19:51:36 Configured pool eth-us-east1.nanopool.org:9999
i 19:51:36 Selected pool eth-us-east1.nanopool.org:9999
i 19:51:36 Connection remotely closed by eth-us-east1.nanopool.org
i 19:51:36 Stratum mode : EthereumStratum/1.0.0 (NiceHash)
i 19:51:36 Established connection to eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
i 19:51:36 Spinning up miners...
cl 19:51:36 cl-0 Using Device : Intel GPU 0.0 Apple M1 OpenCL 1.2 Memory : 10.67 GB (11453251584 B)
i 19:51:36 Extranonce set to 778d
i 19:51:36 Extranonce set to 778d
i 19:51:36 Authorized worker [REDACTED]
i 19:51:36 Epoch : 397 Difficulty : 10.00 Gh
i 19:51:36 Job: c7fc5311… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
cl 19:51:38 cl-0 Generating split DAG + Light (total): 4.10 GB
i 19:51:38 Job: 40a57756… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
cl 19:51:38 cl-0 OpenCL kernel
cl 19:51:38 cl-0 Creating DAG buffer, size: 4.10 GB, free: 6.57 GB
cl 19:51:38 cl-0 Creating light cache buffer, size: 65.62 MB
cl 19:51:38 cl-0 Loading kernels
cl 19:51:38 cl-0 Creating buffer for header.
cl 19:51:38 cl-0 Creating mining buffer
m 19:51:41 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
i 19:51:42 Job: 077b62f6… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
m 19:51:46 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
i 19:51:46 Job: 2835839e… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
m 19:51:51 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
m 19:51:56 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
i 19:51:57 Job: 97f724e7… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
m 19:52:01 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
m 19:52:06 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
m 19:52:11 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
m 19:52:16 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
i 19:52:16 Job: 54df0504… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
m 19:52:21 0:00 A0 0.00 h - cl0 0.00
cl 19:52:22 cl-0 4.10 GB of DAG data generated in 44,060 ms.
m 19:52:26 0:00 A0 184.16 Kh - cl0 184.16
m 19:52:31 0:00 A0 1.96 Mh - cl0 1.96
m 19:52:36 0:01 A0 1.98 Mh - cl0 1.98
i 19:52:39 Job: d3b1da5e… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
m 19:52:41 0:01 A0 1.99 Mh - cl0 1.99
cl 19:52:43 cl-0 Job: 54df0504… Sol: 0x778d000001d14c71
i 19:52:43 **Accepted 150 ms. eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
m 19:52:46 0:01 A1 1.95 Mh - cl0 1.95
m 19:52:51 0:01 A1 2.07 Mh - cl0 2.07
m 19:52:56 0:01 A1 2.00 Mh - cl0 2.00
m 19:53:01 0:01 A1 1.98 Mh - cl0 1.98
i 19:53:01 Job: ccc2b97f… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
m 19:53:06 0:01 A1 1.97 Mh - cl0 1.97
i 19:53:07 Job: 23919d82… eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
^C i 19:53:10 main Got interrupt ...
i 19:53:10 main Disconnected from eth-us-east1.nanopool.org [144.217.14.139:9999]
i 19:53:10 main Shutting down miners...
i 19:53:16 main Terminated!Code is available at https://github.com/gyf304/ethminer-m1
Is it worth it?
Um. Not really. At current Ethereum prices (2021-02-26), it generates $0.14 of profit per day. It’s still a profit, but very miniscule.
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