Ethereum mining has made its way back from popularity with the recent Cryptocurrency boom. The latest Nvidia RTX 30 series graphics cards are being gobbled up by miners resulting to a GPU drought for gamers. These cards are being targeted by Ethereum miners thanks to the GDDR6X memory’s bandwidth which is crucial factor for the hashrate of the KECCAK-256 hashing algorithm. As miners try to stock up on other options, some have stumbled upon using Apple’s latest M1 silicon to mine Ethereum.
Yifan Gu, a software engineer working for Zensors, has found a way to use the GPU of the Apple M1 silicon to mine Ethereum. Gu was able to port the Ethminer utility to Apple’s macOS thus granting the ability for the M1 GPU to mine coins. However, the results were not as high compared to dedicated graphics cards as the Apple M1 GPU generated only 2MH/s hashrate.