Repurposed PS5 APUs for cryptomining
ASRock’s mining solution out for grabs on eBay.
AMD BC-250 Mining card was a true Frankenstein of a card. Not only it features one of the kind Sony PlayStation 5 APU, it was designed for the least expected workloads for this APU: cryptomining. The last two years have been crazy enough for some companies to even consider doing this in scale, which they did. But now, with the crypto craze over, those solutions are no longer profitable to use.
ASRock’s system, which was listed for around $15K when it came out, featured twelve BC-250 cards and in a full mining chassis. These cards are equipped with Ariel/Oberon processors, which combine Zen2 and RDNA2 graphics. These APU/SoCs were used by PlayStation 5 gaming consoles. In this case, however, these are not fully functional chips, but the leftovers with partially disabled graphics which were also used for the AMD 4700S desktop kit.
Upon its release, the system was expected to deliver a hash rate of up to 610 MH/s in both ETHASH and ETC, thanks to its configuration. Each card features 16GB of GDDR6 memory, a passive cooler and uncommon interfaces for a mining card such as USB or Ethernet.
However, the crypto-economic landscape has changed significantly since its introduction last year. Initially offering a profit of around $2 per day for each GPU, the current scenario paints a different picture, with profits dropping to just $0.2 per day. As a result, the system has become financially impractical for usage.
The eBay offer shows $500 price for one card, which is hardly a good deal considering you can just buy a working PlayStation 5 with a fully operational SoC for the same price. But maybe there some is some collector’s value here, or material for an interesting tech review.
Source: eBay via KOMACHI_ENSAKA