We know AMD's Threadripper is a monster, designed for extreme multitasking. It's not easy to max that sucker out. Throw 4K gaming, video encoding, 1080p Twitch streaming, rendering, and gameplay recording at it simultaneously and it barely breaks a sweat. And we also know it has 32MB of L3 cache, which AMD Technical Marketing Manager Damien Triolet tells me is part of its secret mining sauce. I'll divulge more of that conversation soon, and extensively test Threadripper in my own mining environment for some sharable hard numbers.
In the meantime, I wondered if Threadripper could earn you more profit with software like NiceHash than Nvidia's GTX 1080 can. (Note that NiceHash pays out in Bitcoin, which you can then transfer to an exchange like Coinbase for free, and then ultimately to your bank account).
When you mine with a CPU on NiceHash, you'll be throwing your hashing power at an algorithm called Cryptonight (the same one used to mine a crypto coin like Monero) because it was designed to cater to a CPU's strengths. I scoured various subreddits and Monerobenchmarks.info and determined that many users can reach a hashrate of at least 1300 H/s. If you plug in that hashrate under Cryptonight, enter an electricity cost of $0.10kW/h and input Threadripper's 180W TDP into the NiceHash profitability calculator at the time of this writing, you get a monthly profit of $99.79.
