XMRig is a high performance RandomX, CryptoNight and Argon2 CPU/GPU miner. A new version was released on Feb 1 2020, version 5.5.2 that features changes to the Random X implementation. User have been reporting a small increase in hashrate, so I wanted to check it out myself. The release notes for this version detail the changes that were made:
- Removed unnecessary code from RandomX JIT compiler.
- Optimized CFROUND instruction for RandomX.
- Optimizations for AMD Bulldozer.
- Added support for BMI2 instructions.
- Fixed thread affinity.
It's those first two that are likely responsible for the performance improvement people are seeing. On my main rig which I use to mine Monero, a Dell server with an Intel Xeon E5-2470 CPU, I've gone from a consistent average of 5510 h/s to 5524 h/s. Not huge, but for a simple software update, it's definitely worth it. Makes mining the tiniest bit more profitable. If you have a large amount of nodes, it could represent a significant increase at scale.
Another update release yesterday (5.5.3) includes a bugfix that was introduced by the last update, but shows no performance boost (which is expected as it didn't change anything related).
Hopefully we'll continue to see performance improvements as the XMRig developers get more experience with the new(ish) RandomX PoW.
You can find the latest update on the XMRig Github page.
