AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 Hashrates Calculated

Redditor /u/optimiz3 did the math and did some number crunching calculating the hashrates of AMD‘s latest Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. Rumours have been popping up, touting the card’s effectiveness as an Ethereum mining card while some are debunking it. The redditor optimiz3 claims that he is a professional mining software developer so he has some first hand experience with seeing how effective certain cards are.

Ethereum uses Ethash as its proof-of-work which is very memory bandwidth bound. AMD’s Radeon RX Vega uses HBM2 memory which provides significant bandwidth over GDDR5 because of their design. Taking the fact that a single Ethash requires 8KB of memory bandwidth, a single MH requires around 7.8GB of memory bandwidth. This is calculated by multiplying 1,000,000 by 8KB and dividing it by 1048576. Applying this to Vega 56, it converts to 409.6GB/s divided by 7.8GB giving a hash rate of 52.5 MH/s. For the RX Vega 64, it is 483.8GB/s divided by 7.8GB which results in approximately 63.4 MH/s.

Should I Start Panicking?

This is a lot lower than the 70 to 100 MH/s rumour which was floated earlier. However, this is still within the desirable range for some miners. This is because it is a linear increase from the RX 570 and RX 580. Power consumption itself is not a big issue since the hash performance is memory bound. This means the GPU can be downvolted and downclocked. Plus, the return makes it worth the while for many professional miners.