I recently heard about Monero (it’s a crypto currency like Bitcoin) and read up on it a bit. It’s fairly amenable CPU mining on recent machines, so I figured why not mine some? I’ve been curious to toy with these coins for a while, and I’ve been kicking myself for not buying some Bitcoin a year ago when it was ~$300.

Below is what I’ve got laying around to mine with. I’m using the xmr-stak-cpu miner with the thread count tuned for best performance on each CPU. The machines run Ubuntu 16.04, and power usage is measured from the wall with any displays (eg. on laptops) turned off.

CPU Threads H/s Watts
Intel Core M 5Y10 2 67 10
Intel i5 4440 3 180 75
Intel Core i7 840QM 4 44 77
Intel Core 2 Duo e8500 2 50 135
AMD E1-2500 2 20 10

Interestingly, the mobile AMD CPU is the only one with less than 2 MB cache per core which still got a speed boost from running multiple threads.

If you found this information helpful, perhaps you would consider tipping me some XMR at address: 4AJ7hzT7ULL6vNM7ChoQA1KPiWCaDA5zaCJVV2YJ4hE5HYh8NUZTcrg13qjW8Mm5F5ehGUE9oxJYvZUY3Xr5bP3K6uFqzXa