The roadmap for the new release of XMR (v0.15) and the relevant hard fork, which will introduce the new PoW RandomX in the currency protocol, was unveiled during a meeting between all Monero developers and some members of the community.
According to the infographics, the new version of Monero’s core will be made available on October 31st, 2019, and will bring the XMR protocol to release 0.15.
Once the new clients for wallets, nodes and tools for crypto mining are released, Monero’s hard fork will be executed, set at block number 1978433, roughly in the afternoon of Saturday, November 30th.
Hard Fork Monero: ready for CPU mining on PoW RandomX?
At the moment we don’t know the complete changelog of the new release of Monero. The changelog will be published after the release of the new software version, thus after October 31st.
For now, the only certain news is the implementation of the much rumoured new Proof of Work RandomX, whose development and testing have been going on continuously since last January.
This Proof of Work will introduce significant changes compared to the current CryptoNight-R, as it will again eliminate ASICs and FPGAs from the mining of the cryptocurrency. Not only that, since the operation of this algorithm is optimised for the use of the classic CPU and its instructions, cache and architecture, even the yield in the mining of video cards will drop dramatically, thus making suitable (given the efficiency) only the CPU mining of Monero, at least initially.
From the first tests, among all the processors tested, an interesting performance advantage has emerged for the new AMD Ryzen CPUs, in particular for the third generation of CPUs based on the ZEN 2 architecture.
These particular CPU models, in fact, boast large amounts of first, second and third level caches, practically twice as much as the first and second generation of AMD Ryzen and the current solutions offered by Intel.
Moreover, being manufactured using the last seven-nanometre production process of TSMC’s Taiwanese foundry, they offer high energy efficiency in Monero’s mining on the PoW RandomX.
Currently, the most performing model is certainly the Ryzen 9 3900x, equipped with 12 cores and 24 threads at a base clock of 3.8 GHz. This CPU can reach a hashrate close to 11500-12000 H/s, with a power consumption of about 150 watts. However, the price is not the cheapest, as it is difficult to find the Ryzen 3900x at less than 600 euros.
The model with the highest price/performance ratio is definitely the Ryzen 5 3600, a solution with six cores and 12 threads operating at a base clock of 3.6 GHz. In fact, it can get a hashrate up to almost 6300 Hash/s, all with a power consumption of about 80-90 watts for the CPU alone and a price below 200 euros.
