Usually, a mining setup comprises ASIC miners or a generous amount of graphic cards. However, things were a little different at the mining farm which the Ukrainian officials discovered. Instead of GPUs, it relied on PS4s!! Yes, you heard that right!
The scarce supply of graphics cards and ASIC miners forced these Ukrainian miners to choose a different approach towards mining cryptocurrencies. The Security Service of Ukraine disrupted this illegal mining operation. In the raid, the service seized over 50 processors, 500 graphics cards, and 3,800 PlayStation 4 consoles. Indeed, it is uncommon but it looks like it was working for these miners due to the huge amount of PS4s they had.
Memory plays an important role in crypto mining, memory bandwidth to be specific. The best mining cards come with large amounts of memory with good bandwidth. Although mining through PS4 consoles isn’t efficient, it can do the job with its 8GB GDDR5 RAM operating at 5.5 Gbps. The 256-bit bus and 176 Gbps will mine cryptocurrency but won’t excel at this as the graphics cards do. The farm was drawing huge amounts of power from the grid illegally due to which it came under the spotlight of Ukrainian officials. A Setup of fake meters was used to hide the activity.
Via Tom