Holding on old Samsung smartphones may have been a good choice for many users as Samsung just built a Bitcoin mining rig out of 40 Samsung’s old smartphones. Although as you may have been expected, this mining rig isn’t powerful enough to mine Bitcoin with profits, it is more efficient than a normal desktop.
Nowadays you can’t really mine for Bitcoin with your desktop. You could but you wouldn’t see any small amount soon. Though is a good landmark to get an idea of the Samsung rig’s power.
The company declined to answer specific questions about the bitcoin mining rig, but the information sheet presented below, notes that eight Galaxy S5’s can mine at a greater power efficiency than a standard desktop computer.
Samsung Rig vs I7 Desktop
From the image released by Samsung, we get some important data about the hash rate, power consumption and hash-rate/watt ratio. It seems that a desktop with an I7 processor, has a greater hash rate comparing to this 8 Samsung Galaxy rig but the energy needed for that is proportionally bigger on the desktop.
- I7 2600 Desktop – 20000 Kilohash/sec – 95 Watts
- 8 Samsung Galaxy S5 – 2600 Kilohash/sec – 4 Watts
Samsung premiered this rig, and a bunch of other cool uses for old phones, at its recent developer’s conference in San Francisco. Upcycling involves repurposing old devices instead of breaking them down for parts of reselling them.
This is great news and we can’t wait to see how it will develop in the future. At the moment, this mining rig created by Samsung seems to be just an experiment, but since we didn’t get much info from Samsung, we can only speculate.
It seems that Samsung is trying to upcycle several types of devices, including tablets and smartphones, and find a new purpose for these gadgets, which are still powerful and normal users could still benefit from them.
Here is also the Github link to their project: https://galaxyupcycling.github.io/