3,800 PS4s found and seized on a cryptocurrency farm in Ukraine

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WTF ?! On Thursday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) reported that it had shut down a cryptomining operation in the city of Vinnytsia, seizing over 500 GPUs and 50 processors – and a bunch of Playstation 4. The technology-based consoles of the 2013 era they may not be great for mining, but they don’t need to be when you have 3,800.

Although the GPU market is starting to improve and dedicated ASICs may be on track to alleviate demand, it appears that a group of enterprising cryptocurrency miners have turned to the latest console hardware to get things done.

From the photos provided by the SSU, it appears these consoles are of the PS4 Slim variety, the 2016 update of the original console from three years earlier. Mostly outdated for newer games, it’s hardly surprising that so many can be bought in bulk so easily.

However, while the PS4 Slim performed more efficiently than the base PS4 thanks to a reduction in nodes on the APU, it was no faster. It’s hard to estimate what kind of performance you might get on a console rigged by the jury to mine cryptocurrency, but the PS4 Pro’s GPU is a low-power derivative of AMD’s RX 480 silicon and that card’s higher clock refresh. , the RX 580, has been found by Tom’s Hardware to be a rather inefficient card for Ethereum mining these days, albeit tuned.

On the other hand, Ethereum mining is often more dependent on memory bandwidth than compute performance, and there the base PS4 and Slim manage 176GB / s with their shared 8GB of GDDR5. That’s less than the Pro model’s 217.6GB / s and their desktop counterparts’ 256GB / s, but not as far off as in other metrics like TFLOPS often cited in console-related debates.

Either way, it’s almost certain that miners were using the PS4 for its price and availability rather than speed or efficiency, especially considering the vast number of consoles in use. Also, like some previously disrupted mining operations, they were stealing electricity from the Vinnytsia power grid, so power usage was unlikely to be an issue.

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