Bitmain Antminer E3 is continuing mining Ether with its latest update. Chinese mining giant Bitmain announced that it had prolonged the lifespan of its Antminer E3 with a new update, As per the blog post, the miner would allow miners to continue mining even after “March 2020.”
While many mining companies are closing down due to low profits, Bitmain is not only seeing high sales of its new mining units but also updating previous models as well.
Bitmain Antminer E3’s life extended
Previously, Bitmain had announced that Antminer E3 would stop mining Ethereum by March 2020. Now with its new firmware, the miner can continue mining Ether even after March 2020. Particularly, the new firmware addresses an issue with the directed acyclic graph (DAG) files. This issue was first reported by altcoin mining pool 2Miners in February this year.
As per the 2Miners’ report, DAG growth was the main reason behind the limited capability of Antminer E3. This issue would have caused the miner to stop mining Ether and Ethereum Classic due to limited memory capacity.
Subsequently, the issue with DAG growth was confirmed by Bitmain, which also revealed that the miner’s double date rate (DDR) memory is approaching its limit of 4 GB. 2Miners calculated that Bitmain Antminer E3 would stop mining Ether around April 8, 2020.
However, with the latest update, the Antimer’s lifespan has been extended as the new firmware directly addresses the DAG issue. As per Bitmain’s blog post, the new firmware will expand the DDR memory as more space is needed for DAG files. Moreover, as per the firm’s calculations, the miner would continue to support mining until October 2020.
Featured image by pixabay.
