random.directory

RandomX on real hardware

What a RandomX miner asks of the machine it runs on: memory, cache, large pages — and the platforms where some of that is not available.

A flat illustration of three memory modules standing upright, each faced with a grid of orange square cells

Guide

How much memory does RandomX need?

RandomX needs 2080 MiB of shared memory to mine in fast mode, 256 MiB to verify in light mode, and a 2 MiB scratchpad for every mining thread. Where each figure comes from, what huge pages do for it, and how much free RAM a machine needs in practice.

A flat illustration of a small box-shaped desktop computer with a screen of orange square cells, beside an indigo desk lamp

Guide

RandomX on Apple Silicon: what an M1 Mac can do

RandomX runs on Apple Silicon through its ARM64 JIT and hardware AES, but without the huge pages it gets on Linux: macOS on arm64 has no 2 MiB pages to give the dataset. What we measured on a Mac mini M1, and the ARM fix in RandomX 1.2.2 and 2.0.1.