Bitmain's E3 Ethereum mining machine has a 6-fold drop in computing power and is expected to stop mining in April

According to BlockBeats, according to a report released by 2Miners mining pool on February 24, Bitmain Ethereum mining machine E3 will stop ETH mining in April.

It is understood that Bitmain's Antminer E3 was once the "world's most powerful" ETH mining hardware. According to a report released by the mining pool 2Miners on February 24, E3 will stop Ethereum mining in April 2020. On February 21, 2Miners began to receive the first report about the significant performance drop of E3 miners on the ETC pool. Some users reported on the ETC pool that the Antminer E3 mining data showed that its computing power dropped by 6 times: from the previously announced 180 MH/s to as low as 30 MH/s.

After an internal investigation, 2Miners found that the computing power of ETC mining pools around the world has experienced the same decline. At the same time, 2Miners said that the E3 miner is still performing well on the Ethereum mining pool. The team immediately proposed that the problem may be related to the directed acyclic graph (DAG). The DAG file changes every epoch. An epoch is 30,000 blocks, called a mining epoch. (BlockBeats Note: DAG (directed acyclic graph). It is used for all Ethash-based digital currencies, such as ETH-Ethereum, ETC-Ethereum Classic and other digital currencies. The DAG file generates a DAG in each mining epoch and will continue to increase. It is very important to understand the current and future size of the DAG file because it will have a great impact on the mining speed. The DAG file is directly located in the GPU video memory. If the DAG file is larger than the GPU video memory, then your graphics card can no longer mine.)

2Miners also confirmed that it is the growth of DAG files that limits the use of E3. Bitmain also stated that the ASIC mining machine E3 still contains 4GB cards, and the DAG file is close to this threshold.

Bitmain said: "[…Antminer E3 is a 4GB graphics card. E3 is related to the ETH algorithm. The DDR capacity has reached its upper limit and E3 will not be able to continue mining. This means that it is estimated that E3 can only mine until January 2020, and then it will not be able to continue mining."

According to 2Miners calculations, Antminer E3 will stop mining Ethereum around April 8, 2020.