A photo of what looks to be a PlayStation 5 hacked to mine Ethereum, with a hashrate of 98.76 MH/s has been floating around the internet. The image turned out to be fake however, with a 2D barcode revealing the joke.
By reading the barcode with a smartphone, it will reveal Chinese text. When translated that text reads “There is no such software for entertainment hahaha.”
The troll responsible looked to take advantage of the dire situation on the GPU market. He decided to scare gamers who in an act of desperation planned to switch to consoles.
Playstation Has the Hardware to Mine Crypto Such As Ethereum
While the PlayStation hasn’t been turned into a crypto mining machine, it does have the hardware to do so. The console uses AMD Ryzen CPU on Zen 2 microarchitecture (x86, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 3.5 GHz). It also uses AMD Radeon GPU with RDNA 2 architecture (ray tracing acceleration; up to 2.23 GHz, 10.3 teraflops).
The software side of the PlayStation however, is pretty closed for the console at the moment. As such, developing a miner is the hard thing to do. If utilized properly, something like 50 MH/s might not be impossible for the PlayStation hardware.
GPU designer NVIDIA has started an open battle with cryptocurrency miners. Limiting the possibilities of mining digital currency by the latest GPUs. At the same time the manufacturer announced a special series of cards prepared exclusively for enthusiasts of modern mining.
Perhaps there is a possibility of seeing PS5 mining farms in the near future if the crypto mining craze continues. Console gamers are not happy with the PlayStation 5 shortages at the moment. With the device not easily obtainable even at a premium over the recommended end user price.
If the console becomes an attractive crypto mining device it will become even harder being a gamer and wanting to get a PS5 game console.
