Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 Old Galaxy S5s (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Samsung is starting a new "Upcycling" initiative that is designed to turn old smartphones and turn them into something brand new. Behold, for example, this bitcoin mining rig, made out of 40 old Galaxy S5 devices, which runs on a new operating system Samsung has developed for its upcycling initiative. Samsung premiered this rig, and a bunch of other cool uses for old phones, at its recent developer's conference in San Francisco. Upcycling involves repurposing old devices instead of breaking them down for parts of reselling them. The people at Samsung's C-Lab -- an engineering team dedicated to creative projects -- showed off old Galaxy phones and assorted tablets stripped of Android software and repurposed into a variety of different objects. The team hooked 40 old Galaxy S5's together to make a bitcoin mining rig, repurposed an old Galaxy tablet into a ubuntu-powered laptop, used a Galaxy S3 to monitor a fishtank, and programed an old phone with facial recognition software to guard the entrance of a house in the form of an owl. Samsung declined to answer specific questions about the bitcoin mining rig, but an information sheet at the developer's conference noted that eight galaxy S5 devices can mine at a greater power efficiency than a standard desktop computer (not that too many people are mining bitcoin on their desktops these days).

Comments

There's mining numbers right in the photo

[DontBeAMoran]

For once, reading TFA would have been useful to a lot of people here, including myself.

There's a photo with a graph in it:

Bitcoin mining cluster
CPU mining comparison with desktop PC
PC i7-2600, hash rate 20000, 95 watts
Galaxy S5, hash rate 2600, 4 watts

Power efficiency
PC i7-2600, 211 Khash/watt
Galaxy S5, 650 Khash/watt

Can any of these compete with ASICs? No. But they can still participate in a pool.
They could also mine something else like Dogecoin, Litecoin or Monero.

Re: So?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Your analysis is completely incorrect. Trying to say that chip density tells the story and that your desktop used less power than a smartphone because it has greater chip density is absurd. In fact greater chip density means the same die space can use more power, not less.

Re:wut

[war4peace]

Actually NiceHash mines whatever coin's more profitable at the moment and converts it automatically to BTC. It's all transparent to me.
Of course, manually mining some more obscure coin and converting it exactly at the right time might prove maybe twice as profitable, but I value my own time more than the difference. Auto is good enough. I'm not doing this to become rich, and it's a long term investment. If BTC reaches very high values sometime down the road, I could become rich. If it crashes, it won't make me any poorer because the investments would have had written themselves off a long time ago.