Thank you for all the Intel based user crash reports that you sent in. To help resolve the issues, we ordered in an Intel iMac with 8GB GPU for our investigations.

A major crash was discovered stemming from an OpenCL driver issue which blocks Intel based Macs from running OpenCL computes at the same time as Metal computes. Interestingly, this implementation of running two competing compute engines at the same time should not have been released in the first place.

It was just an experimental optimisation which did boost the hashrate on initial testing, but is not ready or ever will be considered for actual release before more experimentation is done.

This patch should also further address the initial M1 Macs overwhelming issue previously reported. Please let me know if this indeed does help the stability of M1 Macs – I don’t have one here to test.

Note, if you experience any issues with the Metal compute engine, you can still download the v0.1 OpenCL version from the link in the About section.

To learn more about the differences between OpenCL and Metal, see Bringing OpenGL Apps to Metal.

Bonus – Another extra development worth mentioning is that macminer now runs on Android. Well, I ordered a S22 Ultra and figured it might be interesting to see how powerful its GPU is at mining, so I ported it over to work on my current Galaxy S7. Surprisingly, for a 6 year old phone running unoptimised code in DEBUG the hashrate is almost half that of a M1 Mac. I’ll more to share very soon.