OpenCL miner
An OpenCL miner is a Bitcoin mining program that uses the OpenCL computing framework to perform SHA-256 hashing on GPUs or other OpenCL-compatible hardware.
Role in Bitcoin mining
OpenCL miners were important during the GPU mining era. GPUs were once much faster than CPUs for Bitcoin hashing, and OpenCL made it possible to use compatible AMD/ATI and other devices for mining.
General-purpose CPU and GPU mining is no longer practical for ordinary Bitcoin mainnet mining. The Bitcoin network's mining difficulty and hardware market are dominated by specialized SHA-256 mining hardware. OpenCL mining remains useful for understanding Bitcoin mining history, GPU hashing implementations, and some non-Bitcoin proof-of-work systems.
Modern mining software and pool infrastructure use newer interfaces than the early getwork and RPC-miner workflows. Bitcoin Core's current mining RPC documentation lists getblocktemplate, getmininginfo, getnetworkhashps, submitblock, and related RPCs.[1][2]
Requirements
Hashing on a GPU requires an OpenCL compatible (ATI/AMD) or CUDA compatible (NVIDIA) graphics card.
The python Poclbm open source OpenCL bitcoin miner was created by m0mchil[3] based on the open source CUDA client originally released by puddinpop[4].
Subsequently the java DiabloMiner based on m0mchil's was created by Diablo-D3[5].
Puddinpop has also released a C++ OpenCL client capable of being compiled into the GUI client or daemon, or as a stand alone RPC miner[6].
Another miner was released by Jedi95 & CFSworks released Phoenix miner[7] which can work with memory underclocked to 300MHz and scans whole 232 nonce space.
BitTornado is another OpenCL Miner that supports ATI and NVIDIA Cards. It was released by Chris Evans[8].
See the Mining Hardware Comparison page for detailed statistics on the hash rates that can be achieved with various hardware.
See also
- Mining
- Mining hardware comparison
- RPC Miner
- Getwork
- Getblocktemplate
- ATI Stream vs. NVIDIA CUDA - GPGPU computing battle royale
- Processing Cores vs. Stream Processing Units
References
- ↑ "getblocktemplate (31.0.0 RPC)". Bitcoin Core. https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/31.0.0/rpc/mining/getblocktemplate/. Retrieved 23 June 2026.
- ↑ "getmininginfo (31.0.0 RPC)". Bitcoin Core. https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/31.0.0/rpc/mining/getmininginfo/. Retrieved 23 June 2026.
- ↑ m0mchil's announcement on the forum
- ↑ puddinpop's open source CUDA miner
- ↑ Diablo's announcement on the forum
- ↑ puddinpop's RPC miners
- ↑ Jedi95 & CFSworks phoenix miner
- ↑ BitTornado by Chris Evans