When is the next Monero upgrade and what is it about?

@cipherchan Haha fair enought

regarding mining, if everyone looses efficiency then your relative efficiency to the nethash would be unchanged
well, with an upgrade like that it's also expected to have:

• old rigs that are not updating so they wouldnt be mining at all (lowering nethash)
• new rigs being added to the network from the upgrade hype thing (increasing nethash)

all in all, it probably should be about the same, maybe get more $, maybe get less $ depending on which way those would go but overall should be pretty similar tbh

The RandomX v2 update doesn't "reduce mining efficiency". And even if it did, that doesn't mean you make less money... There's a fixed reward for mining a block, and since every miner must use the same algorithm, your reward is still determined as your fraction of the total hashrate. Even if the hashrate per machine went down, if the hashrate goes down the same percent for everybody, then no change in money flow happens.

The RandomX v2 update comparatively advantages CPUs with higher clock speeds and higher instructions/cycle. Basically all CPUs since the invention of RandomX has increased clock speeds, but RAM latency remains the bottleneck for RandomX. So v2 does more instructions per hash basically. In most modern CPUs, the CPU would have been idling waiting for this data anyways, so if you measure "efficiency" as virtual instructions per joule, then the efficiency of RandomX has actually gone up for commerically popular CPUs. This isn't the case for some RISC-V designs, like the ones that Bitmain sells. There was also some changes to floating point and AES operations. You can read more about RandomX v2 here.

https://libera.monerologs.net/monero-pow/20260118

benchmark on the framework desktop just goes from 15kh/s (v1) to 14kh/s (v2)
not really a difference there

@cipherchan That's what I'm trying to say though: hashrate != efficiency. In that comment you linked, notice the column for "relative work / joule" and that's it's 30% higher with v2, even though the hashrate is lower. Let's compare Bitcoin's hashrate to Monero's: 918.02 EH/s vs 5.64 GH/s!!! This means that Bitcoin is 163 BILLION times more decentralized!!!!1!! No, it just means that the algorithms are different, and target different hardware. v2 is meant to better target modern commercial CPUs. What matters is not the difference in hashrate for this machine, but the relative difference in the difference in machines across all miners.