FileStar released version 1.2.1, Intel CPU miners are supported
After weeks of development and testing, FileStar released version Inflation v1.2.1.
It includes the following changes:
- Support 8GiB sector;
- Increase the block gas limit;
- Fixed some bugs.
This version is a mandatory upgrade. The fork will happen at the height of 184560, which is expected at 2 PM on December 30th(GMT+8). Please complete upgrading before then. After the fork, FileStar will support Intel CPU-based miners to join the network. The sealing process of the 8GiB sector has greatly reduced the hardware requirements and has doubled the sealing efficiency. It is a very innovative attempt, which will greatly save storage space and retrieval time.
Open a gate to Intel CPU-based miners
According to the CPU market research report released by Mercury Research in 2019, although AMD’s market share in the server field has been grown rapidly in recent years, Intel still occupies 90% of the server market. It means that Intel’s server CPU is much easier to obtain and the cost is lower than AMD’s same-level CPU.
Filecoin currently requires top-level AMD CPUs along with top-level graphics cards, a lot of RAM, and tons of SSDs to participate in mining competitively. So the sever costs at least 15,000 US dollars, along with several hundreds of thousands of the storage cost, is very unfriendly to ordinary users. Hence, Filecoin mining became an oligarchic competition from the beginning, with most of the computing power coming from several large mining pools. Due to the high requirements of Filecoin mining on the network, the centralization of these mining pools is even more serious than that of Bitcoin and Ethereum mining pools.
FileStar`s vision is to provide decentralized storage, verifiable computation, and measurable bandwidth to fully support Web 3.0. And FileStar hopes that more people and devices could have the opportunity to join the decentralized network. So lowering the entry barrier and allowing more devices to participate is the most important first step for FileStar as an infrastructure.
At present, the minimum sector size required by the Filecoin network is 32GiB, so mining equipment must have a lot of RAM. With version 1.2.1, FileStar reduced the lower limit of sector to 8GiB and reduced the number of calculation layers of PreCommit1 from 11 to 5 in the sealing process. So the overall calculation amount and the disadvantage of Intel processors have been reduced.
See the latest benchmark and device configuration of FileStar
Next Steps
FileStar will further shorten the gap between AMD and Intel processors. And it requires PreCommit1 to support other Hash algorithms besides SHA256. And it leads to a lot of security and performance experiments.
To effectively increase the TPS of FileStar, this version increases the gas limit of the block. In the future, FileStar will also continue to research on improving the network’s TPS and reducing the number of information submitted by miners in preparation for Web 3.0.
Links
Official Website / GitHub / Slack / Twitter / Telegram / WeChat: filestarofficial
