Nov 11, 2024

Finally, as a reminder, this run is on a machine without AVX512 (which is very common for the last five years or so, and we have implemented) and BN doesn't yet apply SHANI (also common on hardware). with these applied it should significantly reduce archive and validation time, which leaves more time for confirmation. Confirmation may end up being more limited by RAM/SSD depending on the machine, but this new technique limits the importance of SSD speed and RAM volume. On the mini both will certainly help. BC does not yet have AVX512, so that's an even comparison, but it does have SHANI, which makes a major difference in its performance. The big Mac, with 768GB RAM does not have SHANI and that takes over 24 hours to validate, where the Windows 11 mini (with 32 GB RAM and SHANI) takes BC 15 hours. Finally, BN is using a 3 yo build of secp256k1, which is missing performance improvements that BC has. Given that about 75% of the archive and validation cost is secp256k1 and 15% is sha256, I'd expect to get a pretty significant boost, possibly a 1/3 time reduction on the mini, which in the apples-to-apples should put BN well ahead of BC. The maxi validation is already 5.5 hours to BC's 20.