The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has confirmed that Ukrainian law enforcement recently shut down a mining farm located in the city of Vinnytsia that was illegally using the city’s power grid to mine cryptocurrency. What’s interesting about the bust is that in addition to the usual pieces of hardware that’s typically discovered at these sites (e.g., graphics cards and processors), authorities also discovered racks upon racks of Sony’s last-generation gaming console, the PlayStation 4. According to SSU’s press release, exactly 3,800 of these systems were recovered, but the agency didn’t confirm whether these PlayStation 4 consoles were actually used to mine cryptocurrency or not.
The PS4 features 8GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5.5 Gbps. Across the 256-bit memory interface, the PS4 delivers a memory bandwidth up to 176 GBps. The Pro variant, on the other hand, has memory running at 6.8 Gbps, offering up to 217.6 GBps. For comparison, the Radeon RX 580, which is one of the best mining GPUs, has a memory throughput of 256 GBps. Hypothetically, the PS4 Pro could potentially come close to a Radeon RX 580 in Ethereum mining.
Sources: SSU, Tom’s Hardware