If you consider cpu mining, you should consider the whole PC consumption, not just CPU.
Making a "traditional" desktop computer with a 4770K will cost more thant a GPU.
You're thinking from a single minded perspective. You are actually seeing the INTENTIONAL limitation of this algorithm.
My kids have a 2500k each and they get 110H/s when the CPU is at 50% the whole time they're on it. They use this miner in Windows. Measured AT THE WALL the power consumption
goes up by 30w when the miner starts if the PC was at idle, when I have Hearthstone running in window mode, it is only going up by 20w with the miner.
So effectively, regular crappy $300 computers that I bought for my kids are getting me 110H/s for somewhere between 20w and 30w depending on what they're doing. An R9 280x draws around 300w from the wall at full power, if Claymore's miner is only using half their power, it would be 150w.
To break even in H/s you'd need to be getting closer to 660H/s per card, your results show 460 per card.
This means that people can't just buy a crap tonne of equipment and own the coin. It was intentionally made to be this way.
EDIT: Forgot to mention that the kids don't think it affects their gameplay. They play mostly Hearthstone, Path of Exile, Diablo 3, League of Legends and DotA 2.
The cryptonight algo was not designed to be more cpu friendly than gpu friendly. It is more cpu friendly actually.
I'm not complaining, i have some cpu at home (a dual xeon 2687w and a
[email protected]) - i'm not pro or against cpu mining. I have a few gpu and some cpu.
But juste mesuring the difference when mining with cpu compared to when your kids computer are not mining is not, well, a good measure.
Such a computer while mining should draw ~250W (mesured at the wall). Maybe i'm wrong, i'll let you make the measure.
A simple rig designed for mining with gpu, with a little cpu (ga2016/2020), in iddle state, draw 80w, and when mining XMR with one R9 280X, draw 250W.
With the 5 R9 280X, 2300H/s, 1000W measured at the wall.
OK, my dual xeon give me 960H/s for less power, but i think we will see a lot of optimization (for both i hope) in a near future.
This means that people can't just buy a crap tonne of equipment and own the coin. It was intentionally made to be this way.
Why do you think it was designed intentionally in this way ? To be fair ?
Gpu friendly coin bring gpu farm and multipool, cpu only or cpu friendly bring botnet/amazon EC2 instances (see the boolberry thread, DGA talk about 200 EC2 for himself, and he is far from being the biggest one). In both case i'm still a very little miner
EDIT :
GPU miner coming to nvidia card (not released yet)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7458872First test, with 6 x 750Ti : 270W at the wall (something like 35w per card), ~160H/s per cards