Bitcoin Forum

Hello!

Im having a discussion in with one of my friends.. I don't believe me, when I say the use GPU's.. Can someone please give me a solid reason WHY the use GPU's instead of traditional CPU in computers? :)

gpus mine more coins then cpus per watt used.

computing power. CPU's are very week in this category.

You can look at it inductively and see that GPUs outperform CPUs on the vast majority of popular mineable cryptocurrencies.

Alternatively, you can consider the typical analogy (all analogies only have so much similarity, but this is a fair explanation):

CPU= A room with a small number (think around 2-16) of intelligent people.
GPU= A room with a large number (on the order of thousands, usually) of much less intelligent people.

You can throw a large variety of task types to a small room of intelligent people, and they will be capable of doing it. CPUs are very good for general-purpose computing. However, if you have a large-scale task consisting of a great number of simple problems that can be solved independently (being parallelizable is important), the room of less intelligent people will perform better due to sheer numbers. (E.g. think of handing 1,000,000 simple addition problems off to each room. Intuitively, the room of less intelligent people will finish them first.)


Now apply this to *most* mining processes:
A very simplistic view that we can use to represent mining is the rolling of a die. Suppose you roll a die, and if the number on the die is below 3, you "win" a block. Now, you might ask, why do I use a die instead of submitting "2" or "1" all the time? Since, of course, that would guarantee you a block each time.

The answer is that the "win" condition isn't as simple as "if (x<3) {win}". Instead, it is something much more complex, such as "if (x== solution to [insert complicated equation without a general analytic solution]){win}".

Finding solutions that meet the necessary conditions can then be done by generating random/psuedorandom guesses, a process that a GPU can generally do at a greater rate than a CPU.

The more number of GPU's you have the more computing power you get. For eg an Rx 580 can provide you with about 30mh/s which is really cool. Can mine more coins!