Bitcoin Forum

As people are speculating it might be GPU based, which raises a question. (And note that Bitmain has never called it an ASIC, while for other miner’s it boldly claims “the world’s first Scrypt ASIC” etc, so highly probable that this is not an ASIC).

So the question - Won’t Bitmain be able to easily program it to mine other algos? E.g. Cryptonight, now that their Cryptonight ASIC is bricked.

I suppose it could do around 4-5kh/s on Cryptonight, so two of these would compete with a 6 card Vega RX56 setup.

I don’t think that would be too bad. It would alleviate the pressure on gaming GPUs and make mining more cost-effective as well as power-effective. Of course we would want more manufactures to come up with solutions like this to prevent centralization.

Thoughts?

Edit: And perhaps ETH Devs already factored this and decided fork would be useless.

The whole point of an ASIC is that it is built to do a very specific set of functions/calculations.
They are much simpler than other chips such as a GPU or a CPU, and you can't change how it works by using a modified program/tool.

Mining ASICs are basically just a very powerful and very specific calculators.

read with understanding, the guy above says "what if those are gpu based"

If it is GPU based then yes it could probably be re-purposed to mine something.  If this is GPU based though I'm sure its highly optimized to only mine ETH.  A lot of custom work would had to go into it to get that hashrate at that price with that low of wattage.   Then you have the fact that it wouldn't make as A. They already make a cryptonight miner (Which is not bricked, it still will mine that algo that that it advertises) and B. They already make a cryptonight miner.

ETH devs have wanted to go POS for a long time, it doesn't make sense for them to change the algo now.

I recall on the day of the E3 releasing I saw a picture of something like a web control interface listing the miners (can't recall if it listed individual hashboards or whole miners) as GPUs, with numbers from 0-10 listing the miners. I don't remember it well, though, so this could be completely false.

It is entirely possible Bitmain has chalked up something GPU-based. If they've done so it might explain how cheap the miners are, as if this is what they've done then Bitmain doesn't have to go through as lengthy of a process to get ahold of GPUs like through Nvidia or AMD. They're definitely doing something with the wording here like you said, as doing CTRL+F and entering 'ASIC' on the E3 Batch 2 page gives no results.

It's an ASIC. https://astr.al/u/81eb23fa_960x720.jpg

That image, like the F3 antminer could be fake. With a little photoshop skill, one could easily make that.
Sadly there is really no way to verify these fakes until they are released to the public.

    If E2 is a gpu, it will probably need a lot of gpu needed, and for the price will be more expensive. That's if we talk about the hardware's price. But if we talk about the aspect of its operating system, it will be very difficult to apply. Because it will requires scrypts to detect and run syntac from gpu. I think it's impossible. :)
    But even if there is can made, it will definitely more simple to mining, and must have a high hashrates. ;)

Taking into account that amd cards have some shortage, it is really very bold to announce device based on chips you can't buy.. also new version or new generation of cards could be released by amd which again can hit source of chip... highly likely those asics will have a special chip.. imho