Bitcoin Forum

Im wondering what performance an Itanium would deliver.
Are there any miners working on that plattform yet?

I doubt any CPU platform mining is going to be worth it.

See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Also,

If you just want to see what all this stuff is about you may want to take a look at litecoin which is a CPU only currency. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47417.0

If litecoin ever takes off (and it won't) I guarantee you will be seeing GPU and or FPGA miners. There is no such thing as a "cpu only" virtual currency. Where there is a will there is a way.

Fair enough, looking at the overall hash rates for litecoin, it wouldn't surprise me if someone has already worked around scrypt complexity. I am VERY skeptical that there are so many adopters of litecoin. 13+MHash maybe. Maybe you are right. Maybe some group wants to take over the chain. I just don't know.  

In any case, rather than spend $ on a mining rig/GPU it might be better if Itanium miner test drive litecoin or tenebrix or one of the scrypt based cryptcurrencies.

The strength in the Itanium platform is parallel operations that are optimized by the compiler (not SMT/HT on the CPU). The gotcha with bitcoin is that a single pass of SHA256 can't be parallelized because each cycle requires the output of the previous cycle before it can be computed. It's basically the same issue you run into with video encoding where information from frame A is required to render frame B, so you can't render them both at the same time, the work needs to be staggered.

I did some work with HP Integrity blade systems (Tukwila based Itanium) and on top of performance, they GUZZLE power.

I agree with the statement 'where there is a will there is a way', however.  no amount of will can make 2+2=5. 

From what I have read, the algorithm for ltc cannot be done efficiently on gpu, and even if it could, it wont be faster then the cpu.  That being said, if it does get done, goodbye litecoin.

I am with the camp that says ltc compliments bitcoin.  bitcoin==gold, litecoin==silver.  For small transactions and quick confirmations it makes alot of sense.  if you want to transfer large sums of money, use bitcoin. for small transactions, use litecoin.


We have no idea where all this is going to take us,  hell maybe every country will have an alt currency.  chinabit, ukbit, ruc, iraqbit, etc...

Actually "GPU hostile" is misnomer.  It is "small cache" hostile.  For example it does abysmally on the Bulldozer chip (which has very limited L1 data cache) and last time I checked it isn't a GPU.

Looking at benchamrks scrypt needs about 32KB of L1 cache. AMD GPU have about 8K per SIMD group (16 SP).  As GPU become more CPU like and GPGPU becomes more common the need for more L1 cache will grow.  Eventually a GPU with 32KB+ of L1 data cache will be released and scrypt won't even blink as it is accelerated across thousands of stream processors.

Already NVidia top of the line Tesla can be configured for 48KB of L1 cache.  Granted the price makes testing prohibitive but my hypothesis is that it be able to work on ~12 nonces simulataneously (i.e. a 12 core GPU).  Eventually even the cheapest GPU will have enough L1 cache.