So i know that the salsa core used by the scrypt algorithm uses 128.5 kB or memory (would be smart to use 256 kB per thread) and from what i've gathered, a single thread (running on a spartan 6) would use 576 slices (roughly) or about 3680 blocks of logic, and produce a hash rate of around 12.5 kH/s using DDR2 memory speeds.
This means the Spartan 6 LX150 would be able to run around 40 threads concurrently, producing 500kH/s, which is on par with most newer graphics cards, but it would use significantly less power.
Any thoughts?
How much power does a FPGA setup like you describe use? Does it have any short term(<1 year) resale value like a GPU? Could you use it for SHA-256 in addition to scrypt hashing?
Anyone considered using SRAM as the memory requirements are actually quite small for the amount of threads you could run in an FPGA?
I would love to hear from anyone who is interested in developing this further (PM me) and i will be ordering a Virtex 5 FPGA dev kit in the next few days (i have some experience with FPGA)
What have you used FPGAs for?
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