Will we be able to mine Litecoin with ASIC's?

[pieppiep]

Litecoin uses 128.5kB memory, I doubt the fpga itself has this memory, so you need some memory chip(s) besides it.
And even then, currently there is no litecoin bitfiles to load to the fpga, so those must be created also.

eventually it will be created then. minimum of 1year

I'm not sure about that.
A few posts back I calculated the total mined bitcoins vs litecoins converted to $, the value of bitcoins mined was 40 times higher than litecoin.
So if it will be created, the profit will be a lot less, unless ofcourse if the litecoin value rises a lot more compared to bitcoin.

[Epicblood]

Litecoin uses 128.5kB memory, I doubt the fpga itself has this memory, so you need some memory chip(s) besides it.
And even then, currently there is no litecoin bitfiles to load to the fpga, so those must be created also.

The FPGAs I will be using have a few MBs of memory on them, how hard would it be to make the bitfiles and whatnot, that would have to be done in verilog right?

[crazyates]

Wait, can anyone explain in greater detail why LTC mining only uses 128kb of memory, but yet any scrypt mining program use enormous (GBs) amounts of memory?

[pieppiep]

Litecoin uses 128.5kB memory, I doubt the fpga itself has this memory, so you need some memory chip(s) besides it.
And even then, currently there is no litecoin bitfiles to load to the fpga, so those must be created also.

The FPGAs I will be using have a few MBs of memory on them, how hard would it be to make the bitfiles and whatnot, that would have to be done in verilog right?

What kind of FPGA is that?
The Xilinx spartan-6 LX150 only has 18 Kb blocks if I'm correct.

Wait, can anyone explain in greater detail why LTC mining only uses 128kb of memory, but yet any scrypt mining program use enormous (GBs) amounts of memory?

The scrypt hash calculation only uses a little over 128kB, but if you run it on a quadcore cpu there are 4 calculations at the same time, so 512kB is used.
If you run it on a gpu, with for example has 1024 calculation units, you run 1024 calculations at the same time so you need 1024 * 128kB = 128MB.

[crazyates]

Wait, can anyone explain in greater detail why LTC mining only uses 128kb of memory, but yet any scrypt mining program use enormous (GBs) amounts of memory?

The scrypt hash calculation only uses a little over 128kB, but if you run it on a quadcore cpu there are 4 calculations at the same time, so 512kB is used.
If you run it on a gpu, with for example has 1024 calculation units, you run 1024 calculations at the same time so you need 1024 * 128kB = 128MB.

So when I set --thread-concurrency to 8192 (4x 2048) for my 7970, it's using 128kb * 8192 = 1GB. So why does it use so much more than that?

[Aseras]

how many gpu threads are you running? 1, 2 or 4?

[crazyates]

how many gpu threads are you running? 1, 2 or 4?

I don't remember. I only tried it once, and went back to BTC. So in my case, will each thread use 1GB of memory?

[pieppiep]

I don't know in detail how the gpu litecoin miners work, but what I guess is indeed something with gpu threads.
Maybe when the gpu is calculating on the 1GB of work, the cpu already puts the next 1GB of work in place.
That way the gpu can start the new work immediately when the old is done.
Doing this with more threads would probably lower the chance all work is done before new work is ready.
But I'm no expert for litecoin gpu mining. Just a computer programmer thinking about what approach he would choose to do it.

And another thing, litecoin doesn't use 128kB but a little more, around 128.5kB.
It is possible it's faster to align on some boundary.
If the boundary for memory blocks is 64kB the total amount of 1GB becomes 1.5GB.
With 4 threads putting work ready it becomes 6GB.

[Epicblood]

Litecoin uses 128.5kB memory, I doubt the fpga itself has this memory, so you need some memory chip(s) besides it.
And even then, currently there is no litecoin bitfiles to load to the fpga, so those must be created also.

The FPGAs I will be using have a few MBs of memory on them, how hard would it be to make the bitfiles and whatnot, that would have to be done in verilog right?

What kind of FPGA is that?
The Xilinx spartan-6 LX150 only has 18 Kb blocks if I'm correct.

*snip*

Virtex-6 (ML605), not 100% sure exactly how much memory is on it, just going by what a friend told me who works there

[pieppiep]

I think I was wrong with the 18 Kb blocks.
According to http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/index.htm all the 6 and 7 serie chips have enough memory.

[scrybe]

I think I was wrong with the 18 Kb blocks.
According to http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/index.htm all the 6 and 7 serie chips have enough memory.

If you are serious about pursuing this you might want to have a look a this: http://www2.engr.mun.ca/~howard/PAPERS/ccece07_yan.pdf (salsa20/8 is an underlying algo used in Scrypt)

They actually used an FPGA and 3 ASIC variants for Salsa20 in this paper, and the compact FPGA variant uses 194 slices and 4 Block RAM's on a Xilinx 2V250fg256

[420]

I think I was wrong with the 18 Kb blocks.
According to http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/index.htm all the 6 and 7 serie chips have enough memory.

If you are serious about pursuing this you might want to have a look a this: http://www2.engr.mun.ca/~howard/PAPERS/ccece07_yan.pdf (salsa20/8 is an underlying algo used in Scrypt)

They actually used an FPGA and 3 ASIC variants for Salsa20 in this paper, and the compact FPGA variant uses 194 slices and 4 Block RAM's on a Xilinx 2V250fg256

does that prove anything

that ASIC was made for litecoin mining?

[scrybe]

I think I was wrong with the 18 Kb blocks.
According to http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/fpga/index.htm all the 6 and 7 serie chips have enough memory.

If you are serious about pursuing this you might want to have a look a this: http://www2.engr.mun.ca/~howard/PAPERS/ccece07_yan.pdf (salsa20/8 is an underlying algo used in Scrypt)

They actually used an FPGA and 3 ASIC variants for Salsa20 in this paper, and the compact FPGA variant uses 194 slices and 4 Block RAM's on a Xilinx 2V250fg256

does that prove anything

that ASIC was made for litecoin mining?

No, it was doing salsa20, but not the full mining algo. This is the hard part of Litecoin though, the memory intensive part that makes stock FPGA bitcoin mining rigs unsuitable for Litecoin.

I was mostly linking to the resource for anyone who wants to incorporate parts of the design detailed in the paper into an FPGA or ASIC based LiteCoin miner. There is a ton of stuff out there already to springboard from, even an open source VHDL scrypt implementation: http://opencores.org/websvn,listing?repname=salsa20&path=%2Fsalsa20%2F&rev=1
This unit, a couple SHA2 units, some golden_nonce detection and you can have Litecoin a ASIC in 6 months with the right folks and a couple hundred thousand dollars. Most likely we will see an FPGA generation built before ASIC is profitable for Litecoin.

BTW, nothing says someone couldn't create an ASIC that could use SHA2, salsa20/8, and other future algorithms on the same chip, but each algo will need to justify it's own design time and die space.

[Epicblood]

So is this a yay or nay on using xilinx ML605s to mine?

[scrybe]

So is this a yay or nay on using xilinx ML605s to mine?

If the is the full ML605 I think that has a DDR3 interface on it. That would in theory allow you to use some of your SP's to add load/store for a large number of inflight scrypt attempts.

I don't think this one will be as easy to build a bitstream for as BitCoin was, and any FPGA without a large high-speed RAM capability is going to be limited to an insanely low performance (think 1000 cycles per attempt without any pipe-lining.)

At a high level the challenge is going to be handling the random requests for a portion of the large random vector that is used by scrypt. This means that each pipline will need to manage enough parallel processes per engine to keep the pipeline full during the 30-50 clock cycle memory lookups, since we are not using Block RAM.

If someone wants to use this information to build the code, then at a high level I think it could work. I'll happily work with any experienced FPGA devs that have an appropriate board, but I don't have the programming skills to put this together solo, or a board staring me in the face demanding I put it to work.

[regular]

I wonder if any ASIC manufacturers out there could be working on a LTC ASIC?  They could get into a dominant market position like BFL did if they got in early.

[Bogart]

I wonder if any ASIC manufacturers out there could be working on a LTC ASIC?  They could get into a dominant market position like BFL did if they got in early.

This would be somewhat harder to do than a Bitcoin ASIC miner.  For mining BTC, someone can just license an existing SHA256 IP core, or use an open-source one.  Scrypt, on the other hand, probably doesn't have ready-made cores "out there" like that.  A maker would have to design and produce their own.

I think the ASIC makers likely have their hands full and then some handling their current product efforts, but you're right, there is an opportunity here.

[scrybe]

I wonder if any ASIC manufacturers out there could be working on a LTC ASIC?  They could get into a dominant market position like BFL did if they got in early.

This would be somewhat harder to do than a Bitcoin ASIC miner.  For mining BTC, someone can just license an existing SHA256 IP core, or use an open-source one.  Scrypt, on the other hand, probably doesn't have ready-made cores "out there" like that.  A maker would have to design and produce their own.

I think the ASIC makers likely have their hands full and then some handling their current product efforts, but you're right, there is an opportunity here.

True, I don't think it's coming soon from the existing players, maybe a new party in 12 months? Existing in 18-24? if ever it is worth enough (to justify development and) to sell dedicated (and even more specialized) ASIC.

On the Scrypt ASIC thing, I think it's less hard than it sounds. Scrypt is just a Salsa20/8 core with a sha2 core before and after it, with enough DRAM to store the inflight variables or external RAM and a memory controller. It's all mainstream IP, there is even the VHDL I lined to over at opencores for Salsa20 (/8 means it is Salsa20 with limited iterations). So we really just need someone who thinks there in enough profit in plumbing them together and getting it fabbed, same as the Bitcoin ASIC's.

Right now there are ~$60k worth of LTC being generated each month (30 days at current difficulty, at current full network hashrate) compared to $2.6M each month worth of BitCoins, and we are just hitting the point where ASIC makes sense on Bitcoin. I think Litecoin mining is going to have to be worth a LOT more (30-40x?) before someone invests in the ASIC implementation.

[jjiimm_64]

no.

/thread

this.

And yes, it has been discussed many times.

whats the problem?

How can you be a Hero member with 1900 posts and not know this??

[420]

no.

/thread

this.

And yes, it has been discussed many times.

whats the problem?

How can you be a Hero member with 1900 posts and not know this??

Because I'm 420 man

Maybe it's time for a bets of bicoin

"A company will be working on a litecoin mining prototype ASIC by the end of 2013"