Where is the difficulty in creating an ASIC?

[PachucoBro]

I guess OP does not even know what ASIC means

Actually I do, but it is the incorrect use of the acronym ASIC that is already being propagated that gets the terminology all backwards. People are calling the new products 'ASIC Miners' because they are mining rigs/devices that use ASICs as opposed to CPU or GPU. but the device themselves should probably have some other name given to them. Kinda like people say 'Mining Rig'... then is your 'Rig a GPU rig or an ASIC rig.

My original post was meant to say that aren't there other ASICs already designed by someone else that can do these same types of computations.

Evidently as I have learned through this thread.... no these ASICs that are being designed by BFL and AVALON are specific to BitCoin... not just AN ASIC that can do the number crunching of things(hashes) like what is used for bitcoins.

Clear as mud?

[Bogart]

My original post was meant to say that aren't there other ASICs already designed by someone else that can do these same types of computations.

There has been some talk of upcoming "crypto chips", meant for use in mobile phones, being used for mining.

While their design will surely prioritize performance-per-watt highly, it will probably not prioritize absolute performance very highly at all.  (How much sha256 crunching will a mobile phone need to do, really?)

So, I think that any "miner product" that uses these chips will probably have to incorporate a heck of a lot of them in order for it to add up to any kind of substantial hashrate, which will make for a complex PCB, complex cooling, and such.

[JoelKatz]

Evidently as I have learned through this thread.... no these ASICs that are being designed by BFL and AVALON are specific to BitCoin... not just AN ASIC that can do the number crunching of things(hashes) like what is used for bitcoins.

Yep. Typical chips designed to accelerate operations like hashing are designed to accelerate the hash of a large object. An ASIC designed to accelerate Bitcoin mining gets much of its performance benefit from being designed to do precisely the hash operations that Bitcoin mining requires in precisely the sequence Bitcoin mining requires them to be done. A Bitcoin mining ASIC is an assembly line with many nonces in various states of hashing at the same time.

[Odi]

My original post was meant to say that aren't there other ASICs already designed by someone else that can do these same types of computations.

There are other "ASIC" Intellectual Property out there already that can do the same computation.  However, those IPs are optimized for low area and low power, so that they can sell it to someone who wants to add hashing capability to their ASIC.

(How much sha256 crunching will a mobile phone need to do, really?)

This is the key point.  IP out there are meant to do a few hashes.  So the tech sheets I've seen from IP providers calculate a hash in 66 clock cycles.  Furthermore, because they are minimizing area used, they reuse as much as possible during these 66 clock cycles, meaning you can only calculate one hash every 66 clock cycles.  Assuming you are running it at 660MHz, then you only get 5MH/s per IP core (bitcoin hash is SHA256(SHA256(x))).

But to the mobile phone ASIC designers, they are happy to license it so that they can calculate a hash in 100ns, compared to however long it would take to put it through the MIPS or ARM core, or having to implement one themselves.

In comparison, the initial open source FPGA design unrolled the SHA256 cores (if the FPGA can fit it), which means it computes SHA256 in one clock cycle and a bitcoin hash in 2 clock cycles.  It uses up a lot of area, but can roughly get MHz -> MH/s (because of pipelining, the first core can start calculating the next hash while the second one finishes)