Could mining come back to CPUs?

[Signus]

I am thinking that FPGA has not been explored enough.

Maybee there are some that can be used to mine different crypto-currencies at a decent rate with low power-consumption and low unit-price compared to CPU based mining riggs.

It truly hasn't. I'm still working on a FPGA project of my own, very very slowly. But developing the bitstream for multiple currencies is possible with FPGA's. If LTC becomes huge once the ASIC's hit the market bit time, FPGA's will be back in the game.

[pizza]

It def will in the future but not the current cpu technology. an article mentioned building chipsets with mobile processors in about a year or so.

[Viceroy]

I am thinking that FPGA has not been explored enough.

Maybee there are some that can be used to mine different crypto-currencies at a decent rate with low power-consumption and low unit-price compared to CPU based mining riggs.

It truly hasn't. I'm still working on a FPGA project of my own, very very slowly. But developing the bitstream for multiple currencies is possible with FPGA's. If LTC becomes huge once the ASIC's hit the market bit time, FPGA's will be back in the game.

Signus, that's interesting.  So assuming a scrypt based currency becomes the flavor of the day (I think likely) then does going this route make sense as an alternative to making a new ASIC or a multi-chipped monster bitcoin mining supercomputer?

[Signus]

Possibly, yes.

The topic though is on whether CPU's could ever come back to the market, and I think not. CPU's are reaching their physical limits.

[Quix]

Although there are a lot of companies that could do this easily they won't. There is not enough money in it. Like it or not Bitcoin is a toy that most people don't play with. It only matters as much as it does to us because we're the ones invested in it. To most people it doesn't matter at all.