Asic miner for Ethereum... why not ?

[mjtrader]

Okay so I have read about ethereum's asic resistance... it's designed to be profitable with GPU's and they dont want asics to "destroy" that like it happened with bitcoin and scrypt miners.
But I don't understand why it wouldn't be profitable? I understand that the Ethash algorithm needs lots of memory and that'S not cheap. But why hasn't a company just produced them in bulk for a lower price and made it profitable ?!

Like I see it, the current best GPUs can mine 46 MH/s (Radeon R9). And they're still profitable.
So what exactly is the problem with having a miner that has more hashing power, would the power consumption be too high?
How high would the power consumption of something like this be, I mean bitcoin miners have incredibly high electricity cost as well, why is this so different?


And another factor I read is that ethereum will switch to PoS "soon".  And once they do that switch, an asics device specifically for ethereum would be unusable.
I don't really understand the technical side of PoS and why that's the case, but let's just say this is true.
How do we know when exactly ethereum will be switching to PoS?
I have gotten the feeling that in the mining world, every announcement is always late. almost nobody meets their deadlines.
I have read some forum posts of people saying they wanted to switch until the end of 2016, others say it may take another 3-4 years. Why so vague?

I'm really just trying to understand why there's asic miners for like every major currency but not the one that's currently on the 2nd place of the market place.

[TheKoolaider]

Go home dude. Read a little before you post shit.

[Metroid]

Its is at 2nd place because its ASIC resistant, which means trust, which means you mine and be sure that value is safe and you dont need to sell it, if ltc was ASIC resistant then its value would be around $50 and not $4. ASIC means only whales can mine, the value is not distributed, whales mine and dump because for them if they dont dump then other whales will. ETH has a check for ASIC, if the questionable device dont pass then it will not mine. there will never be ASIC for eth which means, you can mine or buy safely.

Go home dude. Read a little before you post shit.

'
I politely answered him but in truth, I was like, "what a moron".

[felixbrucker]

actually there is one, at least claimed, asic for ethereum: the Geass P1-200

why there are no/little asics for eth:

I understand that the Ethash algorithm needs lots of memory and that'S not cheap.

And another factor I read is that ethereum will switch to PoS "soon".

On the other side there is a GPU Miner (Pandaminer) used (not only) for eth as it is cheaper to manufacture than asic design and can be used for other algorithms as well.

But why hasn't a company just produced them in bulk for a lower price and made it profitable ?!

The problem as outlined above is the price would be too high to be worth it

[dartmyth]

actually there is one, at least claimed, asic for ethereum: the Geass P1-200

why there are no/little asics for eth:

I understand that the Ethash algorithm needs lots of memory and that'S not cheap.

And another factor I read is that ethereum will switch to PoS "soon".

On the other side there is a GPU Miner (Pandaminer) used (not only) for eth as it is cheaper to manufacture than asic design and can be used for other algorithms as well.

But why hasn't a company just produced them in bulk for a lower price and made it profitable ?!

The problem as outlined above is the price would be too high to be worth it

The Geass P1-200 and pandaminer are just custom motherboards that have 8 or 10 slots that have a gpu that laptop's use. You could take the gpu's out and replace them if one blew or something.
But the biggest reason eth and zec have no real asic is the memory that is required to mine them. They where designed to require alot of memory to mine to keep them from being mined by asic equipment

[CraigWrightBTC]

Unfortunately there are no developers of hardware that build asic for ethereum
 at least for right now and what i know 
If there are asic hardware for ethereum I think ETH's price will going down is like litecoin
 actually i don't agree with asic for ethereum but everything depend on the developers.

[onthefrynge]

It just occurred to me that the reason why ETH plans to switch to proof of stake is to discourage ASIC research and development. It seems likely they never plan to implement PoS, rather to just keep mentioning it.  If this is true, it's a very peculiar security model.

[semirealdude]

It just occurred to me that the reason why ETH plans to switch to proof of stake is to discourage ASIC research and development. It seems likely they never plan to implement PoS, rather to just keep mentioning it.  If this is true, it's a very peculiar security model.

That's definitely a reason to discourage ASIC development, but "soon" the ETH difficulty calculation is supposed to start increasing much more quickly to incentivize transition to PoS.

[couture]

The race against difficulty is real :/

Is there any more news (rumours) on the PoS date?

[devkowow]

As most altcoin algorithms are memory heavy, ASICs would not be faster then GPUs as memory speed would bottleneck device as ASICs and GPUs use same memory. Only gain from ASICs would be fact, that they would be more power efficient, but impact on mining would not be as near as close as it was when BTC went from GPUs to ASICs when we say massive increase in performance and massive drop on power usage at same time. And that is biggest reason why there are non and most likely wont be one in near future.

[lothar_hayner]

Sorry to revive a dead post, but, I've actually been working on this in verilog and a few other thing for several months a this point.

So we know that equihash, and ethereum, as well as neoscrypt are what we call memory hard.

In the specific case of ethereum, we currently have a 2+GB DAG file, or as I like to call it a library.

That library takes up 2 GB today and in a few more months it will be 3gb, etc etc.

So the library has to be accessible, and then the way the algorithm works is by calling a 128 byte "page" out of that 2gb library. Well it doesn't call them sequentially, it's at a seemingly random order, and it also calls it a total of 64 times, before mixing it and then comparing it to the current nonce.

64*128 bytes = 8192 bytes or 8.2Kb for the rest of us.

So now we are talking about how many times we can pull 8.2Kb per second? right because 8.2kb/s is a "hash". so we are now discussing memory bandwidth.

Each 1gb of DDR5 has approximately 24 gb/s of bandwidth, which results in a theoretical max Ethereum hash of approximately 3 Mh/s.

So I had this awesome idea for sticking a single mem controller and processor with 16gb of ddr5 ram (which is actually fairly cheap at $6-7 each) only to find out I have a LOT to learn about electrical engineering and programming.

Theoretically, you could build an FPGA with 16gb or memory on 1 RAM controller, with a single processor, and run about 50 mh/s on 1 card. However the development cost is fairly high for that, and ethereum has been fighting off the PoS Ghost transition for 12+ months now. If anyone had known 1 year ago, that casper would not go into effect in October, they would have made such a card. Hindsight is 20/20. People think Casper will again be rolled out around november/december, and it's july 1, so no one will invest 20+K to develop an FPGA/ASIC card for a coin that is going to proof of stake.

I personally consider that silly, as an FPGA card with 16gb of ram, that runs around 250W that is designed for memory hardened crypto algos is well worth the development.

I had the brilliant idea of combining 10 such 16gb cards, with not but a power supply, small ram chip for bios, and 16 gb of ram and a memory controller, all feeding into 1 FPGA "gateway" device that would send out the work, and the biggest problem I ran into there is a data transfer latency timing issue, where basically I would in theory be submitting all stale shares because, by the time I sent the signal, processed it, sent it back, then received it, then passed it on those 10+ nano seconds would cause me to end up with an effective hash rate of below 1.5 Mh/s. so for 10 cards at 16 gb at a likely cost of $750 per card, or $7500- I could end up with a whopping 240 mh/s @ 2500 watts, IE worse than a rig of Rx 480's.

Theoretically I could make a card, with 2 processors (similar to an R9 290 DUO) and stack 2 memory controllers each with 16 GB of ram on the card and end up with a near 100 MH/s (96 really) it is beyond my own ability to finish the engineering and programming of such card, and I do not possess the LARGE amount of funds it would take to generate the first card. All subsequent cards would be fairly inexpensive ($300-$400 to produce)

The other piece of the puzzle, of course, is making sure that the components are OPEN CL/CUDA device compatible, so that they interface with the current miners, and I don't also have to write my own additional miner.  All in all, if it was truly a profitable venture, you would see someone with money to blow doing just that.

So good luck, and if you ever want to borrow some of my research notes or existing in development files, drop me a line.

[Za1n]

One other reason is the philosophy of the Dev team and community. There is no real technical reason Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other coins that are currently being mined with ASICs couldn't, with a switch to another POW algorithm, be put back in the hands of GPU miners. Point is, if the Dev's and community wanted to keep a coin out of the ASIC realm, they could just change the code if/when that moment happened. A few of the lesser known coins have already did this with great success. The problem as we know with Bitcoin is there are too many big players with deep pockets that would fight tooth and nail to keep that from ever happening. They can't even agree to a minor thing as a block size increase much less something as dramatic as changing out the POW.

[Astmalim]

One other reason is the philosophy of the Dev team and community. There is no real technical reason Bitcoin, Litecoin, and other coins that are currently being mined with ASICs couldn't, with a switch to another POW algorithm, be put back in the hands of GPU miners. Point is, if the Dev's and community wanted to keep a coin out of the ASIC realm, they could just change the code if/when that moment happened. A few of the lesser known coins have already did this with great success. The problem as we know with Bitcoin is there are too many big players with deep pockets that would fight tooth and nail to keep that from ever happening. They can't even agree to a minor thing as a block size increase much less something as dramatic as changing out the POW.

I think the Vert coin has changed the PoW many times.

[head.arrow]

i dont think its possible ethereum have different algo

[Salicorne]

There will be no ASIC for Ethereum because it is a memory-intensive algorithm rather than a CPU intensive one (GPUs are just many CPUs plugged together). So there will never be one for it.

[VasiliyVSL]

There will be no ASIC for Ethereum because it is a memory-intensive algorithm rather than a CPU intensive one (GPUs are just many CPUs plugged together). So there will never be one for it.

I do not think so, many advanced mining rigs has already done, using GPU and memory as in video cards. I googled "ethereum asics" and found devices like this one https://www.nvminer.com , they call it an asic, but it still use NVidia GPUs. however, the hashrate and power consumption are more profitable, than graphic cards.

[vuli]

heh, yea right. Another scam? No company info on the website. Smells fishy to me.

[nvminer_asic]

heh, yea right. Another scam? No company info on the website. Smells fishy to me.

Why did you write so?
We have all information on the website!

[thebigjdoe]

There will be no ASIC for Ethereum because it is a memory-intensive algorithm rather than a CPU intensive one (GPUs are just many CPUs plugged together). So there will never be one for it.

I do not think so, many advanced mining rigs has already done, using GPU and memory as in video cards. I googled "ethereum asics" and found devices like this one https://www.nvminer.com , they call it an asic, but it still use NVidia GPUs. however, the hashrate and power consumption are more profitable, than graphic cards.

you mean you are the scammer that made the website nvminer.com and want to lure in suckers?  lol nice try....obvious scam is obvious

[nvminer_asic]

There will be no ASIC for Ethereum because it is a memory-intensive algorithm rather than a CPU intensive one (GPUs are just many CPUs plugged together). So there will never be one for it.

I do not think so, many advanced mining rigs has already done, using GPU and memory as in video cards. I googled "ethereum asics" and found devices like this one https://www.nvminer.com , they call it an asic, but it still use NVidia GPUs. however, the hashrate and power consumption are more profitable, than graphic cards.

you mean you are the scammer that made the website nvminer.com and want to lure in suckers?  lol nice try....obvious scam is obvious

We are official represent of NVminer.
Do not make hasty conclusions, but carefully review the information on the site.

We can answer any questions.