Do ASICS for litecoin exist?

[newcoinman]

Hi All,

Do asics for litecoin exist? If so, where can I buy one?

[mitsanaga]

i dont believe so. i remember reading somewhere, sorry dont remember where, that asics are bitcoins only as of right now. so gpu's aren't dead yet. just get a good one and crossfire it. (if you have Nvidia, slap yourself. and buy a radeon. much faster... you will thank yourself.) 

[Gabi]

No.

[BaghdadSteve]

(if you have Nvidia, slap yourself. and buy a radeon. much faster... you will thank yourself.) 

For those already with Nvidia cards, there is a working cudaMiner that works best for those cards.  You won't get as much khash/s as AMD but you'll get more from it than using the other mining programs.

As for LTC ASICS, nope.

[newcoinman]

Since Litecoins seem to be immune from ASICs...is it worth building a GPU rig for mining?
Seems like the difficulty keeps increasing every other day.

[Schrankwand]

Since Litecoins seem to be immune from ASICs...is it worth building a GPU rig for mining?
Seems like the difficulty keeps increasing every other day.

Not necessarily immune. But the building requirements are quite different. Basically, what is more of a "pure" computational algorhithm with BTC is a RAM intensive Algorhithm with LTC.

So, you could definitely build it. The question is at the moment: Would it be profitable? Would people pay so much money for it, that it makes sense?

And at the moment, I doubt that.

[evilscoop]

There is work afoot for ltc fpga's
I'd guess someone would invest in ltc asics after/if that works

[finn_au]

As with any GPU rig ... a large % of costs will be power (KW/h).  Taking as much as 30% to 75% of costs.

If the rate is high enough ... and your cost per KW/h low... go for it!

[jamie22]

I'd lOVE to get an ASIC for anything
or even an FGPA... my gpu's arent doing it anymore. Time to call it quits I think.

[Gabi]

Since Litecoins seem to be immune from ASICs...is it worth building a GPU rig for mining?
Seems like the difficulty keeps increasing every other day.

Bullshit, learn what ASIC is before posting false things.

[J23450N]

It would take some serious and expensive development to get an ASIC to run the scrypt algorithm fast. Scrypt requires a lot of memory and there's a trade off between speed and efficiency. Given the amount of memory in current GPUs they'll probably be the standard for the foreseeable future unless LTC reeeally picks up.

[lordblunt]

Technically you could, but it wouldn't be worth it. You wouldn't get the same efficiency with it that you get on bitcoin.

[antekh]

The larger issue is that there are different encryption algorithms used for both currencies:
bitcoin uses SHA-256
and litecion uses scrypt

Both algorithms have different properties.

SHA-256 requires very few memory, it basically can be designed as a set of logic gates. This can be done very easily in a FPGA or ASIC.

Scrypt on the other hand needs a lot of memory, which makes current FPGA or ASIC boards practically not usabe usable for this kind of algorithms.

So at the moment there is not known implementation of scrypt for FPGA/ASIC and it's quite unlikely that one will appear in near future.