Litecoin FPGA developments

[Robby]

Ok firstly I joined this forum to post reply's to some other threads but due to this whole newbie restriction thing (so weird) ill start a new topic here.

Any of you who are familiar with litecoin know that it was designed on the basis of being more CPU friendly and not as compatible on GPU's, aswell as being highly resistant to FPGA and ASIC's.

I'm not gonna get into litecoin GPU mining as that has already proven itself but want to discuss litecoin mining with an FPGA.

Many people are starting to realise that this is possible using DDR memory (of some sort i.e DDR2 or DDR3) interfaced to an FPGA.

I was wondering about specifics.

So i know that the salsa core used by the scrypt algorithm uses 128.5 kB or memory (would be smart to use 256 kB per thread) and from what i've gathered, a single thread (running on a spartan 6) would use 576 slices (roughly) or about 3680 blocks of logic, and produce a hash rate of around 12.5 kH/s using DDR2 memory speeds.

This means the Spartan 6 LX150 would be able to run around 40 threads concurrently, producing 500kH/s, which is on par with most newer graphics cards, but it would use significantly less power.

Any thoughts?

Anyone considered using SRAM as the memory requirements are actually quite small for the amount of threads you could run in an FPGA?

I would love to hear from anyone who is interested in developing this further (PM me) and i will be ordering a Virtex 5 FPGA dev kit in the next few days (i have some experience with FPGA)

Please no flame reply's about how this is not fitting with the ideals of litecoin

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[phk]

Ok firstly I joined this forum to post reply's to some other threads but due to this whole newbie restriction thing (so weird) ill start a new topic here.

Any of you who are familiar with litecoin know that it was designed on the basis of being more CPU friendly and not as compatible on GPU's, aswell as being highly resistant to FPGA and ASIC's.

I'm not gonna get into litecoin GPU mining as that has already proven itself but want to discuss litecoin mining with an FPGA.

Many people are starting to realise that this is possible using DDR memory (of some sort i.e DDR2 or DDR3) interfaced to an FPGA.

I was wondering about specifics.

So i know that the salsa core used by the scrypt algorithm uses 128.5 kB or memory (would be smart to use 256 kB per thread) and from what i've gathered, a single thread (running on a spartan 6) would use 576 slices (roughly) or about 3680 blocks of logic, and produce a hash rate of around 12.5 kH/s using DDR2 memory speeds.

This means the Spartan 6 LX150 would be able to run around 40 threads concurrently, producing 500kH/s, which is on par with most newer graphics cards, but it would use significantly less power.

Any thoughts?

Anyone considered using SRAM as the memory requirements are actually quite small for the amount of threads you could run in an FPGA?

I would love to hear from anyone who is interested in developing this further (PM me) and i will be ordering a Virtex 5 FPGA dev kit in the next few days (i have some experience with FPGA)

Please no flame reply's about how this is not fitting with the ideals of litecoin

Did you get anywhere with your investigation?

[jpyao78]

Ok firstly I joined this forum to post reply's to some other threads but due to this whole newbie restriction thing (so weird) ill start a new topic here.

Any of you who are familiar with litecoin know that it was designed on the basis of being more CPU friendly and not as compatible on GPU's, aswell as being highly resistant to FPGA and ASIC's.

I'm not gonna get into litecoin GPU mining as that has already proven itself but want to discuss litecoin mining with an FPGA.

Many people are starting to realise that this is possible using DDR memory (of some sort i.e DDR2 or DDR3) interfaced to an FPGA.

I was wondering about specifics.

So i know that the salsa core used by the scrypt algorithm uses 128.5 kB or memory (would be smart to use 256 kB per thread) and from what i've gathered, a single thread (running on a spartan 6) would use 576 slices (roughly) or about 3680 blocks of logic, and produce a hash rate of around 12.5 kH/s using DDR2 memory speeds.

This means the Spartan 6 LX150 would be able to run around 40 threads concurrently, producing 500kH/s, which is on par with most newer graphics cards, but it would use significantly less power.

Any thoughts?

Anyone considered using SRAM as the memory requirements are actually quite small for the amount of threads you could run in an FPGA?

I would love to hear from anyone who is interested in developing this further (PM me) and i will be ordering a Virtex 5 FPGA dev kit in the next few days (i have some experience with FPGA)

Please no flame reply's about how this is not fitting with the ideals of litecoin

waiting for your status update

[skeeziks]

So i know that the salsa core used by the scrypt algorithm uses 128.5 kB or memory (would be smart to use 256 kB per thread) and from what i've gathered, a single thread (running on a spartan 6) would use 576 slices (roughly) or about 3680 blocks of logic, and produce a hash rate of around 12.5 kH/s using DDR2 memory speeds.

This means the Spartan 6 LX150 would be able to run around 40 threads concurrently, producing 500kH/s, which is on par with most newer graphics cards, but it would use significantly less power.

Any thoughts?

How much power does a FPGA setup like you describe use?  Does it have any short term(<1 year) resale value like a GPU?  Could you use it for SHA-256 in addition to scrypt hashing?

Anyone considered using SRAM as the memory requirements are actually quite small for the amount of threads you could run in an FPGA?

I would love to hear from anyone who is interested in developing this further (PM me) and i will be ordering a Virtex 5 FPGA dev kit in the next few days (i have some experience with FPGA)

What have you used FPGAs for?

[BitshireHashaway]

I find this interesting. I hope that Asics don't become popular or possible with Litecoins. However, if it is popular to mine them with FPGA's assuming this development happens in a year or so, I will probably invest in the FPGA's some after Bitcoins shown the rewards of the early adopter if I have some funds lying around.

[narf46]

That's an interesting idea. I wonder how the value of the other online currency's is doing with introduction of cheap asics on bitcoin.

[joef]

So i know that the salsa core used by the scrypt algorithm uses 128.5 kB or memory (would be smart to use 256 kB per thread) and from what i've gathered, a single thread (running on a spartan 6) would use 576 slices (roughly) or about 3680 blocks of logic, and produce a hash rate of around 12.5 kH/s using DDR2 memory speeds.

I don't understand the complete scrypt code. in my opinion it uses the sha256 as well. I think it is impossible to calculate sha256 in 576 slices, otherwise the hashrate for actual bitcoin miners would be higher