Litecoin (scrypt) chip miners? Why not?

[Vezunchik]

I can't understand why there is no FPGA or ASIC miners for litecoin / other scrypt crypto-coins.
What is the main technical problem?

I now that scrypt algorithm needs more memory to run. But in GPU, like 7970 processors has not so many memory for random access (usually cache N KB). FPGA on the other hand contain N MB of BRAM, faster than cache.
Slower part (random access too) is 2-4 GB DDR on GPU, but FPGA board may have multi-port DDR interface and also be faster than GPU.
What about ASIC - there is no problem to get SRAM on it up to 500 MB...

Can anyone answer?

[Bitweasil]

Cost/time/boards.

The FPGA boards being used for bitcoin mining right now have no RAM attached - they're the FPGA cores only.  So you can't use them easily as you need 4kb of block RAM per engine (which takes a bit of space).

You could do it with external RAM on the chips, but that's totally different boards.

And it seems like there are only a handful of people in the community who can write VHDL/Verilog anyway.

My guess is that someone is very successfully mining litecoin on FPGAs with RAM attached and just hasn't bothered to tell anyone about it.

[billotronic]

My guess is that someone is very successfully mining litecoin on FPGAs with RAM attached and just hasn't bothered to tell anyone about it.

Would you?

[Bitweasil]

Would I what?  Mine litecoin with FPGAs and RAM if I had the time and hardware?  Yes.  Do I have the time or hardware?  No.

[mgio]

I can't understand why there is no FPGA or ASIC miners for litecoin / other scrypt crypto-coins.
What is the main technical problem?

I now that scrypt algorithm needs more memory to run. But in GPU, like 7970 processors has not so many memory for random access (usually cache N KB). FPGA on the other hand contain N MB of BRAM, faster than cache.
Slower part (random access too) is 2-4 GB DDR on GPU, but FPGA board may have multi-port DDR interface and also be faster than GPU.
What about ASIC - there is no problem to get SRAM on it up to 500 MB...

Can anyone answer?

They don't exist because Litecoin isn't worth it and most likely will die completely in the next year or so. No one is going to invest millions in designing an ASIC for an alt coin that has 0 use as currency.

Yes you could build an FPGA miner and maybe someone has but the advantage of FPGA miners is really only for the power consumption. They aren't actually any faster or cheaper than GPUs. Again, it's just not worth it for Litecoin or any other alt coin.

There are dozens of alt coins and all of them are just basically bitcoin with a minor tweak. None of them will succeed as there is no reason to choose one of them over the original.

[Flying Hellfish]

I can't understand why there is no FPGA or ASIC miners for litecoin / other scrypt crypto-coins.
What is the main technical problem?

I now that scrypt algorithm needs more memory to run. But in GPU, like 7970 processors has not so many memory for random access (usually cache N KB). FPGA on the other hand contain N MB of BRAM, faster than cache.
Slower part (random access too) is 2-4 GB DDR on GPU, but FPGA board may have multi-port DDR interface and also be faster than GPU.
What about ASIC - there is no problem to get SRAM on it up to 500 MB...

Can anyone answer?

It is being worked on.

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2702.0.html?PHPSESSID=s04ugtai6e6v1fq7m96381m533