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August 24, 2013, 06:11:10 PM |
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They're going to hit the wall of diminishing returns on node sizes fairly soon.
Once the miners are on 28nm, they are at the limit of current tech (unless you're Intel, who will not even bother with bitcoin). The returns on shrinking feature size have been smaller and smaller with each shrink lately, and this is likely to continue.
At this point, the only real optimizations are in layout, but there are only so many creative ways to improve incrementing a nonce, performing a SHA256 block operation or two, and comparing the result for a number of null bits.
I expect everyone to eventually settle into around the same price/performance/power consumption, though the companies getting to 28nm first will obviously have an advantage.
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