[ANN] [SKC] Skeincoin 0.9.3.1

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I'm offering a 10k skc bounty on an opensource FPGA implementation of the skein algo.

HW Testing shows that I can get about 2.5MH/s (for the sha256/skein algo) out of a Cyclone IV E115. Not impressive. That's only burning about 1W though, so that's 2.5MH/s/W which is kinda "cool" if you're gonna make a large rig of dozens of FPGAs. With my rig, once I get the stratum proxy working, I'm expecting around 180MH/s for myr-skein. That's about what you'd expect from a single modern GPU ... meh.

Disappointment.

This still will yield about 5x what my rig is yielding today running the scrypt algo though. ASICs are starting to kick my ass in the Scrypt realm. Todays cryptocurrency landscape doesn't appear to have much room left for FPGAs. The algo's are a whole generation newer (and more complex) than they were in BitCoin days and those damned GPUs are REALLY REALLY fast now! Even though GPUs are not running algo steps in parallel (like an FPGA can) they're running their core at some insane GHz speed that more than makes up for it. If I really work at timing issues I can get logic steps in the FPGA to run up to 100MHz. That's roughly the theoretical max for how fast a single fully unrolled instance of an algo machine can run in this FPGA. The SHA3 generation of algos though are so much more complex than SHA2 that you'd never fit an entire fully unrolled instance in a single IC. You have to start making trade offs to shrink the logic into something that will fit and this means increasing the number of clocks per hash. I've run out of steam at 64 clocks per hash for Skein.

Quite a learning experience

not all of the SHA-3 candidates are more complex some are quite simple by design and work well on FPGA most of the issue are in the IDE and getting it to PAR(ISE is such a pita to use) and high fmax is more luck than any thing else Cry

I have some 28nm Cyclone v FPGA's here will port blake to them once I have finished some other work I do prefer working in Quartus over ISE Wink

hashrate wise FPGA is not going to beat GPU but it will use less power which for me here in UK is an important factor to mining

Quote from: Red Kendra on November 07, 2014, 04:55:06 PM

AuxPow has been reverted for the time being while we investigate an issue.

Please use the 0.8.99.13 wallet (see OP) or the latest version from Github.

Thanks

I found with AuxPoW that the block start code had issues as it seems that the AuxPoW blocks start before the check Wink

hope that helps Cool

Hehe blue on the SKC thread! Cool!

Indeed, Blake is a very simple SHA3 finalist, and it seems Skein is also very simple because it boils down to a tweaked threefish cipher (which is already FPGA fit).