different types of mining

[flexgroo]

are all altcoins scrypt based mining with cpu or gpu?

And bitcoin is hardware?

If so why do none of the alt coins use the same gear as bitcoin miners?

[vpasic]

there is no much point of mining anything with CPU these days.
you mine Sha256 coins with ASIC and Scrypt coins with GPU.
also you mine every coin with hardware. ASIC is hardware, GPU is hardware, CPU is hardware. you just using software to make hardware to work.
and finally,
ASIC = Application Specific Integrated Circuit
second word, specific mean's that it can do only one specific thing! and that thing is Sha-256 hashing!
so that's why you can't do anything else with it!

[NorbyTheGeek]

"Altcoins" is a broad term.  There are some SHA256 altcoins (same algorithm as Bitcoin), many Scrypt coins, and there are others such as Primecoin and Protoshares.

CPU mining is not very profitable anymore for SHA256 and Scrypt, but can still be profitable for Primecoin and Protoshares.

The SHA256 altcoins can be mined with the same ASIC hardware used for Bitcoin mining.