And yes your excess memory use ideas are still silly in that regard
How so?
(I'm still sure you're just messing with him to make him use these ideas ... but hey if you are serious ... that's a worry
)
These are quite sound ideas. If you know something wrong with them, do tell.
A CPU can trivially use 128MB for a split-second to validate a block header. Trying to do that on a GPU would slow you down to a crawl -- it doesn't parallelize well because the GPU doesn't have as many memory paths as it has execution units.
There is really nothing complicated about making a mining algorithm that works much better on a CPU than a GPU. After all, the algorithm -- so long as it is concatenated into a hash -- can be anything at all so long as it's deterministic. If all deterministic computing tasks could be done better on GPUs than CPUs, we wouldn't have any CPUs.
Well you may be able to do a single hash in a 'split second' but the point is to produce a function that can compute many hashes.
And if the resulting function has difficulty doing 1,000 a second because it accesses and processes a large amount of RAM - then that is just plain stupidity.
Also don't forget that the actual process of using memory will not involve transferring it across the PCIe bus.
Unless the block size has suddenly become some totally stupid size and thus the chain takes up ridiculous amounts of disk space, the hash of a block should only require a small amount of memory transfer and then the GPU can deal with the issue of using silly expansion algorithms to generate a large amount of data to hash - though more likely someone would come up with a simplification unless it's done well - note that SC
all these ideas you'll need in your paper
that you can pretend are yours
Anyway - the bottom line is that wasting that much power on generating a single hash just to attempt (note: attempt - not guarantee) that a GPU cannot do the hash - is as I said before - stupid.
e.g. a 6950 can currently do something like 360 MHash/s on the current algorithm (mine do) and used somewhere under 200Watts of power and costs around $250
To expand this you can add more cards (my MB can take 4x6950 with it's 4 PCIe slots, 2 are 1x and 2 are 16x, and was not at all expensive)
So yeah if someone wants to double/quadruple that middle of the road setup they can with just getting new cards.
Suggesting that people should spend that same amount ($250) on a middle of the road CPU that would also use around 60Watts of power plus the power requirement to have an actual GPU in the computer and use a lot of RAM your really not saving a lot - at BEST maybe a 1/3 of the power
But then to increase performance, you will need a multi-CPU motherboard (expensive and few have them just to get 2 CPU's) or another whole computer.
Then to top it off you can't use the computer easily when it is mining unless you slow mining down to a crawl.
If you GPU mine you can also use the computer and even have VERY little effect on your use
(there are ATI bugs with some versions on window where it will use a whole core in your CPU, but the rest hardly use any CPU - mine uses 2% of a single core with the CPU auto down-clocked to 1200MHz)
With a dual card GPU setup you can actually have mining running at half speed and still have a FULLY functioning computer to use or even play high performance FPS games at the same time.
It just seems ludicrous to even consider and more so is just a waste of a computer to do this.
... and again, if anyone bothers (yeah I don't know if anyone would bother) but if anyone bothers to produce a GPU version of the hash, you suddenly are telling everyone who spent any extra money on whole extra computers so they could hash faster - that they wasted their money - bad luck your hash power is trash.
Bottom line, as I keep saying, its a stupid idea.
