Another interesting utility for Bitcoin Asic miners?

[Somegory]

So far we have seen few other use cases for Bitcoin miners and right now I found something else too.
Not too long ago I guess someone created a company that uses Bitcoin Asic miners heat to make beer..

I've also read some past bitcoin mining topics on here where few people claimed to be using their old Asic miners as heater for their home in every cold weather/season.

How about playing doom with your Bitcoin Asic miner right when it's harshing away?..

This is something that GekkoScience Kbox team are able to pull off perfectly.

https://youtu.be/12B4l_CjXAs?si=FDIEJaiDUxqr7LHW

And this have woken up something inside me.

Maybe Linux will end up running on Asic miners someday? I know that those chips aren't CPUs like we have in our computer, they are created specifically for computing sha 256 hashes.

But what if someone found something? Well that's just some curious 🧐 nonsense, right now it's good to see that Asic miners aren't just there to mine Bitcoin only, the heat they generates are useful, even the machines itself.

[Swordsoffreedom]

Heat reuse is no longer limited to home heater and craft beer. A few days ago I saw that Canaan is already deploying multi megawatt hydro cooled unit in Nordic district heating network. Which can provide heating to thousand of homes. I saw their current project is about 8 MW capacity. And in full deployment it is supposed to supply heating to more than 2000 home. This seems to me to be a much bigger long term use case than a novelty like running Doom on a KBox. Although running Doom as an Easter egg is also pretty cool

[Stalker22]

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How about playing doom with your Bitcoin Asic miner right when it's harshing away?..

This is something that GekkoScience Kbox team are able to pull off perfectly.

But are they really playing Doom with ASIC hardware, or just running it on the tiny Linux control board attached to the unit?

Lets be real about what is actually happening under the hood here. ASIC chips are hardwired at the silicon level to do exactly one thing: compute SHA-256 hashes as fast and efficiently as possible.  They physically do not have general-purpose compute cores or GPUs so they can not process game logic, render graphics, or run an OS.  I mean, playing Doom on an ASIC miner is a cool hack for hardware nerds, but the mining chips are not doing anything here except grinding hashes in the background.

[Outhue]

It sound like that they had some extra board installed in the or beside the Asic miner, there is no way a asic miner that boot up a video game I'm suspect some kind of tiny little motherboard or raspberry pi like mono to just get that doom part running.

Also if I am wrong this would be possible on every other Asic miners available, why this Gekko Science miner only? That should tell you that they baked it to make that Doom running, aren't we supposed to be buying cheap Asic miners? That extra touches will make it a little costly than other Asic miners in it's range.

[BALIK]

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How about playing doom with your Bitcoin Asic miner right when it's harshing away?..

This is something that GekkoScience Kbox team are able to pull off perfectly.

But are they really playing Doom with ASIC hardware, or just running it on the tiny Linux control board attached to the unit?

Lets be real about what is actually happening under the hood here. ASIC chips are hardwired at the silicon level to do exactly one thing: compute SHA-256 hashes as fast and efficiently as possible.  They physically do not have general-purpose compute cores or GPUs so they can not process game logic, render graphics, or run an OS.  I mean, playing Doom on an ASIC miner is a cool hack for hardware nerds, but the mining chips are not doing anything here except grinding hashes in the background.

I don't think ASIC will ever be able to run full Linux like CPU. As you said, silicon is basically made of pure SHA 256 pipeline. So the general purpose logic here is very limited. So it's not possible to run Doom directly here. Control board can run lightweight Linux-like systems for management but the main hash chip are dumb and highly specialized.

Anyway, it's nice to see people still finding secondary value in this hardware, rather than seeing it as e-waste after few mining cycle. If the waste heat from mining can somehow become part of real municipal infrastructure then it would definitely change the way we look at the energy story of Bitcoin mining.