What is ASIC miners

[den.faulkner1990]

Found some topic here when man asking about gpuvscpu. And someone wrote the right thing " Cpu and gpu are the waste of time because there are ASIC's on the scene"

Could someone explain fundamental difference between gpu and ASIC. I thought ASIC's are powerful gpu's specialized to mining bitoins.  For this reason ASICs are cheaper the gpu farm in $/hash 

Are there some conceptual difference between gpu and ASIC?

[os2sam]

And if you would have followed the Hardware Comparison link I posted in that thread you would have very easily seen the differences between ASIC's and CPU/GPU's.

Take a look at it this time and I think it will answer your questions.  If not feel free to post a follow up after reviewing it.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

[techman]

Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) . This is the first step for you

[jets567]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining#ASIC_Mining

"ASIC Mining
An application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, is a microchip designed and manufactured for a very specific purpose. ASICs designed for Bitcoin mining were first released in 2013. For the amount of power they consume, they are vastly faster than all previous technologies and already have made GPU mining financially unwise in some countries and setups."

[DrG]

The English and non-technical version: ASICs in this context are CPUs designed solely for the purpose of mining SHA-256 cyrptos - the most popular one being Bitcoin.  Since the chip can only mine and do nothing else (doesn't produce video or audio output, doesn't have extra L2 cache, etc) it is 100x faster than a GPU - just like how a shovel is designed to move dirt while a mop is not.

[den.faulkner1990]

The English and non-technical version: ASICs in this context are CPUs designed solely for the purpose of mining SHA-256 cyrptos - the most popular one being Bitcoin.  Since the chip can only mine and do nothing else (doesn't produce video or audio output, doesn't have extra L2 cache, etc) it is 100x faster than a GPU - just like how a shovel is designed to move dirt while a mop is not.

Thank you, that's what I thought. so there are (or could be in a future) a coins which gives advatages to gpu's but asic's are useless for them. Am i right?

[os2sam]

The English and non-technical version: ASICs in this context are CPUs designed solely for the purpose of mining SHA-256 cyrptos - the most popular one being Bitcoin.  Since the chip can only mine and do nothing else (doesn't produce video or audio output, doesn't have extra L2 cache, etc) it is 100x faster than a GPU - just like how a shovel is designed to move dirt while a mop is not.

Thank you, that's what I thought. so there are (or could be in a future) a coins which gives advatages to gpu's but asic's are useless for them. Am i right?

So you are asking about alt coins.  You need to post in the Alt coin forum.

But as it is right now there are very few ASIC's developed for non sha256 alt coins.  So those coins may be for GPU or even CPU's only until someone develops ASIC's for them.

But again the folks in the alt coin section would be more knowledgeable about that.

[den.faulkner1990]

The English and non-technical version: ASICs in this context are CPUs designed solely for the purpose of mining SHA-256 cyrptos - the most popular one being Bitcoin.  Since the chip can only mine and do nothing else (doesn't produce video or audio output, doesn't have extra L2 cache, etc) it is 100x faster than a GPU - just like how a shovel is designed to move dirt while a mop is not.

Thank you, that's what I thought. so there are (or could be in a future) a coins which gives advatages to gpu's but asic's are useless for them. Am i right?

So you are asking about alt coins.  You need to post in the Alt coin forum.

But as it is right now there are very few ASIC's developed for non sha256 alt coins.  So those coins may be for GPU or even CPU's only until someone develops ASIC's for them.

But again the folks in the alt coin section would be more knowledgeable about that.

no, it's not about altcoins. I'm interested in difference between ASIC and GPU, this question simply followed.

[DrG]

The English and non-technical version: ASICs in this context are CPUs designed solely for the purpose of mining SHA-256 cyrptos - the most popular one being Bitcoin.  Since the chip can only mine and do nothing else (doesn't produce video or audio output, doesn't have extra L2 cache, etc) it is 100x faster than a GPU - just like how a shovel is designed to move dirt while a mop is not.

Thank you, that's what I thought. so there are (or could be in a future) a coins which gives advatages to gpu's but asic's are useless for them. Am i right?

So you are asking about alt coins.  You need to post in the Alt coin forum.

But as it is right now there are very few ASIC's developed for non sha256 alt coins.  So those coins may be for GPU or even CPU's only until someone develops ASIC's for them.

But again the folks in the alt coin section would be more knowledgeable about that.

no, it's not about altcoins. I'm interested in difference between ASIC and GPU, this question simply followed.

Well the ASIC only has advantage if it's doing the specific task it was designed to do.  It has an advantage over a GPU or CPU as long as the coin is SHA-256.  Other coins like Litecoin have their own ASICs made for their protocol (scrypt).

So yes any new coins that come out that use an algorithm for which there is no ASIC (like cryptonote based coins) will have an advantage on GPU since the Bitcoin ASICs can't even attempt to mine those coins.  If a coin/algorithm becomes popular somebody will make an ASIC to mine it for profit.

[bbeesley]

just follow this link for a wealth of information

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+an+asic+miner

[Soros Shorts]

If a coin/algorithm becomes popular somebody will make an ASIC to mine it for profit.

You can bet your ass on that. Conversely, it could be said that an ASIC-proof coin is a worthless coin.

[bbeesley]

You can bet your ass on that. Conversely, it could be said that an ASIC-proof coin is a worthless coin.

the reality is that anything you can do programmatically - in software - can be represented in an ASIC

the only question is, "when does it become worth it to invest the money to spin an ASIC because I can recoup the tens of millions in investment from a market willing to buy enough of them"

[DrG]

just follow this link for a wealth of information

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+an+asic+miner

If you leave this board and head off to google land you'll run across scam after scam.  It's better to just go to the hardware subforum and read the 20+ threads on the newest ASICs and get an idea of what these machines are like.  Even if you came across the BFL thread you would find 10 angry people yelling at them.  If you find BFL through Google you just lost your investment 

[HarmonLi]

If a coin/algorithm becomes popular somebody will make an ASIC to mine it for profit.

You can bet your ass on that. Conversely, it could be said that an ASIC-proof coin is a worthless coin.

If a lot of money flows into making ASICs for a specific coin, I'd suppose that the market around that coin at least provided some potential. Litecoin is showing us the opposite at the moment, I guess...