What's the next evolution in mining?

[TheSeven]

It's called the FPGA/ASIC clusters already owned by big financial players/knowledge management/intelligence communities.

Do you even know what "ASIC" stands for?! Probably not, or you would know, why what you just said is completely stupid.

About FPGAs: They are maybe good at MH/W performance, performance per chip wise they quite honestly seem to suck though.

FPGAs are not exactly cheap, but they're quite powerful.
An XC6SLX150 will get you ~200MH/s for ~20W. And if you build an FPGA cluster yourself, you'll end up with costs around 200-300$ per chip. Because they don't use much power you can reach very high density. Oh, and ASICs might actually be feasible once you reach quantities >10000.

[1715013238]

1715013238

[phungus]

Nvidia may get wise and decide to invest a little money into a Bitcoin R&D project. The fact is, Radeon's are not in stock anywhere and, questionable investment or not, they would probably like to be the ones selling out of cards.

I imagine both companies have probably formed ad-hoc Bitcoin divisions already to examine this phenomenon.

They only need to re-design some of their existing tech by stripping out everything unnecessary. If they can target relatively lower power usage, smaller form factor, less heat, and combine that with a new library to replace OpenCL cutting out everything unnecessary to the hash function, maximizing profit from the device while providing a hot seller, even if it's somewhat temporary, they'd really have something.

If I was an executive at Nvidia, I'd be scrambling to try and put together a business unit to capitalize on it fast.


I registered just so I could post that. Been lurking here for awhile. :-)


I've been feeling a little left out since all I have to hash with is an old 4650. I snagged a single 5830 from Newegg this morning but I don't have enough power supply to run two.

I'm just hoping to mint a few coins to buy some hosting with. I think I may have 0.01BTC hashed so far. :-)

[tehcodez]

It's called the FPGA/ASIC clusters already owned by big financial players/knowledge management/intelligence communities.

Do you even know what "ASIC" stands for?! Probably not, or you would know, why what you just said is completely stupid.

About FPGAs: They are maybe good at MH/W performance, performance per chip wise they quite honestly seem to suck though.

FPGAs are not exactly cheap, but they're quite powerful.
An XC6SLX150 will get you ~200MH/s for ~20W. And if you build an FPGA cluster yourself, you'll end up with costs around 200-300$ per chip. Because they don't use much power you can reach very high density. Oh, and ASICs might actually be feasible once you reach quantities >10000.

already owned

[CoinSpeculator]

It's called the FPGA/ASIC clusters already owned by big financial players/knowledge management/intelligence communities.

Do you even know what "ASIC" stands for?! Probably not, or you would know, why what you just said is completely stupid.

About FPGAs: They are maybe good at MH/W performance, performance per chip wise they quite honestly seem to suck though.

FPGAs are not exactly cheap, but they're quite powerful.
An XC6SLX150 will get you ~200MH/s for ~20W. And if you build an FPGA cluster yourself, you'll end up with costs around 200-300$ per chip. Because they don't use much power you can reach very high density. Oh, and ASICs might actually be feasible once you reach quantities >10000.

already owned

?

ASIC's can only do one thing (Application-specific integrated circuit).  You can't really modify a high frequency trading ASIC for bitcoin hashing...  Maybe an FPGA setup, but even that's questionable.

[TheSeven]

I also doubt that those "big financial players" even use FPGA clusters for anything.

[MoonShadow]

Maybe an FPGA setup, but even that's questionable.

I'm sorry, but I have to ask.  Do you know what a FPGA is?  It stands for a field-programmable gate array.  It's an electronic circut that can be programmed at the hardware level, in the field.