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The good news is Bitmain is rumored to be launching an Ethereum ASIC - 25x as fast as an RX 570 at 4x the efficiency (650 MH/s at 750W). Those are going to pus

by paulmd 9y ago

The good news is Bitmain is rumored to be launching an Ethereum ASIC - 25x as fast as an RX 570 at 4x the efficiency (650 MH/s at 750W). Those are going to push gaming GPUs out of the ethereum market. Prices are going to come down quickly just like the last time ASICs hit the market. (Ethereum is ASIC-resistant, meaning any ASIC needs to look a lot like a GPU in terms of a powerful memory subsystem, which is much more difficult to optimize. It has never been impossible to improve the efficiency of the processing side of things - after all, a GPU is a kind of ASIC. You can think of these as Ethereum-optimized GPUs. The fact that these ASICs are only 4x as efficient as a general-purpose GPU says that the ASIC-resistance is actually working, in comparison the first Bitcoin ASICs were thousands of times as efficient as GPUs.)

mchannon 9y ago
Once Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (supposedly this year) that would render any such effort pretty silly on their part. There are other nascent cryptocurrencies that may make an effort worthwhile.
- paulmd 9y ago
  Ethereum is more than 18 months behind schedule on the PoS switchover, this time last year people were saying we would already be on PoS right now. Now the switchover is "maybe Q1 next year", and he made some statements that sound an awful lot like it's going to be pushed back to 3-5 years. Vitalik can't actually deliver this product. He's a teenager who made a Bitcoin clone with a different hashing algorithm, not a super-genius software engineer. He's way out of his depth and he's not delivering. It's even sillier to take him seriously at this point in time, and Bitmain is putting their money where their mouth is. The only real question is whether Vitalik will hardfork and screw up their implementation... but then next time Bitmain will just keep it in-house and not tell anyone. They already pre-mine with them before selling to customers, business is business. (remember, Bitcoin includes a scripting language for smart contracts too! It was just partially disabled due to bugs in the original implementation that nobody ever bothered to fix. And nowadays the development process has dragged to a halt from infighting between various stakeholders, they are effectively incapable of making significant decisions. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script )
deleted 9y ago
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Fr0styMatt88 9y ago
Why would Bitmain do this when all signs are pointing to Ethereum moving to Proof-of-Stake? I find it hard to imagine them risking the R&D cost that goes into developing an ASIC like this unless they think they're going to make it back very quickly. That's assuming it's Ethash-specific though. I guess you could also mine Ethereum Classic with it at least (are they planning to move to Proof-of-Stake? I havne't kept up).
mv4 9y ago
I think Ethereum is just one of the many cryptocurrencies that are being mined with GPUs right now - so if this rumor is true, I don't expect it to have the same impact that ASICs had on Bitcoin mining.
- paulmd 9y ago
  Ethereum makes up the overwhelming majority of the hash power across all the networks (I'd guess about 75% of the total). If those GPUs go looking for other things to mine, they will crush the difficulty on the remaining networks and profit will go to zero. Many chinese miners are using electricity that's nearly or actually free, they will keep trying to recoup their investment even if it sends small miners into the red. On top of that, most Ethereum people are mining using AMD GPUs - and AMD GPUs have garbage efficiency at all the other coins. Ethash is literally the only one they do with reasonable efficiency, NVIDIA is ~2x more efficient at everything else. https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png (numbers from WhatToMine.com and include undervolting for all cards, and BIOS mods for AMD cards)
  - mv4 9y ago
    If I am reading your chart correctly - the 1080 is also very inefficient at Ethash?
    - paulmd 9y ago
      Correct. The 1080 uses GDDR5X, which is quad-pumped and delivers chunks of RAM that are twice as big as Ethereum uses. This works fine for graphics, and for many other coins, but on Ethereum half of the bandwidth is wasted. (bandwidth consumption is what makes Ethash memory-hard/ASIC-resistant - same principle as the tuning parameters on bcrypt/scrypt, designed to make it difficult for an attacker to scale their processing) The 1070 Ti is basically a 1080 with GDDR5 (dual-pumped) instead of 5X (and minus one SM), and does much better, along with the 1070. The 1080 Ti has enough bandwidth to brute-force it even throwing half of it away.

by paulmd 9y ago

mchannon 9y ago

Once Ethereum moves to proof-of-stake (supposedly this year) that would render any such effort pretty silly on their part. There are other nascent cryptocurrencies that may make an effort worthwhile.

paulmd 9y ago
Ethereum is more than 18 months behind schedule on the PoS switchover, this time last year people were saying we would already be on PoS right now. Now the switchover is "maybe Q1 next year", and he made some statements that sound an awful lot like it's going to be pushed back to 3-5 years. Vitalik can't actually deliver this product. He's a teenager who made a Bitcoin clone with a different hashing algorithm, not a super-genius software engineer. He's way out of his depth and he's not delivering. It's even sillier to take him seriously at this point in time, and Bitmain is putting their money where their mouth is. The only real question is whether Vitalik will hardfork and screw up their implementation... but then next time Bitmain will just keep it in-house and not tell anyone. They already pre-mine with them before selling to customers, business is business. (remember, Bitcoin includes a scripting language for smart contracts too! It was just partially disabled due to bugs in the original implementation that nobody ever bothered to fix. And nowadays the development process has dragged to a halt from infighting between various stakeholders, they are effectively incapable of making significant decisions. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script )

deleted 9y ago

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Fr0styMatt88 9y ago

Why would Bitmain do this when all signs are pointing to Ethereum moving to Proof-of-Stake? I find it hard to imagine them risking the R&D cost that goes into developing an ASIC like this unless they think they're going to make it back very quickly. That's assuming it's Ethash-specific though. I guess you could also mine Ethereum Classic with it at least (are they planning to move to Proof-of-Stake? I havne't kept up).

mv4 9y ago

I think Ethereum is just one of the many cryptocurrencies that are being mined with GPUs right now - so if this rumor is true, I don't expect it to have the same impact that ASICs had on Bitcoin mining.

paulmd 9y ago
Ethereum makes up the overwhelming majority of the hash power across all the networks (I'd guess about 75% of the total). If those GPUs go looking for other things to mine, they will crush the difficulty on the remaining networks and profit will go to zero. Many chinese miners are using electricity that's nearly or actually free, they will keep trying to recoup their investment even if it sends small miners into the red. On top of that, most Ethereum people are mining using AMD GPUs - and AMD GPUs have garbage efficiency at all the other coins. Ethash is literally the only one they do with reasonable efficiency, NVIDIA is ~2x more efficient at everything else. https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png https://i.imgur.com/2u2HOw7.png (numbers from WhatToMine.com and include undervolting for all cards, and BIOS mods for AMD cards)
- mv4 9y ago
  If I am reading your chart correctly - the 1080 is also very inefficient at Ethash?
  - paulmd 9y ago
    Correct. The 1080 uses GDDR5X, which is quad-pumped and delivers chunks of RAM that are twice as big as Ethereum uses. This works fine for graphics, and for many other coins, but on Ethereum half of the bandwidth is wasted. (bandwidth consumption is what makes Ethash memory-hard/ASIC-resistant - same principle as the tuning parameters on bcrypt/scrypt, designed to make it difficult for an attacker to scale their processing) The 1070 Ti is basically a 1080 with GDDR5 (dual-pumped) instead of 5X (and minus one SM), and does much better, along with the 1070. The 1080 Ti has enough bandwidth to brute-force it even throwing half of it away.