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I'm surprised I haven't heard about any big FPGA mining operations. It would work nicely with this change plus it allows to mine coins with different algos depe
by comboy 9y ago
I'm surprised I haven't heard about any big FPGA mining operations. It would work nicely with this change plus it allows to mine coins with different algos depending on what is most profitable at the moment (along with running some wallet recovery / vanity address generator services).
- brianwawok 9y agoBack when I was trading, we poked at FPGAs.. but they were 10x or 100x slower than ASICS. They were "cool" in that you can 100% predict the speed.. like guarantee algo X takes Yns to complete... which is very useful for some things, but the brute power was really not that impressive compared to a fast intel CPU with no or a very thin OS. I don't think the profit margin can support that kind of efficiency loss, you are back to near CPU levels..
- wmf 9y agoBack in the Bitcoin days FPGA mining had little or no advantage over GPUs.
- juliangoldsmith 9y agoThat's not how I remember it. I remember a significant increase in hash rate and reduction in power consumption when FPGA mining became common.
- mrb 9y agoActually FPGAs had 10× better energy efficiency. This was huge. Eg. the popular Spartan6 LX150 used in many miners was rated 50 joule per gigahash, compared to 500 J/GH for an HD 5970. I used to run both GPU and FPGA mining operations. That said, they were comparable to GPUs in terms of $/GH.
- drcode 9y agoUsually newer POW algos are very memory heavy to make FPGA mining impractical.
- dragontamer 9y agoBut FPGAs can interface with whatever RAM you want. If you have a memory-heavy problem, then buy expensive, high-quality RAM like RLDRAM3 or QDR-IV. In effect, think of RLDRAM3 as the "ASIC" and use the FPGA to interface with it.
- drcode 9y agoYes, they can interface with RAM, but usually at a slower speed than a GPU can interface with colocated RAM (I believe, this is a bit out of my expertise)
- dfox 9y agoFor this kind of workload it makes sense to optimize the DRAM array topology to the problem at hand, which you cannot do on GPU. That obviously means that you cannot use ready made FPGA devboard (which usuallly have quite narrow memory interfaces) but you have to design your own board.
- dragontamer 9y agoYour statement is probably true for strictly 3 GPUs: Vega 56, Vega 64, and Titan V. Because those three GPUs use next-generation stacked-die HBM2 memory. Alas: an FPGA or ASIC could ALSO use HBM2 memory (although looking into the RAM types available: Hybrid Memory Cube looks like a better fit for the Cryptocoin Proof-of-Work problems). The main issue is that stacked-memory + interposers require advanced manufacturing techniques and are incredibly expensive right now. But if the future makes this technology cheaper, then I'd expect FPGA + Hybrid Memory Cube to eventually become the ideal platform for Proof-of-Work mining. AMD really did a good job at turning HBM2 into a commodity (well, until HBM2 supplies dried up anyway). ------------- If you're talking about commodity GPUs, well... QDR-IV and RLDRAM3 have way lower latency than GDDR5, DDR4, and GDDR6. So I'd expect RLDRAM3 + FPGAs or ASIcs to beat any GDDR5 or GDDR6 based GPU at memory-hard problems.
- marshray 9y agoYes, but then you end up competing directly with the price/performance of off-the-shelf hardware. PC memory bandwidth is the best deal in computing because it's amortized across so many units. I think it would be difficult for an FPGA to beat a $200 CPU and $60 MB that has 30-50 GiB/s RAM bandwidth. (Numbers are approximate)