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It'll be interesting to see if the cryptocurrency mining industry will help subsidize this work, since their primary edge is power/performance. During stable p
by px43 6y ago
It'll be interesting to see if the cryptocurrency mining industry will help subsidize this work, since their primary edge is power/performance.
During stable price periods, the power/performance of cryptocurrency miners runs right up to the edge of profitability, so someone who can come in at 20% under that would have a SIGNIFICANT advantage.
- wmf 6y agoIn this paper, we study the use of superconducting technology to build an accelerator for SHA-256 engines commonly used in Bitcoin mining applications. We show that merely porting existing CMOS-based accelerator to superconducting technology provides 10.6X improvement in energy efficiency. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04641 https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04641
- reasonabl_human 6y agoLooks like the admit it’s not scalable and only applies to workloads that are compute heavy, but a 46x increase over cmos when redesigning with an eye for superconducting env optimizations
- Badfood 6y agoCost / hash. If power is free they don't care about power
- adolph 6y ago/ time. Time is immutable cost.
- gwern 6y agoEven if power is free, you still get only a limited amount of it to turn into hashes. Power sources like plants or dams only produce so much. Even if you have bribed a corrupt grid operator to give you 100% of the output from a X megawatt coal plant for free, you're still limited to X megawatts of hashing. If you can turn that X megawatts into 10*X megawatts' worth of your competitors' hashing, well, you just 10xed your profit.
- agumonkey 6y agoIf something like that happens it will have far reaching consequences IMO. I'm not pro blockchain.. but the energy cost is important and it goes away significantly people will just pile 10x harder on it.
- woah 6y agoHow efficiently bitcoin can be mined has absolutely no impact on the power consumption of bitcoin mining. The difficulty adjusts.