"A bitcoin hash is about 1900 32-bit integer operations [1]. This is comparable to 1900 32-bit floating point operations, not one(!)." That's the amount of wor

"A bitcoin hash is about 1900 32-bit integer operations [1]. This is comparable to 1900 32-bit floating point operations, not one(!)." That's the amount of work you do in a software implementation of SHA-2, running on a CPU or GPU. This abstracts the hardware complexity inside the chip, which is very relevant when we're going into ASIC's. SHA-2 is bit shifts, masks, and binary adders: it's much simpler than a floating point core. A hardware comparison would be something like ops/(transistor * time). A recent Bitcoin press release [1] claims 500 billion SHA-2 hashes/second out of >1 billion transistors: ~500 hashes/(transistor-second). A 7990 has a peak throughput of 8.2 teraflops SP [2], out of 8.6 billion transistors: ~1,000 flops/(transistor-second). Both are on 28nm processes. [1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/uniquify-hashfast-announce-working-silicon-160000124.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/uniquify-hashfast-announce-wor... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_7000_Series#Southern_Islands_.28HD_7xxx.29_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_7000_Series#Southern...