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Comment by yatsyk | Hacker News Reader

How many megahashes this hardware computes?

I love this board, but keep in mind that the entire premise of this board is parallel execution of _separate instruction streams_. From the performance people are getting from GPU's for bitcoin mining, I presume the calculations can be done extremely parallel with few instruction streams - for that a normal GPU is likely to be a far better choice.

Much, much less than the specialized ASIC platforms do.

But when we consider the consuming power of ASIC platform, I think this board has strength. They said this board consumes 5 watt for typical jobs.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

It's nowhere near fast enough. My 7970s can push out about 1.3Ghash/s and combined they are capable of around 7 TFLOPs. When (/if) they release the BFL Jalapeño it'll run at 5 Ghash/s and be powered by USB. 90 GFLOPs is equivalent to a decent processor, but nowhere near powerful enough for bitcoin mining.

> But when we consider the consuming power of ASIC platform, I think this board has strength.

No, it can't possibly have.

SHA is half bitshifts-by-constants. On an ASIC platfrom, those essentially refactor to no-ops. There is no way, no how general-purpose hardware could ever possibly get anywhere near even a piss-poor special purpose ASIC for this task. If you think otherwise you simply don't understand the domain. Those 600-watt ASIC systems contain multiple chips and run at tens of GHashes/s. That 5-watt chip, if it's very, very good, might maybe break 40MHash/s.

Not enough. Don't bother.

They say 90 GFlops.

(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=26824.20;wap2)

> For example a Radeon 6990 has 5.2 gigaFLOPS of computing power[1] and yields roughly 800 megahash/s in bitcoin mining.

That was in July 2011. Mining is harder now.

Radeon 6990 is 5.1 TERAflops (5099 GigaFLOPS) ... several orders of magnitude faster than this thing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_6000_Series#Northern_...

Cayman XT [Radeon 6970] outputs 2.7 TFLOPS in Single-Precision and 675 GFLOPS in Dual Precision. [1] I think the 6990 is just two of those, or at least that's normally their convention.

[1] http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/12/13/amd-radeon-h...

Doing a single hash isn't harder though. Increased difficulty just means you have to do more hashes. So the numbers given should still be about right.

I agree with you. This might be good for bitcoin mining. :)

The real question is: How much power does it consume compared to its hashing power?

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