Comment by X4 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by X4 | Hacker News Reader

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>> we really need AMD to keep Intel from falling asleep at the wheel

100% Fullack! I too remember the Co-Processors. Do you remember those giant ISA slots, which had math's co-processors that helped some scientists boost their code? =) awe.. and the beloved Turbo Button on your Tower, hehe. Makes me wonder if our Mimzy [1] from the future will have an Intel inside too. Back then, it was a 100% sure bet that Intel would live forever and grow to the largest company on earth. Today things are different, a little company coming up with self-assembling nano-materials and an optical, neuronal, graphene or silicene chip design could beat Intel quite fast. What would hold them back is only the time required for the OS landscape to become more adaptive to the hosting hardware. I see that future in my living time.

I'm also thinking about Bitcoin mining with this rig, or do you know something better? (Those damn ASICS...)

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[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSHhmwGzN8w

Regarding BitCoin, at this point you won't be able to find anything "better" than ASICs, that sort of defines the maximum refinement.

From a systems architecture perspective it is interesting to compare this to the Intel Larrabee project (lots of parallel cores) but that seems to me to have suffered a similar coding challenge that the Cell architecture has.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

Indeed. I've found a 1024 Core manycore manufacturer, but idk. it's price per unit. However, ASICSs that support scrypt are not available yet and even if, you can't use an ASIC for anything else than Bitcoin mining, which is pretty bad, because in 1 year the best ASIC will be outdated and an investment of several thousand dollars is wasted. Would be better if those ASICs worked like a Co-Processor or something..

That is essentially the FPGA value proposition. While they are more expensive than an ASIC because they are re-programmable, you don't have a huge up front investment in masks and wafers. So a decent FPGA set up would probably set you back $10K but you could re-design at will into different sort of 'coin' miners. The book 'Cracking DES'[1] talks about building an array of FPGAs to brute force DES keys. If you are at all interested in ASIC/FPGA based crypto 'mining' you should have and read that book.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Des-Encryption-Research-Polit...

What about Scrypt-based crypto currencies like Litecoin? Will this tech help?

No. The performance of Scrypt based mining is relative to memory bandwidth. GDDR5 is significantly higher than DDR3

The turbo button slowed your computer down to allow older programs (namely game) that relied on counting cycles to still be playable.

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