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by officialchicken 3839 days ago
Faster, potentially cheaper, and more expensive to produce?

The history of the bitcoin miner has details and us a real-world example of software on x86 ASIC -> FPGA -> Custom ASIC process. It's easy to find the relative performance of the bitcoin miner running on everything from Rasberry PI's to CUDA clusters [1].

Note that the article is using the very flexible DE2-115 and there's lots of interesting trade-offs made to fit a bitcoin miner in only 115,000 gates... iirc, if you have 250k gates, it can run 4x (???) faster due to optimizations during synthesis.

https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner

Current Performance: 109 MHash/s On a Terasic DE2-115 Development Board [2]

[1] https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Non-specialized_hardware_comparis...