[hngiszmo]

Isn't it beautiful how OpenSource is the joker card of the underdogs? Google played it with Android against Apple, too.

In 2007 I did my diploma work based on AMD GPU cause it was better. In 2011/12 AMD was the standard for Bitcoin mining, yielding twice the performance than NVIDIA. Now, buying my laptop I ended buying NVIDIA. What happened to AMD?

[Symmetry]

AMD is still better for bitcoin mining but that's a matter of integer versus floating point processing power.

[JoshTriplett]

> AMD is still better for bitcoin mining

Neither CPUs nor GPUs have any remaining relevance there, given ASIC/FPGA miners.

[dcposch]

Even FPGAs and older-process ASICs are unusable for Bitcoin today. The network hashpower just broke 1 exahash/second

[ethbro]

Side question: does anyone have links on some power bounds for what the Bitcoin network is currently consuming?

Understand it would be a very rough estimate, but seems like it would be possible to arrive at some kind of number given electricity prices as a ceiling and state of the art efficiency as a floor.

Curious on what the magnitude is in relation to other things...

[voltagex_]

The power/monetary cost of 1 megahash is going to be different in Australia than it is in China.

[ethbro]

That's why I said "bounds".

[lqdc13]

They're still better for integer ops like password cracking. And they're competitive for gaming.