| HN Mirror

I mean, a serious FPGA lab would simply keep their FPGA techniques secret until they build a sizable advantage. There's a lot of tech that would be built up: a custom memory controller, an implementation of various Cryptocoin PoW systems, and of course, the Bill of Materials for the ideal power-efficiency for various designs, etc. etc.

Something like an FPGA + Interposer to HMC would be a huge R&D effort, and just as centralizing.

BTW: None of the designs I've talked about are strictly speaking commodity. They'd require at a minimum, custom PCBs. Maybe more advanced techniques for the best technology (again: Custom Interposer to HMC + FPGA interface + all the Verilog / VHDL code to make it happen).

As long as an FPGA-based shop kept their FPGA PCB secret, as well as their code secret, and their Device Drivers secret (You'd probably run Linux / Windows to talk to the FPGA over PCIe) then they're basically going to be ahead of the rest of the competition. Eventually, the competition would catch up, but a constant R&D effort into newer designs (ie: testing HBM2 vs HMC vs RLDRAM3 vs QDRIV, building relationships with suppliers, etc. etc.) could lead into a sustainable business edge.

Heck, early on in Monero's life, some dude got to like 40%+ of the entire network's Hash Rate by simply writing better CPU code and keeping it for himself, and then spending hundreds-of-thousands of dollars on AWS: https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-mone...

> By the 14th of May, we were 45% of the total hashing power on the coin. Things started to get a little exciting

FPGAs would be that on steroids. There are way fewer Verilog / FPGA engineers. It also would require custom PCBs and hardware engineers to make it all happen. I wouldn't even know who to ask to design an Hybrid Memory Cube interposer and to fit it on an FPGA for example.