Quote from: haarts on November 15, 2012, 03:21:06 PM

Would a miner take advantage of these new cores without any (or little) code changes?
http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/intels-50-core-xeon-phi-the-new-era-of-i/240105810?donkey

Yes and no. The cores run x86 and are not OpenCL compatible so the mining kernels would need to be recoded and recompiled. This is a pretty trivial requirement.

The major killer is cost. Looking at the specs my total SWAG would be 2 MH/s per core that would be 100 MH/s per board. At $2600 each it would be hard to compete with GPUs. Forget about competing with FPGA or ASICs.

Now for LiteCoin.... maybe but unlikely. Against a real "memory hard" algorithm (LTC was intentioanlly weakened in this respect) it would be powerful and would be a "CPU killer". Kinda shows how silly it is to put limits on coin mining. Eventually something will come along.

Say BTC was designed to be really memory hard such that avg GPU barely outperformed the average CPU. This is like getting 10+ CPU on a board. You could build a rig with 8+ of these boards and out power 80+ normal CPU nodes. Technology always finds a way.