I thought Wagner's algorithm sorted. I'll have to reread the paper more carefully.
That puzzled me too. I don't see a need for sorting, just for binning to find collisions on the next chunk of n/(k+1) bits
In this case it turns out there is little difference between fully sorting and sorting into bins,
since the expected bin size is only 2 :-)
So equihash really seems to be all about sorting...
I apologize for my ignorance in understanding exactly what you're saying.
The bottleneck is going to be sorting - so it will be transfer speed between the ram and the processor and the processor speed. Not the amount of RAM that will be the bottleneck?