Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: The Ethereum Paradox
by
iamnotback
on 09/06/2016, 23:18:37 UTC
The point is that if you have enough threads running, the likelihood is there are 2^12 threads wanting to read from the same row, thus your algorithm is no longer bounded on memory latency rather on memory bandwidth and moreover that there isn't 1 hash per memory row buffer load but instead 2^12 hashes, and thus actually your algorithm is computation bound and will be 1000s times more power efficient on the ASIC.

I stated earlier
Quote
To avoid latency, you could increase the number of memory banks by a factor of 2^7,
but this similarly increases die area, hardware costs, and energy usage.

Your above proposal of simultaneously running millions of hardware threads and needing to sync them
incurs much worse increases in die area (to the point of not fitting on any single die),
hardware costs, and energy usage.

My calculation was 2^15, that isn't a million.

Did you really design these threads already. I bet they can use a minimal number of transistors each by reusing some components for threads that are stalled.

Multiple CPUs can access the same memory. Perhaps the same could be done if multiple dies are needed.

Afaik, the hardware cost is rather insignificant relative to the relative power consumption efficiency cost when it comes to mining economics for ASIC farms.