Quote from: C1D on April 16, 2013, 06:46:26 PM

Quote

Hi,
This looks interesting, but I don't think it will be able to compete with the Avalon ASIC. The 64 cores are certainly nice, but a single Avalon ASIC can do 275 Mhash/s.
Even if each Epiphany-IV core can produce one full hash every 640 clock cycles, it will only generate 80 Mhash/s. I'm more of an FPGA/ASIC person, so I'm basing the 640 clock cycles on 10 clocks per individual SHA256, and 64 rounds per hash, which might even be low.
I think it is hard to compete with the Avalon ASIC custom chip, which was custom designed for mining.

Regards,
Pat

I see your point, I'm quite new to the world of ASIC and FPGA's and I so I thought this could compete. I will still be using this as a server and a second board for a custom PC. Also can ASIC's run applications or are they designed for mining?

I also have considered the Parallela design. Assuming C1D guesstimates about the Epiphany's hashrate are close enough, you could achieve 1Gh/s by putting together a bunch of Parallela boards (it would take 122 boards to achieve 1Gh/s, by my calculations, and I didn't take into account any kind of overhead required for processing the Bitcoin/getblocktemplate protocols). 122 x $100 = $12,200. Each of those boards would require at least 5W, but probably more than that given the expected heavy load. We'll be kind and leave it at 5W. Compare Avalon #3: 63 Gh/s @ 600W at a cost of $5000-$6000 (depending on exchange rate, but this is close enough for now). If you scaled up the Parallela board to produce a comparable hash rate, you'd be paying $769,000 for the hardware, and you'd need 31.5kW to run them (not to mention a place to put them and additional equipment and electricity to cool them). This is also all assuming you can purchase or manufacture this many boards at a cost of $100 each.