Quote from: fcmatt on June 19, 2011, 07:26:39 AM

Quote from: Hook^ on June 19, 2011, 05:56:59 AM

Quote from: rograz on June 19, 2011, 05:38:31 AM

Quote from: Hook^ on June 19, 2011, 04:58:26 AM

That is because everyone knows that ASICs are the inevitable end game. Whoever has those wins.

Even a ASICs design will have a hard time vs a few million gamers worldwide who consider their graphics cards free and GPU shrinks that happen every 18-24 months on average. Any ASIC design brought out today will have to compete with the radeon 7xxx series and not current hardware.

The problem is that an ASIC can be custom designed to go orders of magnitude faster than a GPU for a specific task. As just a very rough estimate, one SHA256 engine with bitcoin hash difficulty detection would take something like 1 million transistors. The latest ASIC technology allows 2 billion transistors. So that would allow 2,000 of these engines per chip. If you layed them out by hand, you could probably get them up to 4 GHz. Assuming one hash per clock, this ends up being 8 TH/S per chip. In other words, this one chip could outperform the entire current BitCoin network. And once the multi-million up front tooling costs are covered, you can make each chip for $50 each. So for another $10,000 you could make a system with 200 chips that would be able to dominate the entire network at 200 times its current capacity. It would pay for itself in about 20 days, because you would get every bitcoin made in that period.

If the exchange rates hold, you could multiply your earnings and buy thousands more chips for a low incremental cost to maintain your dominance. I don't see how GPUs could begin to compete with this.

it all sounds so good except that one or a group of people have to come up with millions of dollars to do this. And i have a feeling
2 million is just enough to go bankrupt trying without producing a single thing.

sure.. if you get lucky and manage to rope in a few experts in the area you have a greater chance of success.. and if they donate their
time for basically a shot at making bitcoins... and if several stars align just so... maybe someone will make a package that can do this.

i am not an expert in the field. i am known to be wrong and probably am. this is just a gut feeling that if people guess that it will take
1 million dollars to do the job.. i normally multiply that in my head by a factor of 5 to really make it happen.

edited to add:

10:31 TD so it's $1000 per gigahash?
10:32 ArtForz well, if support components, PCBs, cases, ... grow on trees, yes

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but he wins on the power side of things for sure.

According to rumors I have seen around the forums in the last few weeks, there is a group called LargeCoin that has managed to secure a couple of mil and the ASIC engineers to do just that. If I were one of the original bitcoiners that just made 5 million in the last week, this project is exactly what I would be doing with half of the proceeds.

ArtForz used structured ASICs which are just one step above FPGAs. They won't have nearly the performance of a full custom ASIC.