Quote from: drwho88888 on July 12, 2013, 02:06:43 PM

Quote from: gmaxwell on July 12, 2013, 01:55:03 PM

This isn't mining related

Correct. Well done.

However, I thought some guys who understood the concept of Application Specific Integrated Circuits might be able to shed some light on my question. And I felt that they may be on this forum.

Naughty boy for even considering that. I stand corrected.

ASICs contain specific mathematical operations or algorithms in a physically, hardcoded way. It's the algorithm you want to perform in circuit form.

Let's take SHA256 for example:

http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/sha256.html

Scroll down and you'll find a JavaScript implementation of this algorithm. You'll see it's fairly simple, if you can call it that. Some logical operations here, some logical operations there, all in all maybe 100 lines of code. So developing an ASIC you'll take this algorithm and try to construct electronic circuits that emulate these logical operations. As you can imagine this has been shown to be quite a challenge to develop properly. At least compared to simply writing the code (or porting it to another programming language).

Now take Photoshop. That's like, a gazillion lines of code. Which would probably be a pain in the ass to construct as an ASIC. And with every Adobe update (and you know how much adobe loves their updates) you'd have to physically replace parts of the circuit.

So ASICs for complex software like Photoshop? Definitely not feasible. ASICs for other logical operations and algorithms? Already in use, eg. from what I recall GPUs usually contain ASICs for often required calculations.

Question answered?