Re: [XPM] [ANN] Primecoin Release - First Scientific Computing Cryptocurrency
Before I knew about cryptocoins, I ran a lot of GPU's for BOINC distrubuted computing projects. There are/were(?) heaps of CPU based Prime number finding projects but none of them ever used GPU, so I am agreeing that branching is not suitable for the hardware and that is why no one ever bothered to make a program to mine on them. For this reason I suspect we might never see a GPU or ASIC prime number miner.
This question comes from a complete non-computer engineer, but I'm curious. Since ASIC is designed to accomplish a specific task, wouldn't it be possible to create an ASIC to "mine" prime numbers? [This isn't a question about whether it would be a marketable device like the ASIC USB miners, just about the engineering side.]
We need a hyper geek who has:
* Designed processors
* Knows how SHA-256 works on a machine level
* Knows how prime number searching works and how to implement that at the machine level
They should be able to say for sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generating_primes
My brain just hurts looking at these pages and the links that follow.
