ouch. that would certainly put some hurt on gpu eth farms. most people were counting on eth not going away from pow for what, another year or so?
So bitmain has decided to call the eth pos bluff.
this will shake up the world of cryptocoins big time.
of course a fork could fork the bitmain asic. I would like to see this play out.
https://coinmarketcap.com/1 BitcoinBitcoin $147,216,469,090 $8,731.50 $5,965,710,000 16,860,387 BTC 4.25% sparkline
2 EthereumEthereum $84,035,910,402 $861.29 $2,207,890,000 97,569,820 ETH 2.22% sparkline
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Bitmain is about to release F3, the ethereum ASIC miner. Its reported that every miner is mounted with 3 mainboards. On each mainboard there are 6 ASIC processors, each of which has 32 1GB DDR3 memory. Therefore, one unit of F3 miner contains 72 Gigabyte DRAM memory.
The F3 only for ETH mining may not be the full story here... memory heavy algos may benefit too?