Quote from: DevonMiner on May 14, 2018, 06:10:23 PM

[...] I'm sort of hoping 'programmable' miners come to reality this year. In some respects Baikal have set the ball rolling as they add new algos now and then to existing machines. [...]

I might be wrong, but as far as I understand, the programmability of ASIC miners is limited. The reason they are so fast is because they've been designed to do just one thing. And because they're hardwired to a specific algorithm from the ground up, there's not much headroom to make them do other algo's. They might be able to do other additional algos, but they would be quite inefficient at it.

Being inefficient might end up still being better than GPU's (per spent watt), so it may still be worth it, and that's probably why some manufacturers add additional algo's to their miners.