So there's lots of talk going around about various projects to fund custom FPGA and ASIC miners, the latter of which has developmental costs in the millions (ie. far out of reach for average users here). A while back someone mentioned they couldn't understand why ATI doesn't produce GPGPU cards like Nvidia's Tesla range, and I think they have a fair point in that: for mining the two essential factors are stream processors and core frequencies - standard consumer GPGPUs go half way on this by meeting the stream processor and frequency requirements, but have enormous VRAM chips (which would be pointless for mining).

As people are prepared to invest a total of millions on an ASIC, would it not be cheaper and more worthwhile (for your average user here) to start taking reference ATI designs and cutting all the unnecessary extras which bring the price up but don't improve mining rates? I don't pretend to really know anything about this field; but from what I understand, graphics card manufacturers take a reference design, tweak the design by changing routing and components to meet a specification, buy the components in and then assemble them onto a PCB - all of which is within reach for a well organized community project.

So by taking a reference design, cutting the bus width (would this decrease costs?), reducing the memory capacity and effective speed (DDR2 / DDR3 are still readily available and cheap) and using a fan chosen purely for airflow, I reckon that would sheer off a fair amount of the cost.

Now obviously economies of scale apply here, but even still - is this realistic?


This is really just a thought I had the other day, so I'd be interested to see what thoughts you guys had.

Cheers,
Mike