Also, the other downside, and this only really applies to if you mean mining at their actual home is even the quietest miners, tend to make some sort of audible sound, which not everyone wants in their home. Then you have to think about the dynamics at home, the husband/wife might want to mine, but does their partner want the constant hum of the miners, and the wires sprawled everywhere.
Apparently some company is going to be selling a 128 core cpu next year. i bet that will put asics out of business. plus it won't make any noise.
Not at all! I first thought you were trolling, but it's good. We're all here to learn. First of all, 64-core CPUs are widespread in server applications for years, and a 2x improvement in core count is just O(1) difference, so those would compete with ASICs just as well as 128-core CPUs (
just use 2 of them, right).
Secondly, no general-purpose chip can compete with ASICs per definition. Realistically, even a very old ASIC will beat such a CPU.
Little back of the envelope calculation:
Let's assume the CPU was able to do one SHA per clock cycle (absolute maximum, with specialized instruction that doesn't exist). Let's assume a constant boost clock of the highest boosting CPU of roughly 5GHz (high core count CPUs clock lower, but let's give it the best shot). 128 cores x 5GHz x 1 hash/s = 640GH/s.
At a power draw of probably 300-500W and probably costing around $2,000 USD.
You can get a Compac F [1] for around $200 and 15W of power draw that pushes 300GH/s, so two of those would match this hypothetical CPU at a price of $400 and 30W. That's 5 times cheaper and at least 10 times more power efficient, so you could say 50 times better.
However I gave very very optimistic numbers; a CPU needs way more than 1 cycle per hash; I believe 100-1000 cycles if memory serves correct, which would be 6.4GH/s or 0.64GH/s, which would be much lower than even an old stick miner which just pulls 5W like NewPac.
[1]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5355470.0[2]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5053711.0