I find this thread highly entertaining. Wether people really understand the differences between the architectures, software, and silicone processes are used to create these entirely different technologies and try to dumb it way Way way way down with various degrees of hilarity, or people just guessing based on popular belief or outright hearsay; All while the actual simple truth is that there are no lines of demarcation, everything is in ASIC, a FPGA is a Programmable ASIC, a Pentium processor is general computing ASIC(the x86 granddad the 4004 was a calculator ASIC), etc.

FPGA‘s are only in efficient because miners are using them wrong. Hell even the ZYNQ FPGA on most bitmain control boards are being used wrong. As many know control board functions can be done by generic microprocessor like the TI Arm Processor on the begle bone and the A113D ARM processor, The programmable logic area is almost completely unused. But you know what, it’s still going to be powered on(it works because, you guessed it, there are two ARM CPU‘s built into every ZYNQ, The logs look familiar because it’s all ARM Linux), and you know what they call that, inefficiency. Do you know what would be a proper use of the FPGA, a miner that switched 10 different coins/algos in one day, because if you just tried to design an ASIC that could reconfigure itself for that many different algos, when you were done you’d realize you just designed an FPGA. They don’t have to be slower either, ZYNQ’s Goliath big brother Ultrascale is an absolute beast if you want to pay many thousand dollars for a single chip.

Any questions?