Re: What is ASIC miners

The English and non-technical version: ASICs in this context are CPUs designed solely for the purpose of mining SHA-256 cyrptos - the most popular one being Bitcoin. Since the chip can only mine and do nothing else (doesn't produce video or audio output, doesn't have extra L2 cache, etc) it is 100x faster than a GPU - just like how a shovel is designed to move dirt while a mop is not.

Thank you, that's what I thought. so there are (or could be in a future) a coins which gives advatages to gpu's but asic's are useless for them. Am i right?

So you are asking about alt coins. You need to post in the Alt coin forum.

But as it is right now there are very few ASIC's developed for non sha256 alt coins. So those coins may be for GPU or even CPU's only until someone develops ASIC's for them.

But again the folks in the alt coin section would be more knowledgeable about that.

no, it's not about altcoins. I'm interested in difference between ASIC and GPU, this question simply followed.

Well the ASIC only has advantage if it's doing the specific task it was designed to do. It has an advantage over a GPU or CPU as long as the coin is SHA-256. Other coins like Litecoin have their own ASICs made for their protocol (scrypt).

So yes any new coins that come out that use an algorithm for which there is no ASIC (like cryptonote based coins) will have an advantage on GPU since the Bitcoin ASICs can't even attempt to mine those coins. If a coin/algorithm becomes popular somebody will make an ASIC to mine it for profit.