Quote from: DarkWolf on August 30, 2014, 12:09:26 AM

Hi,
This may seem like a very stupid question, but I am wondering why FPGA's aren't used instead of ASICS? Part of the answer is probably that I just do not have enough knowledge about hardware and the costs involved. By the way does anyone have a list of the prices for The latest FPGA's like the Xilinx Virtex ultra scale family with 4000000 Logic cells.

same reason why cpu mining died a long time ago.

I think it goes like this:

FPGA = complex computing circuits built into the silicon

CPU = complex computing circuits also built into the silicon

Asic = simple computing circuit that is repeated continuously over the surface area of the silicon

FPGA and CPU can only use a tiny sliver of the computing circuits available to do the BTC hashing

Asics use THEIR ENTIRE computing surface area to calculate hashes. (Mining hardware vendors simply run their tape-out then start the tedious assembly work of combining our chips resistors ferrite beads capacitors and boards)

FPGAs were used at one point because they were off the shelf and available to work with a much smaller power and subsequent heat footprint (compared to GPUs) As we see, this trend was short-lived as Avalon and bitfury chips flooded the scene (KNC and Bitmain were simply the nails in the coffin of the FPGA Bitcoin mining business)

I basically took out the 'non factor' hardware vendor companies there because they didn't hardly make a dent in btc difficulty levels compared to those mentioned.