Quote from: AzN1337c0d3r on June 08, 2012, 10:58:52 PM

Actually, litecoin is dependent on cache-speed (see this page), so depending on the cache-organization in Knight's Corner, it might not even end up being faster than a regular CPU.

scrypt is sequential memory-hard algorithm and is dependent (mostly) on memory access speed. Since memory requirements are enormous (16MB per single scrypt operation by default) and since access pattern is random, CPU caches would not help a lot. It does help much more with bcrypt though where the state is just 4KB and can fit in L1 cache completely. scrypt is unimplementable on GPUs for other reasons, mostly that there is just not enough memory - assuming you can utilize ~2GB of videoram, that would feed 128 workitems or 2 wavefronts which is quite inadequate to keep even one of the CUs properly utilized and definitely not enough to hide any memory latency.

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SHA256 hashing only needs 1 thing: lots and lots of ALUs. Stuff like AVX, threads, and x86 just introduce structural dependencies that slow down the process.

No, it needs parallelism. Lot's of ALUs won't help unless you can feed them with enough work to do. SHA256 round steps are sequential and there are dependencies, thus you won't perform one SHA256 operation X times faster by just throwing in X times more ALUs. You would likely benefit a _lot_ more if you can run several independent SHA256 operations on those X ALU units in parallel manner.