How are ASICs built?

>>56309558
ASIC costs millions to develop.

An ASIC is a CPU purpose built for a particular task, it can be literally anything from encoding video to AES encryption, or crypto-mining.

However unlike a general purpose CPU an ASIC can't be told to do anything else besides what it was built to do, it can never do anything else. An FPGA is similar in that it is purpose built for a specific tasks, but it can be reprogrammed with special tools.

Generally you'd use an FPGA for design/ testing and move your design to an ASIC for production


What you mention with RPi's simply isn't feasible. They use general purpose ARM cores.

>>56309674
Would an ASSP be financially feasible?

>>56309677
Or would FPGA's?

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special hardware is interesting, bump

>>56309558

If you wanna mine bitcoins you just have to front the money, go double or nothing and buy the shit or go fuck yourself

Fabbing a chip is retardedly expensive and it has already been done. Designing the chip is the easy part by far. Usually you just have to program it in VHDL and then verify the design.

An FPGA is something you also program in VHDL. As you would expect, you get losses in efficency. So it would probably be better than a CPU but worse than a GPU per dollar. I don't think it would even pay for itself.

>>56311299
Well that's the thing, I know bitcoin has them, but the coin I want to mine doesn't at the moment.

If one were out, nobody's made it known since the difficulty is so low that a Th device would be making thousands of dollars a minute in mining power (but the volume doesn't appear to be enough for that).

Since bitcoin ASICs can't be made to work for any other algorithm, I was wondering if there's a possible way to build a device more efficient in mining than GPUs at a rate that still pays itself off.

>>56309558
High performance chips exist because of the huge demand
If you want to develop a high performance chip without the resources to produce it in huge numbers and unable sell it at competitive prices you will just have a huge hole in your bank account

>>56311386
Gotcha. Are GPUs the only affordable alternative?

Your only utility for a rPi would be to control multiple miners if you find a solution that can run through usb..

>>56309558
1. Design in a HDL like System Verilog or VHDL
2. ??? (Probably do TONS of testing and some shit more like early versions of the chip)
3. Send final design to factory and hope nothing breaks
4. Profit

>>56311734
FPGAs do provide more MHs/W and maybe even more MHs/s but may be more expensive and you have to design the digital circuit
I do not have enough knowledge on this topic