I want to do a short piece about aeon on steemit but can't find much information about the coin. can somebody point me to a white paper or something maybe? what makes cryptonight lite different from the original algo? some interesting current and planned features, and info about them? I've noticed when I mine aeon I get a higher hashrate then I would get mining other CN coins. Why is that?
The cryptonight-lite variant uses half as much cache and half as many rounds per hash (only half as many rounds are needed to ensure good coverage of the entire scratchpad, since it is smaller). Thus you can get twice as many hash attempts per thread and, depending on cache availability, twice as many threads on your CPU (overall about 4x faster, or more if the CPU has less than 2 MB of total accessible cache). Example: i7-4770 has 8 MB of cache and 4 cores but supports hyper threading for 8 hardware threads. With 8 threads you are using a total of 8 MB of cache here, or 16 MB with regular cryptonight (which wont work since the CPU only has 8 MB).
There are also quite a few low end or mobile CPUs with only 1 MB of cache or 2 MB but segmented so that only 1 MB can be used by any core. Those perform terribly with regular cryptonight, but are perfectly usable with cryptonight-lite.
As for a white paper, there really isn't one, as this was originally a "keep the coin from dying" project when I took over and has evolved from there, rather than having a real "launch". There are various technical writeups scattered throughout this thread including the pruning FAQ and some comments about the safe allowance of lighter-weight 0-mix transactions, and now the above description of the function and motivation for cryptonight-light (a similar writeup might have appeared earlier, I don't remember). Perhaps at some point those should indeed be collected into a white paper.
