Surely all someone has to do is come up with a way to build a ASIC miner packaged multi gpu box. i.e. buy the GPU's and mount multiples of them on boards like many of the current multi-small-asic miners (antminer, avalon, etc) clock them low enough to be kept cool by heatsinks and large fan combos and you are back in the mining race.
Yes it depends on being able to get raw gpu cores from AMD or whoever, or develop their own programmable asic but given the right incentives (money) someone will come up with a method of concentrating the crunching power into "boxes".
Maybe. Here is what I have been looking at from an economic viewpoint.
AMD and Nvidia are bigger by far then any asic company.
They have a vested interest in finding ways to market GPU's.
Eth coin is responsible for about 100,000 r9 390's in hash power 24/7/365
When you breakdown that 100,000 number we all know that some gamers will mine while they sleep and turn the mining off while they game.
Also some mine with r9 380's so Eth coin has driven far more sales then 100,000 r9's
So both Nvidia and AMD can prop up Eth coin as an advertising cost.
Asrock builds a gpu mining board so they can prop up Eth coin as an advertising cost.
Intel sells cpus they can prop up eth coin as an advertising cost
Amd sell cpus they can prop up eth coin as an advertising cost.
All of the above companies have zero interest or gain from asic chips.
So from an economical viewpoint GPU mining is going to stick around.
I see huge issues for Asic companies down the road.
A simple this ' tape will self destruct ' method for Eth coin. Ie turn it into a pos only coin once an asic builder makes a chip to mine it.
We already have Eth coin 2 in place with a new algorithm to fend off asics. You can keep your Eth 1 coin as pos or convert it to Eth 2 coin as pow
If I was an asic company I would be shitting myself as this could mean death to asic mining.
Note bitmaintech now has come out with a s-7 lite version in my opinion due to eth coin explosion.
You sort of missed the point, my bad I didn't explain it well.
Sure with ASIC resistant coins such as ETH with their willingness to modify and prevent a fixed function processor being able to crunch the algo getting an box with a bunch of ASIC boards in it isn't going to be a success and ends up in the same situation BTC is now.
However, and remember a the term GPU mining is a bit of a misnomer, it really is Graphics card mining. Yes the GFX card does contain the GPU, just like a PC contains a CPU and a Bitcoin Miner contains ASIC's, but a GFX card also has a lot of stuff on it that isn't needed on a miner.
The point I was making was that its possible given the right set of circumstances and money for someone to purchase the GPU cores directly from the manufacturer (NV/AMD/IMG/INTEL/etc) in large numbers and instead of mounting them one or two on a GFX card board, designs a board and transport which houses 10/20/30 GPU cores on the board, just like a ASIC miner design does. Yes its not easy, yes you need memory and other stuff that the GPU cores need to access, but its not impossible if the market is there.
You won't get up to the TH level in a single box doing it this way, but you could get up to multi MH and maybe low GH in a single box. The technology may or may not be worth investing and building but it would be an interesting extension to just buying GFX cards and being limited by the PC form factor and motherboard designs.