yeah its alway the same gag - "no one has shown the ability......"
A GPU device is essentially a packaged simplified "PC" its a; Processor, Ram and Electricity, the market won't keep falling for the same gag.
next question:
Whats wrong with GPU's?
The latest complex algos and the future ones will all be more or less minable on a broad range of old and new devices - CPU and GPU this is as close to "egalitarian" as you will get. (even though that is a really retarded word to use.) (i know its not yours)
its just a free market finding equilibrium, that is all it is.
It's not a "gag" at all - unless you're incredibly familiar with the code and its technical merits, or lack thereof, I don't think it's appropriate to speak to its value.
Here's what Dave Andersen, an associate professor in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon, had to say about it:
The algorithm is *not* complex, it's very simple. Grab a random-indexed 128 bit value from the big lookup table. Mix it using a single round of AES. Store part of the result back. Use that to index the next item. Mix that with a 64 bit multiply. Store back. Repeat. It's intellectually very close to scrypt, with a few tweaks to take advantage of things that are fast on modern CPUs.
Claymore has no fundamental advantage beyond lots of memory bandwidth and compute. His results are actually slightly slower than what is achievable on a GPU with no algorithmic magic -- compare Claymore's speeds to tsiv's for nvidia and extrapolate another 10%-20% due to slightly better code.
Remember that there are two ways to implement the CryptoNight algorithm:
(1) Try to fit a few copies in cache and pound the hell out of them;
(2) Fit a lot of copies in DRAM and use a lot of bandwidth.
Approach (1) is what's being done on CPUs. Approach (2) is what's being done on GPUs. I tried implementing #2 on CPU and couldn't get it to perform as well as my back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests it should, but it's possible it could outperform the current CPU implementations by about 20%. (I believe yvg1900 tried something similar and came to the same conclusion I did). An ASIC approach might well be better off with #2, however, but it simply moves the bottleneck to the memory controller, and it's a hard engineering job compared to building an AES unit, a 64 bit multiplier, and 2MB of DRAM. But that 2MB of DRAM area limits you in a big way.
In my best professional opinion, barring funky weaknesses lingering within the single round of AES, CryptoNight is a very solid PoW. Its only real disadvantage is comparatively slow verification time, which really hurts the time to download and verify the blockchain.
On a serious note.. agreed, it is the most like LTC of current crypto-note crop, but who knows .. anything can happen.
