But, the withdrawal of GPU mining in the near future, why is no one designing a board that will plug into the empty PCIe slots? I would think a 2 to 8 chip board with cooling would be a perfect fit, as power is right there with the unused PSU connector from the retired GPU. This might be a future consideration, as I see the small boards as expensive in relation to larger boards, price per square CM per hash rate.
What are your thoughts?
* USB is a much simpler (and cheaper) interface to work with than PCI-E for development of this type
* A single host computer can have a lot more USB devices connected to it than PCI
* The host doesn't even have to be a PC- it could be a raspberry pi or TP Link router
* The boards in development now use the PCI-E power connectors anyway that GPU's use
Yep -- say you currently have 10 computers with 6 GPUs each. You could replace each GPU with 6 ASIC PCIe cards and still run 10 computers. Or you could pull all the power supplies and run 60 USB ASIC cards off of one raspberry pi. The pi uses onlye 5 W -- each computer before was using ~ 50W each, saving you 500W. And you've cut your maintenance by a factor of 10 (firewall, system updates, etc). Everything is centralized.