Subforum naming FAIL - page 2. | Bitcointalksearch.org

eldentyrell

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felonious vagrancy, personified

Quote from: koin on July 06, 2012, 09:04:41 PM

Quote from: eldentyrell on July 06, 2012, 05:41:20 PM

Why are FPGAs considered "custom hardware" but GPUs are not?

my gpu doesn't need to be programmed to mine. there's no firmware update and no bitstream.

Wha? This is just plain false. Your GPU won't mine unless you upload code written in OpenCL/CUDA.

Calling it "shader code" instead of "firmware" or "bitstream" is just a matter of terminology.

Here's the source code for the part of DiabloMiner that is written in OpenCL and gets compiled and uploaded to the card.

koin

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Quote from: eldentyrell on July 06, 2012, 05:41:20 PM

Why are FPGAs considered "custom hardware" but GPUs are not?

my gpu doesn't need to be programmed to mine. there's no firmware update and no bitstream.

eldentyrell

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felonious vagrancy, personified

Quote from: wildemagic on July 06, 2012, 06:34:24 PM

cpus and gpus that are part of the normal pc hardware.

I own at least three different normal PCI cards (two network, one graphics, off the top of my head) with FPGAs on them. You probably haven't noticed how often FPGAs are part of your "normal pc hardware".

The current classification really is "mining using devices made by companies who spend a lot of money on advertising to consumers" vs "everything else". I really can't think of any other reason why GPUs are not "custom" and FPGAs are.

wildemagic

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I think hardware should be hardware, the root being cpus and gpus that are part of the normal pc hardware.

There should also be a separate section for FPGA and separate ASIC (or speculation since there are no mining ASIC atm)

kind regards

bitcoindaddy

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They should have just created a new group - ASIC and left FPGA alone.

eldentyrell

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felonious vagrancy, personified

Why are FPGAs considered "custom hardware" but GPUs are not?

I mine on (among other things) one of these boards, which were on sale before bitcoin existed:

http://www.xilinx.com/univ/xupv5-lx110t.htm

Why is that considered "custom" yet mining on an ATI graphics card isn't?

I understand that the old naming scheme was not ideal, but the new one is actually worse. If you mean "everything that isn't a CPU or GPU" then say that -- I can't say that I think that's a good organizational scheme, but at least it's self-consistent.

Topic: Subforum naming FAIL - page 2. (Read 2819 times)