A lot of hand waving there. For some concrete numbers it quotes 53 MB/s and since we only hash 192 bytes at a time, you might think it would do 27 mhash/s (but it probably would be less) which I beleive is actually within the range of a desktop with a couple GPUs.
Sorry, afraid I corrected this after you quoted it. The correct calculation would be 0.27 Mhash/s.
Quote from: creighto on August 17, 2010, 9:52:06 PM UTCThe other point is one that I didn’t explicitly mention, one FPGA does not equal only one sha-256 processor. It is possible, even likely, that more than one such processor could be programmed into a single FPGA chip. These chips are fairly large so that they can ‘virtualize’ some pretty complex logic circuts, and a talented programmer could program one chip to be several sha-256 processors running in parrallel. All this, and his main CPU and GPU are still available if still more Kh/s are desired. Any hacker with the skills to program one or more GPU’s in the same system to crunch hashes is already elite, and doing multiple sha-256 cores on a single FPGA would be child’s play. And we already know that there is some elite talent within the Bitcoin community, some who desire to run it, and some who desire to break it.
Excuse me but you need to be more explicit. First does it need a “talented programmer” or is it “child’s play”?
I understand you are excited about the possibilities but you are making grandiose claims without evidence, nor even concrete estimates of the performance you expect.
How bout some actual numbers? How many SHA256 hashes can you really do in parallel on your FPGA? Please state the actual model number of the FPGA you expect to use. What actual data rates are expected?
Beyond that is the price of the chips, the price of the developer environment and the power requirements. Any of these can be very significant barriers to this idea.
Peace.