Excuse me but you need to be more explicit. First does it need a “talented programmer” or is it “child’s play”?
To a programmer talented enough to hack his GPU, hacking one or more parralel sha-256 coproccesors into one or more FPGA’s would be 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?
To be honest, I was over the top when I said that a set of four FPGA’s would look like a supercomputer. I can’t really say what can be expected, until I try it, but my own (admittely limited) experience with FPGA’s is that a single such chip can replicate a pretty complex shortwave receiver, tuning and all, including all of the currently popular modes on shortwave with zero aid from the master cpu. Two are required only for the experimental modes, and they may even be better/faster these days, as it has been a number of years since I played with these things. They are certainly cheaper. At first glance at the complexity of the sha-256 algorithium, I would expect to be able to get at least four such coproccessors into a chip comparable to the kind that I have used in the past. Any one of which should have a kh/s rate somewhat less than the hardware found on a VIA 7, assuming that they are implimented in pretty much the same way. The ‘virtualization’ of the solid state circut within a FPGA does impose a slight (yet measurable) penalty, but I don’t think that it would be so high as to really matter. If all four chips, each with four coproccessors, could be successfully coded and utilized; I would expect that the resulting kh/s rate would total at least 14 times what the single coproccessor on the VIA 7 can run. And that doesn’t include the additional kh/s that the CPU or the GPU could add to the mix.
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.
Sure, but I was assuming that someone already has a set of these chips for experimental ham radio hobbies; in the same way that using GPU’s to crunch numbers assumes that one already has the GPU. It doesn’t make economic sense to buy these chips for this reason any more than it makes sense to buy extra graphics cards solely to generate bitcoins. Honestly, I don’t know if this is the reason, and I can’t know. But if someone has done this, it’s another game changer for the bitcoin community.
Anyway, I imagine that FPGA chips will eventually become a standard thing to have in a high end PC, and most OS’s will be altered to take advantage of them on a regular basis. Can you imagine what a game company could do if one of these were in every PS3?