We are facing a new bubble of cryptocurrency mining, which has increased the demand for the different graphic cards to undermine. But why GPUs are looking more to mining than other processors, which are the reasons behind it? We explain why the GPU is highly sought for miners, that you may know the current situation.
The current bubble cryptocurrencies mining, especially related to Ethereum, has made not only graphics cards have disappeared from the shops, but the price of these quasi has doubled. But why are GPUs so sought after by miners?
What cryptocurrency mining is based on?
The reason why the mining concept is used is that it is based on deciphering a key where it is increasingly difficult to do so. So the cost of decoding the next unit is always higher than the previous one. All this emulates the exploration of minerals where it is increasingly difficult to obtain new units and the added cost of the new minerals extracted affects the price of those already previously extracted, increasing it.
Due to the growth of the difficulty when mining, cryptocurrency mining farms have to renew their fleets of graphics cards. Not only due to wear but also due to the fact that the new architectures are more energy-efficient than the previous ones, reducing costs when executing the mining algorithms.
In any case, the increase in the cost of mining must be differentiated from the demand in the price of the different cryptocurrencies in the market, which does not start exclusively from costs but also from supply and demand.
GPU architecture is ideal for mining
When cryptocurrency mining began at the end of the 2000s, it was not using graphics cards but conventional CPUs. However, the increasing difficulty of mining meant that the execution capacity of the CPUs more thought for the execution of the serial code began to make them the less suitable hardware for mining.
GPUs have the ability to compute thousands of data in parallel, thanks to their extensive SIMD units in combination with their dozens of shader units. So not only can they be mining different parts of the blockchain of each cryptocurrency in parallel, but they can also apply different algorithms and parts collaboratively.
The algorithms are applied through Compute Shader programs, which are shader programs that do not run in the 3D pipeline used to render graphics and are rather used in other fields. In which the enormous power of the GPU is used to solve data problems in parallel. And one of these fields is cryptocurrency mining.
GPUs are cheaper to scale than a CPU
Have a CPU with a large number of cores that are designed to work in tandem without associated latencies can cost us dearly because for them are necessary server CPUs with the high cost that this entails. On the other hand, graphics cards, although when rendering they cannot work in parallel, they can do so in other applications and this allows to build many GPUs working in parallel at the cost of a CPU for servers.
A mining farm can take several high-end GPU graphics cards for mining, but also mid-range and low-end GPUs, and combine them together in parallel for great decoding performance. That is why not only the high-end graphics cards are sought by the miners, but the rest of the ranges.
Are we going to see a third bubble mining?
We can not be sure, but cryptocurrencies with longer life Ethereum have left the GPU to rely on ASICs, units fixed function, or accelerators that are designed for only one type of cryptocurrency and algorithm that lose flexibility in exchange for increasing outrageous efficiency regarding energy consumption and cost. As mining cryptocurrencies reached a point will conventional GPU once stopped using the CPU.
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