Desktop GPU Sales Hit 20-Year Low...as manufactures began to sell years old video card technology for the cost of an entire gaming system and began blocking crypto mining in firmware

submitted by SoCo from tomshardware.com

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[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

You'd think they'd want the faster CPU's as many have decent onboard internal graphics to do your stock reports and spread sheets very fast. I don't see where graphics come into play for bitcoining as that's just data transferring which GPU's don't really do anything for single core use where as gaming your using a lot of 3D pixels that need that extra chalk space. For single core use your better off with a good CPU which should be out of stock everywhere unlike GPU's.

CPU is like one chalk board and one person who can draw/do math really fast: GPU is like having multiple chalkboards and an extra aid for more advance complex formula's freeing the main teacher for the main task.

[–]Canbot 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A cpu can on do as many calculations as it has cores. So a 20 core cpu can do 20 calculations in one cycle while a GPU can do trillions in one cycle. Even if the cpu cycle is 100 times faster the GPU still destroys it because it does trillions of calculation in parallel.

In mining a gpu can try a trillion different numbers at once and a CPU has to try 20 at a time.

[–]SoCo[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They use the GPUs for Cryptocurrency mining, which rewards them with coins. It used to be very profitable, but now the competition is tight and margins are slim. Most bigger coins have long since been unprofitable to mine with GPUs, but some purposely chose algorithms to avoid more industrial mining, in efforts to keep mining decentralized, by being done in the hands of the average Joe.

The mining requires mostly doing lots of one cryptographic algorithm with specific inputs, such as Scrypt, SHA256, and a bunch of weirdo ones that have since sprung up.

The GPUs are uniquely well setup for such a task, by naturally doing tons of parallel processing, compared to CPUs. A GPU may have thousands of compute cores, normally used for pumping vertex and color data through transformation pipelines for 3D rendering, but they do just as well as parallel Scrypt hash processing cores.