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I know that Litecoin was designed to be mined with a CPU but then someone figured out how to mine it with a GPU.
Has anyone figure out how to mine Litecoin with an ASIC or FPGA boards, and if not is it conceivably possible? (and by that I mean would it be more effective)
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Yes, there are designs for Litecoin mining FPGA bitstreams, but they are not very efficient currently. ASICs are much more efficient and if anyone finds it lucrative to invest in development of Litecoin mining ASICs, they will push out GPU mining. (The efficiency ratio between ASIC and GPU will be lower than with Bitcoin though).
What would an ASIC implementation look like for scrypt, technically speaking? My understanding is that the comparatively large memory requirement would need to somehow be addressed in an ASIC design. – nitrl – 2013-09-25T03:00:20.170
@nitrl: I don't know all the technical details, but presumably the board that houses the ASIC chips will just also need to include a sufficient amount of RAM. – Meni Rosenfeld – 2013-09-25T09:09:44.280
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Litecoin uses scrypt instead of sha as its crypto function. Scrypt is a memory hungry algo, so it's very difficult to have efficent implementation on ASIC or FPGA at current technology. This choice was made to prevent ASIC and FPGA specialized mining in favour of more diffuse and generalized mining with standard hardware.
UPDATE After just about 3 months my answer is old. There are company working on ASIC chip for scrypt promising release during current year
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I found this discussion on bitcointalk very informative. Meni is correct but for those of you building rigs, I think FPGA/ASIC's for litecoin are still far off.
– Loourr – 2013-09-24T20:33:35.493So say a 1TH/s Bitcoin miner attached to a PC with 128GB RAM and 2GB Graphics card could not run scrypt with any edge? – user898617 – 2014-02-11T19:15:41.847
@user898617 Nope. The limiting factor to how fast you can mine is how many scrypts you can do, and Bitcoin mining ASICs don't do any scrypts. – David Schwartz – 2014-02-11T22:17:56.937