With the continuing hell world that is crypto and all its awfulness, what happened to the ASICs?
They were supposed to be faster and more power efficient and get people off GPU mining. I have not heard a single word about them since that one company caused a lot of wasted news cycles by running off with the hardware they promised.
ASICs are still used heavily in crypto mining but mostly only for Bitcoin because its basically a requirement at this point due to its complexity but they don’t make nearly as much sense for other crypto currencies.
General purposes GPUs are just far more flexible allowing miners to shift between crypto’s to whatever is the most profitable that day and allows them to sell off cards when there no longer needed to recoupe of of that ROI which isn’t possible with ASICs.
There has been some traction on ASICs for Etherium recently too though once that moves to proof of stake the ASICS will be pretty much be paperweights again.
TL:DR not as flexible and are a very high risk investment going with ASICs because of the way the crypto markets are going.
Pretty power efficient imo, imagine if this was made on the 7nm process.