Cross posted from r/MoneroRegarding RandomX and ASICs, people seem to mis-understand the interaction between hardware/software, the costs of development/manufacture of world class semiconductors, and the economics of ASIC mining.These on-chip, bare metal processing units that RandomX requires are highly advanced, and required to make chips "smart." An "ASIC" takes simple dumb functions and iterates them on bare silicon, rather than as a software abstraction (a layer higher) on top of the underlying hardware.There are a few things that RandomX didn't include, meaning that a fully optimized "ASIC" processor could eliminate some unused logic units to make room for the others particular to RandomX. At most, the designers of RandomX estimate a 2x improvement over current CPUs.2x. That's almost nothing when you consider the economics of what it takes to make one of these things. As someone who spent 5 years as a process engineer in a world class semicon fab, I can tell you the design, testing, manufacture and turnaround time for advanced CPUs is enormous. Nothing like dumb SHA256 ASICs or simple memory chips. You better be gettting a huge return on investment to go to all that trouble.2x is nothing. Bitcoin ASICs arose because there was something on the order of 1000x speed advantage over GPUs. That's the kind of economics you need to recoup the costs involved. Not to mention that you are still competing against the ever progressing AMD and Intel advancements (and probably ARM and RISC-V soon enough). Bitmain has very little competition. They have the patents and the process for new ASICs.So no, it's unlikely, for years, that anyone will develop an economically viable "ASIC" (lol) for RandomX.What we might see are CPU manufacturers use RandomX as a benchmark for their new units, since you will have the promise of a sort of "rebate" by mining Monero. In fact that could be an awesome marketing opportunity for Monero.
Submitted December 10, 2019 at 01:06AM
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