You’ve probably heard about bitcoins by now, the currency of cryptoanarchist libertarian computer geeks or something. It turns out that GPUs are particularly good at mining bitcoins, compared to CPUs: check out this chart – the key factor is Mhash/sec (though Mhash/Joule is also an entertaining concept). The most interesting page (for me) at the site is their explanation of why a GPU is (so much) faster than a CPU for this task. Not a shocker for anyone reading this blog; we all know that GPGPU can rip through certain tasks at amazing speeds. What’s more interesting to me is how and why one IHV’s GPUs are considerably faster than the other’s. I won’t spoil the surprise here, see the page to learn more.