bitcoin

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.