[HH] Bitcoin mining hardware

[Greg London]

> Of note, one is an Altera FPGA implementation:
> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Open_Source_FGPA_Bitcoin_Miner

Nice. hardware wise, it looks like the core of the engine
is here:

https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/blob/master/src/sha256_transform.v

It's a module that has two 256-bit ports and one 512-bit port.
There's a generate loop that instantiates 26 "digesters".

Each digest looks like it has about ten 32-bit adders.
i.e. 260 32-bit adders. not a small design.

The bitcoin fpga project targets a
Altera DE2-115 Development and Education Board
Which sells for $500.

http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?No=502

The FPGA is nothing to sneeze at:

http://www.altera.com/literature/hb/cyclone-iv/cyiv-51001.pdf

 : 150K logic elements
¡ Up to 6.3 Mb of embedded memory
¡ Up to 360 18 x 18 multipliers for DSP processing intensive applications


If I could wrap my head around the math a bit more,
I might even have a go at it.