by maxfan8 on 6/15/20, 6:49 AM with 88 comments
by thesz on 6/15/20, 8:21 AM
I also have a comment about ASIC resistance.
There are tools that allow to customize hardware upon programs it will execute, [1] is an example of one such tool, there are some others.
[1] http://openasip.org/tta.html
If you write a RandomX code generator and interpreter and customize the CPU hardware using tools like one above you will get an optimized version of the hardware. Take a look at [2] for a results of such codesign attempts for Fourier transform. The optimization in energy efficiency can be as high as 100+ times over general purpose processors and on par and exceeding ASIC implementation.
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321700396_Codesign_...
One would duly note that RandomX employs floating point instructions in some parts of hashing process. I will respond that floating point operations can be expressed as operations on fixed point values and these hardware parts can (and will) be shared with other computations. Basically, the codesign tool will implement for you a split (FP)ALU. This will also increase energy efficiency over GPU and general purpose CPUs which have different paths for FP and integer computations and usually do not share ALU parts between these.
To comclude, first, RandomX is needlessly complicated. Second, I think that ASIC version can be attained without writing everything in Verilog by hand, you may stick with C reference implementation for most of the work. And, last but not least, the gain in hashes per joule from ASIC implementation can be much higher than 2-5 times over CPU or GPU.
by tromp on 6/15/20, 7:53 AM
by lvs on 6/15/20, 9:43 AM
PoW should have been set aside as soon as it was generally understood that the network's energy consumption might be unbounded.
by cryptica on 6/15/20, 10:21 AM
Ideally, PoW algorithms should be focused on real science and/or economic problems.
by polytely on 6/15/20, 9:44 AM
by hasa on 6/15/20, 9:33 AM
by elcritch on 6/15/20, 7:37 AM