GPU calculation is more like hiring a whole elementary school ’ s kids to help you finish 1 million questions of simple plus and minus computations . It continuously tries to decode different hashes repeatedly with only one digit changing in each attempt in the data that is getting hashed .
It this compute-intensive property of the GPU that makes them suitable and better for cryptocurrency mining , as the mining process requires higher efficiency in performing similar kinds of repetitive computations .
For general consumers who need to play video games , render videos or even try to profit on mining have to reach out for either Nvidia and AMD for graphics card because they are the only two companies on the planet that are capable of designing and producing them . They are major tools used by Bitcoin miners . ATI Radeon 5970 is a video card popularly being used for Bitcoin mining .
AMD GPUs are faster Bitcoin miners than Nvidia GPUs . AMD Radeon HD 6990 = 2550 billion 32-bit instruction per second Nvidia GTX 590 = 1243 billion 32-bit instruction per second
This approximate 2x-3x performance difference exists across the entire range of AMD and Nvidia GPUs .
Secondly , the algorithmic operations can be implemented as a single hardware instruction on AMD GPUs but require three separate hardware instructions to be emulated on Nvidia GPUs .
These two factors make AMD GPUs 2x-5x faster when mining Bitcoins .
New Devices Replacing Despite technological advancements , certain challenges - like excessive power consumption and limited profit potential – remain which reduce the efficiency of the mining hardware .
GPUs have been around for years , but are now facing competition from improved , new-age devices . They include the Field Programmable Gate Arrays ( FPGAs ) and the Application Specific Integrated Circuits ( ASICs ), which are better than both CPUs and GPUs at performing hash calculations , an essential function to blockchain management in cryptocurrency .