New Ethereum ASIC dominates GPU mining performance

A new Ethash ASIC. Today at the New Era Mining Summit in China, Canaan unveiled a new Ethereum Ethash ASIC. The ASIC would easily outcompete GPU-based miners on an efficiency basis.

Using the most common standard for comparing against different cryptocurrency mining equipment, watts per megahash per second, Canaan's new ASIC is brutally more performant than publicly accessible computer hardware.

Ethash, the mining algorithm used for Ethereum, was intentionally designed to be ASIC-resistant.

Unlike the manufacture of other computer equipment, pricing for cryptocurrency mining equipment is based on the profit it can generate as a money-printing device, not on the cost of underlying materials like the conventional computer hardware industry.

Because of their direct access to cheap hardware they can also dominate mining on the network, much like Bitmain.

There is strong evidence that the two mining juggernauts control between 25-50 percent of the SHA-256 mining hashrate based on correspondences between CryptoSlate and representatives at the companies.

The result: over time, most other small-scale miners will get priced-out based as mining difficulty increases.

In April of last year, Bitmain released its F3 Ethereum miner, essentially a GPU with the superfluous components removed to reduce cost of production.

Community debate over ProgPOW. Now, the community is embroiled in a separate debate over ProgPOW, an algorithm that would allegedly level mining efficiency across ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs in a way, that its proponents argue, is difficult to optimize away.

Overall, the development will make Ethereum mining less accessible to hobbyists and the general public as these ASICs continue to proliferate.