07-12-2016, 01:02 AM
From what I know about FPGAs, which is really very little, they're somewhere between a CPU (or similar, which seems to include those things in GPUs) and ASICs. CPUs can do anything, they're general-purpose (GPU bits are a bit more specific I think), ASICs are hardware that can do just one thing, really well. FPGAs, as the name suggests, can be sort of reconfigured, but not quickly or easily (I'm guessing here, the Wikipedia page didn't help me much).
So you take your FPGA and mess around with it and it can do a hash - problem is, it's then very good at doing a certain type of calculation only, which means always the same hash, always the same mode. Doing a different type means reconfiguring the thing, which is hard.
I'm pretty sure such a thing would be far more expensive than a GPU for equivalent performace for at least a number of years, and even then you'd have to know a lot about the hash algorithms you want and how to implement them on the hardware.
If any of this is wrong, go ahead and shout me down - it's a (barely) educated guess.
So you take your FPGA and mess around with it and it can do a hash - problem is, it's then very good at doing a certain type of calculation only, which means always the same hash, always the same mode. Doing a different type means reconfiguring the thing, which is hard.
I'm pretty sure such a thing would be far more expensive than a GPU for equivalent performace for at least a number of years, and even then you'd have to know a lot about the hash algorithms you want and how to implement them on the hardware.
If any of this is wrong, go ahead and shout me down - it's a (barely) educated guess.