Filecoin launches GPU solution, what impact will it have on miners?

As the launch of the Filecoin testnet on December 11 approaches, IPFS+Filecoin is attracting more and more attention from both inside and outside the industry. The latest progress of Filecoin is the focus of attention, because it not only involves the technical update and progress of the project itself, but also involves the interests of a large number of potential miners and mining service providers.

Today, a breaking news swept the Filecoin mining circle: It is rumored that Filecoin mining requires a GPU, so all mining machines that are not equipped with a GPU need to be upgraded and equipped with a GPU.

What is a GPU? Is this news true or false? What impact will it have on miners and mining service providers?

Today I will analyze with you the meaning of this news and its possible impact on the mining circle and miners.

First of all, is this news true or false?

In fact, this news came from the social media group "fil-lotus". Many messages were sent in the group. The original text of one of the key messages read "Also, a heads up: The next devnet will almost certainly require having one or more GPUs in order to mine".

This means that "the next version of the development testnet devnet will almost certainly require one or more GPUs to mine."

This is the direct source of this breaking news.

So what is GPU mining?

Friends who like to play computer games or are familiar with digital currency mining know that the so-called GPU is more commonly known as a graphics card. It is not uncommon for graphics cards to be used in digital currency mining. The most typical graphics card mining now is Ethereum.

In the early years, Bitcoin could be mined with graphics cards, but later, due to the emergence of ASIC mining machines, the computing power far exceeded that of graphics cards, so graphics card mining withdrew from Bitcoin. The fundamental reason why Ethereum can still be mined with graphics cards is that the Ethereum community does not want mining to become dominated by ASIC mining machines like Bitcoin, which leads to the centralization of mining equipment, so an algorithm that resists ASIC mining machines is deliberately added to the algorithm, which makes graphics card mining popular on Ethereum.

This news means that Filecoin mining may also require graphics cards. Is it possible to mine without graphics cards? Of course, you can only use extremely powerful CPUs to participate in mining. If you really do this, it is like using a cannon to kill a mosquito - a waste of resources, which is not cost-effective for both miners and mining service providers. Therefore, from a cost-effectiveness perspective, it is not appropriate to completely use high-performance CPUs without graphics cards.

So what impact does this information have on mining service providers on the market? Let’s discuss the two popular mining services, cloud computing and mining machine mining:

First of all, for cloud computing mining that does not use single mining machines but is composed of functional modules, this information has almost no impact, because in cloud computing mining, the configuration of hardware and software is relatively flexible, and can be adjusted and updated at any time according to changes in external conditions to adapt to the latest mining algorithms.

Secondly, for individual mining machine suppliers, they are also divided into two categories. One is the well-known large-scale mining machine manufacturers whose services cover managed mining machines, and the other is the mining machine manufacturers who directly sell mining machines to users and have already delivered the mining machines to users.

For the first type of well-known large-scale single-unit mining machine manufacturers, many of them have already considered the possibility of graphics card mining when designing mining machines, so they have reserved graphics cards or reserved expansion plans for graphics cards in their design plans, so this news has little impact on them.

For the second type of mining machine manufacturers who have already handed over mining machines to users and claim that users can mine at home, this is a bit troublesome. If their mining machines are already equipped with graphics cards, the situation will be slightly better, but if their mining machines are not equipped with graphics cards, it will be difficult to mine with only the CPU. In this case, those mining machines that only have CPUs must be updated in hardware and add network cards. If there is no graphics card slot in the design of the mining machine, the entire hardware circuit board of the mining machine may have to be redesigned, which will be even more troublesome.

Therefore, it is unreasonable to say that all single-unit mining machine manufacturers are finished after this news came out. However, this news should serve as a reminder to all single-unit mining machine manufacturers: that is, in the process of hardware design, various conditions should be considered as much as possible, and various expandability and module slots should be reserved for future changes.