Pros and cons of FPGA mining
Mining with FPGAs has its advantages and disadvantages. Let's examine these in order to understand if and when it is appropriate to use FPGAs to mine Bitcoin. As you may recall, mining started on CPUs and then it moved over to GPUs; then people discovered that FPGAs could be used for mining as well.
Pros of FPGA mining
FPGA mining is the third step in mining hardware evolution. They are faster and more efficient than GPUs.
To summarize, mining Bitcoin with FPGAs has the following advantages:
- FPGAs are faster than GPUs and CPUs
- FPGAs are more electricity-efficient, per unit of hashing, than CPUs or GPUs
Cons of FPGA mining
FPGAs are rather difficult to source and program, and are not usually sold in stores open to the public. We have not touched upon programming FPGAs for Bitcoin mining, as we assumed you have acquired pre-programmed FPGAs. There are several good resources on the Internet regarding FPGA programming; electricity cost is also an issue with FPGAs...
