Keks3000 t1_j88700f wrote on February 12, 2023 at 10:47 AM

Reply to comment by Northern-Canadian in PC CPU Shipments See Steepest Decline in 30 Years by diacewrb

The operations that are needed to calculate (or rather guess) the keys required to mine new blocks on the blockchain are best run on graphics cards, hence the demand created by crypto, and the price hikes that came with it.

I’m not sure why that is the case though, maybe someone can explain how a GPU is better suited for the job than a CPU. I think it somehow has to do with CPUs focusing on parallelization and energy efficiency in recent years, while GPUs are more like raw power work horses.

Northern-Canadian t1_j8aog83 wrote on February 12, 2023 at 10:30 PM

Thanks for explaining!

NecroAssssin t1_j8blle5 wrote on February 13, 2023 at 2:34 AM

It's because GPUs are optimisized for math, since doing anything fancy (literally more than the original command line environment) with the display is a lot of math. CPUs however, are much more generalized to be able to give sane output in a variety of different ways for downstream processes.