All true, but I was thinking about a measure that abstracts away from the parallelism/serialness tradeoff. Obviously, supercomputers aren't going to be optimized for ultra-paralellizable tasks like mining rigs are, and I want a measure that doesn't penalize them for this.
And you don't have to guess about supercomputers being less cost-efficient in hashing -- that's the whole reason that amateurs like me, without any experience building one, can put to gether a cluster that's hugely ROR-competitive with existing rentable computing services (a theme often noted on the Bitcoin forums).
Still, there are a number of necessary operations at the assembly/machine level to perform a flop, and presumably much of the same operations are used when computing a hash. At the very least, you have to move around memory, add values, etc. There should be level of commensurably in that respect, right?
Still, there are a number of necessary operations at the assembly/machine level to perform a flop, and presumably much of the same operations are used when computing a hash. At the very least, you have to move around memory, add values, etc. There should be level of commensurably in that respect, right?
Unfortunately, there isn't; in most architectures, the integer and bitwise operations that SHA256 uses and the floating-point operations that FLOPs measure aren't even using the same silicon, except for some common parts that set up the operations but don...
There seems to be quite a bit of a Bitcoin interest around here, with several articles about it already: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]
I propose that links and generic Bitcoin comments should be posted here, instead of making a new discussion thread for each interesting article about the subject.