logoalt Hacker News

scheme271last Saturday at 8:26 PM2 repliesview on HN

How does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.


Replies

0xacklast Sunday at 12:10 AM

Training ASICs (like Google’s TPUs) can generally run inference too, since inference is a subset of training computations. TPUs are widely used for both.

Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.

packetlostlast Saturday at 10:04 PM

The biggest cost is the power which is often on multi year contracts. The hardware is comparatively cheap

show 1 reply