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Comment by daddykotex | Hacker News Reader

Why is AMD Radeon GPUs more efficient to mine LiteCoins than Nvidia GPUs?

One reason is that AMD has a single-instruction bit rotate, which is used a lot in the hash function. Nvidia needs three instructions.

Another is that AMD uses a large number of simple cores, and Nvidia has a smaller number of more complicated cores. The simple cores are all the hash function needs, so AMD can run more operations at once.

Essentially Radeon GPUs have a better architecture than Nvidia GPUs when it comes to executing the mining algorithms associated with cryptocurrencies.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153467-amd-destroys-nvi...

EDIT: grammar

If Litecoin is anything like Bitcoin, here is a good explanation: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU...

The gist of it is that AMD GPUs have more, simpler ALUs, while Nvidia GPUS have fewer, more complex ones. For simple tasks such as sha-256 and scrypt algorithms, the former approach is several time faster than the latter.

It has to do with the amount of power usage and the return rate or mine rate of LTC/BTC. AMD seems to have a better ratio of coin per wattage. So basically just better bang for the buck.

Bang for the buck = efficiency, so you just answered the question "Why is it more efficient?" with, "Because it is more efficient."

The reason, more or less, is that AMD GPUs tend to have way more cores than Nvidia GPUs, and their cores can, in hardware, do the integer operation necessary for the hashing algorithm. Nvidia can only emulate the integer operation, so it takes three instructions on Nvidia vs one on AMD.

You're right. I wasn't aware of the specific technical reasons only knew the power wattage difference.

IIRC, AMD GPUs support and are optimized for newer versions of OpenCL, while Nvidias Cuda solution is much (much) less effective for mining. At the very least a Google search with that in mind will get you the info you need.

Because this: https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

Apparently AMDs have been declared the winner in terms of work accomplished/resources-consumed ratio.

Ya, good question.

See this discussion and linked article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889027

It has to do with the different architecture allowing more 32-bit operations per second.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com