It’s not rocket science. But it is a science.
Introduction
The speculation about hardware design and development costs as it pertains to both ProgPoW and Ethash are usually followed by a statement of authority: trust the author, because they have previous experience in <field>. Sometimes, it is cryptocurrency-ASIC production, other times, it is integrated-circuit design.
For the audience who is more familiar with code rather than fan-out and rise-times, a level of perspective on why this statement of authority does not apply to ProgPoW may be helpful.
A programmer can encompass everything and anything: from writing scripts to iPhone Apps, and from embedded systems, to the Windows operating system. But…
Testnet, AMD bug, and Reducing Compute
ProgPoW Testnet
The testnet is almost up to block 250,000 and has a number of miners, pools, and clients testing. You can observe the status of the network here: http://boot.gangnam.ethdevops.io/
Details for connecting to the testnet are here: https://gist.github.com/holiman/c8944c8be26f798e391822b9a70cb91c#gistcomment-2783941
AMD OpenCL Compiler Bug
We have discovered what appears to be a bug in the AMD OpenCL compiler. For certain periods AMD GPUs when running on the OpenCL platform will always produce incorrect results. The same kernel produces correct results when run on AMD’s ROCm platform or Nvidia’s OpenCL or CUDA platforms.
Members of the ethminer team and us are actively engaged with AMD engineers to understand…
After gaining some mainstream press, we’ve started to receive a number of questions about ProgPoW. We’d like to address a few of the most common.
Q. What’s your stance on Ethereum governance questions?
We don’t have one. We think it’s best left up to the community to answer questions like if, and when, ProgPoW should be adopted. We’ve proposed an algorithm and are happy to answer technical questions about it.
Q. Where did ProgPoW come from?
IfDefElse is a small team that analyzes and optimizes PoW algorithms. We have seen the community repeatedly ask for a PoW algorithm where specialized…
Performance and Tuning
Overview
ProgPoW — a short-hand form for ‘Programmatic Proof-of-Work’ (sometimes colloquially called ProgPoW, or PorgyPoW, after the eponymous Porg from Star Wars VII: The Last Jedi), is a GPU-tuned extension of Ethash that minimizes the efficiency gap available to fixed-function hardware.
As a design paper, this document presents the technical specifications and performance metrics for commonly-available GPU cards. Philiosophical rationale or justification for use is not presented in this document, and we encourage a coin to do their own research on whether or not ProgPoW is the right fit for their network.
Design
“Historically, proof-of-work mining has taken a fixed algorithm and…
IfDefElse
We are the team behind ProgPoW, a GPU-tuned extension of Ethash.
