Crypto Mining Blog

The Chinese company called Gridseed is the first one that has announced an ASIC chip capable of mining both BTC and LTC at the same time or any other SHA-256 and Scrypt crypto currency. Gridseed’s chips are 55nm ASICs with 3 different operating modes: mine only Bitcoins, mine only Litecoins or mine both BTC and LTC at the same time. The Bitcoin and Litecoin mining at the same time should be able to provide 1.6GH/s for Bitcoin and 60 KH/s for Litecoin mining speed per chip with a 4-5W power consumption as per manufacturer’s claim. So far we haven’t seen any device based on these chips, but apparently Gridseed are already shipping chips and the first devices should start hitting the market after the Chinese New Year holidays are over and info about the first devices is already becoming available…

The DualMiner USB is one of the first ASIC based USB miner for both SHA-256 and Scrypt that is based on a single Gridchip’s GC3355 processor chip. It can be setup to mine Litecoin only, or Bitcoin and Litecoin simultaneously. The hash performance is apparently bounded by USB 2.0 specification of maximum 2.5W power consumption for a device and thus instead of of 1.6GH/s Bitcoin mining speed you get only 500 MH/s and instead of 60 KH/s Litecoin speed only 40 KH/s in dual mining mode for BTC and LTC. If the operates only in LTC mining mode it will operate at 70KH/s or a little over the default chip specs thanks to the lower power consumption for LTC scrypt mining only. The price of a single DualMiner USB ASIC is $98 USD at the moment, however the specs of the device don’t make it that interesting for a single unit.

A company called Lightningasic has announced a Bitcoin and Litecoin ASIC mining system based on multiple Gridchip GC3355 processor chips capable of mining BTC and LTC at the same time. Unlike the single chip USB devices these systems use multiple chips and provide higher hashrate – 300KH/s for scrypt plus 10GH/s for SHA256 working together with 60W power consumption. Only mining scrypt gets you 8W and for only SHA256 the power consumption is 52W. This looks more promising in terms of hashrate available, but for these devices to be really interesting we are going to need more chips together on a board and these are probably not going to be late to follow.