Mining Bitcoin-GPU {Post-19}

The Graphics Processing Unit is the processor that sits in the heart of your graphics card or more recently on your main CPU itself in the form on on-chip GPU. GPUs are more focused towards mining since they have a reduced instruction set compared to CPUs. CPUs are designed to calculate a wide variety of instructions hence the focus is more on compatibility and less on volume. GPUs on the other hand have a much reduced instruction set in comparison and can crunch out a lot of numbers in a short amount of time.

Needless to say, AMD cards are way better than NVIDIA’s offerings and this is because of the architecture they have. AMD’s GPUs have many simple shaders that run at low clock frequency while the NVIDIA design has a lot lesser CUDA cores which run at a relatively higher frequency.So AMD gets

the upper hand by having way more parallel processing throughput, when we compare the AMD 6990 to the NVIDIA 590 we can see that   --> AMD Radeon HD 6990: 3072 ALUs x 830 MHz =2550 billion 32-bit instruction per second
-->  Nvidia GTX 590: 1024 ALUs x 1214 MHz = 1243 billion 32-bit instruction per second 

Right off these numbers we can see that AMD is ahead by twice the margin. Another factor is how the instruction sets are implemented in the two competing devices. AMDs instruction set is capable doing what NVIDIA’s instruction set does in number of steps. This significant advantage in terms of time combined with the sheer raw output puts AMD ahead of NVIDIA.