What is the general ASIC miners? It miners, which are based on specialized chips, which have been designed to perform strictly limited functions. ASIC is the abbreviation of the English. application-specific integrated circuit, that is, an integrated circuit for special purposes. Unlike FPGA (in Russian or Field Programmable Gate Array), ASIC chip in the new program can not be sewn. This severely limits their use, but greatly reduces the cost of the process of manufacture in large quantities.
You will not be able to help ASIC miner, designed for mining Bitcoins, perform any other tasks, for example, to engage in mining Litecoin. But you can get a huge miner power by orders of magnitude cheaper than if you sell it on the FPGA. It is also worth noting that the development of FPGA miners is relatively cheap, enough to buy a development board with the desired chip and you can write a program to debug, the chip rewrite as many times as necessary. The development of the ASIC miners much more time-consuming and costly exercise both in finance and time. Any error in the production - and the party goes in the trash, start anew. The reward for the successful production of the exhaust process is the ability to cheaply get hundreds of thousands of chips.
Avalon Chinese company did not engage in long-term prospecting activities, and pretty quickly released on chips market. They are produced on a fairly middle-aged process technology 0.11 microns and have a relatively modest figures for the computing power of the order of 270 Mh / s. However, this is one of the first specialized chips for mining the Bitcoin, which started to produce in large quantities, and they are constructed is described in this review miner.
