ASIC Mining are so-called chips that have been designed for a specific application and cannot be reprogrammed. Therefore the chips are very small, simply constructed, consume little power and are very fast. The advantage therefore is that you can place several dozen to hundred pieces on circuit boards and they are very efficient due to this scaling. The word ASIC itself stands for “application-specific integrated circuit”.

Other crypto-currencies such as Ethereum not only rely on computing power, but are very data-intensive and require very fast memory. Graphics processing units are much better suited for this. Graphics processing units are fast and have enough memory (up to 16GB). They are multiprocessors and can therefore be programmed freely and in principle take over any kind of calculation. They also do not have to be developed from scratch. A simple update of the software is sufficient.