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The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is a cartridge-based system, meaning that its games were stored on circuit boards encased in plastic cartridges. Unlike disc-based media of most later generations of game consoles, the contents of cartridges were not restricted to read-only data. The most common addition to game cartridges was a small cache of re-writable memory used to store progress data in the cartridge.
Originally, active objects in games, called sprites, could only be displayed as one of a set of pre-drawn frames. That's why sprite animations are usually simple loops of a few frames, and why characters are rarely seen changing size as they move towards or away from the player's point of view.
However, later games also included special-purpose microchips that expanded the graphical capabilities of the Super Nintendo console itself. One of these chips allowed the SNES to change the way sprites look as the game was happening, which made sprites look much more alive. This chip also allowed for rudimentary three-dimensional rendering.
Any software workaround to get these effects using only the hardware given in the Super Nintendo would have taking much longer and produced much worse results, if any at all. The video on the Super Nintendo (SNES) by video game trivia group Did You Know Gaming covers these effects and the chips in more detail, and shows some great demonstrations.
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Bitcoin, is a cryptocurrency. Part of what gives it value is the premise that it is computationally hard to create or 'mine' for new ones. In fact, there is a self-adjustment mechanism that increases the mining difficulty in proportion to the total computing power of all miners.
I've appended this historical chart of the log of the total computer power (and the log difficulty), over time with the two hardware advancements that defined the trend in bitcoin mining power.
The first event represents the first time mining using a more specialized graphical processing unit (GPU) rather than a more general central processing unit (CPU) was made publicly possible. Since many miners had compatible graphics cards already, we see a tenfold jump in power almost instantly.
The second event represents the first time mining using a single-purpose processor, called an ASIC* was introduced to the market. This time, another rapid increase in processing power is sparked, but without the initial leap.
An ASIC is orders of magnitude faster at the simple, repetitive task of mining bitcoins than a GPU is, and a GPU mines orders of magnitude faster than a comparably priced CPU. In both cases, the new hardware quickly rendered any previous mining methods obsolete.
* Application Specific Integrated Circuit.
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When developing new methods to solve computational problems, a software approach usually works best. The results of purely software-based are often portable as packaged programs, and the dissemination of improvements can be as quick and as cheap as a software update. The feedback loop of testing and improvement is very quick, and there are many languages such as the R, SAS, and Julia that can make software-based solutions a routine task.
Making hardware to solve a problem may sound insane by comparison - why would anyone willingly give up all of those advantages? This is where Field Programmable Gate Arrays come in. An FPGA is essentially a circuit board that can be programmed down to the gate level. That is, a user can write a program in terms of the fundamental particles of computation, OR, NOT, XOR, AND, and NAND gates.
The FPGA takes a set of gate instructions and physically wires itself into the programmed configuration. When set, the FPGA is essentially an ASIC, an processor that can only do one task but potentially much faster than a general purpose computer. However, if needed, an FPGA can be re-programmed, so the advantage of a quick trial-and-error turnaround is there. Also, the program can be disseminated like any other software. The most popular FPGAs cost between $200 and $500 USD.
The bitcoin ASIC started off as an FPGA. Once the FPGA program was made, it took about a year for the first ASICs to be sold. This is encouraging for anyone looking towards FPGAs for the next great leap in statistical computing, as it means the endeavor has commercial viability. Just think how much faster some common methods could become even if only large matrix inversion was made faster.
It's time to start thinking with gates.
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