In the crypto world, ASIC stands for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. To put it simply, it is a piece of hardware designed to do exactly one thing and nothing else. In the early days of Bitcoin, people mined using the CPUs in their home laptops. Eventually, they realized GPUs or gaming graphics cards were faster. But as the competition grew, developers created the ASIC.
ASICs are the heavy machinery of the crypto mining industry that help solve the complex mathematical puzzles that are required to secure blocks in networks like Bitcoin and Litecoin. They are costly and loud, but they are very efficient at “hashing” which is part of mining.
Think of a CPU like a Swiss Army knife, it’s versatile enough to handle countless tasks, though it isn’t exceptional at any single one. A jack of all trades but a master of none. Whereas an ASIC is more like a high‑speed industrial meat slicer. It can’t multitask or do anything outside its specialty, but it performs that one job thousands of times faster than any general‑purpose tool.
In fact, ASIC models have had an evolution of their own as well. In early 2013, Canaan Creative shipped the first-ever ASIC called the Avalon1. Before this, mining was done on gaming computers. The Avalon1 was a game-changer because it was roughly 50 times more powerful than the best graphics cards of the time.
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Then, from 2016 to 2021 manufacturers like Bitmain began dominating. They focused on efficiency trying to reduce how much electricity the machine uses to produce a result. The most legendary model was the Antminer S9, which is used even today. But now the focus has moved to cooling. Modern flagship models use hydro cooling. These can produce a 473 TH/s hashrate. These machines are so efficient that they are used as space heaters in homes and greenhouses, where mining waste heat is recycled to warm buildings.