<p>No. ASICs are Application Specific, so they can't do anything else. Not password cracking either.</p>

<p>You can use them as an electric heater.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-12-06T11:32:55.250Z
2015-12-06T11:32:55.250Z
Jannes
<p>I've done a minor amount of research into the topic of bitcoin mining using ASICs and FPGAs, and I've started wondering:</p>

<p>Could these be used as GPUs (possibly specialized to a subset of what modern GPUs are capable of)?  If they're so much faster than GPUs, what is preventing them from being adopted as a GPU replacement?  Is it just that they are specialized hardware and simply can't perform all the tasks a modern GPU can?</p>

<p>And as a quick side-question: Do password crackers use these as well?  If not, why?</p>

<mining-hardware><asic><gpu><fpga>
ASIC and FPGA feasibility as GPU
Ben Sandeen
# ASIC and FPGA feasibility as GPU

(Asked by: username_0 on 2015-12-06)

I've done a minor amount of research into the topic of bitcoin mining using ASICs and FPGAs, and I've started wondering:

Could these be used as GPUs (possibly specialized to a subset of what modern GPUs are capable of)? If they're so much faster than GPUs, what is preventing them from being adopted as a GPU replacement? Is it just that they are specialized hardware and simply can't perform all the tasks a modern GPU can?

And as a quick side-question: Do password crackers use these as well? If not, why?

**Tags:** mining-hardware, asic, gpu, fpga


---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2015-12-06. Score: 1

No. ASICs are Application Specific, so they can't do anything else. Not password cracking either.

You can use them as an electric heater.


---

