Crypto currencies are still akin to magic for me and I'm not a hardware engineer by any means, so this is probably a stupid question, but: why doesn't someone create a processing card specifically for mining? Not a GPU but something stripped down to the necessities and running flat out all for the sake of mining.
Granted, a big part of that answer is that it's a limited market when weighed next to the costs of design, prototyping, tooling, production, etc.
I'm curious - which coins are still GPU-minable? I thought everything GPU mineable has already been "mined" and the difficulty is way past the GPUs and is now towards custom ASICs.
> I thought everything GPU mineable has already been "mined"
Coins that you can make effective ASICs for are mined with them, but newer coins have designs that were made to explicitly not work well on ASICs, e.g. by requiring a lot of memory.
Granted, a big part of that answer is that it's a limited market when weighed next to the costs of design, prototyping, tooling, production, etc.