First Public OpenCL Miner Released
User 'kiv' releases the first OpenCL miner, enabling AMD graphics cards to mine Bitcoin and establishing AMD's dominance.
On October 1, 2010, Bitcointalk user kiv released the first public OpenCL-based miner. While the previous CUDA miner (released in September) only worked on NVIDIA cards, OpenCL was a cross-platform standard that supported AMD (ATI) graphics cards. This was a watershed moment for the mining industry because AMD's GPU architecture (VLIW) happened to be significantly more efficient at the specific bitwise operations required by SHA-256 hashing than NVIDIA's architecture.
The release of the OpenCL miner triggered a massive shift in hardware purchasing. Miners quickly realized that AMD cards offered a far better hash-per-dollar and hash-per-watt ratio. This led to global shortages of high-end AMD Radeon cards (like the 5830 and 5870) that persisted for years. The OpenCL miner democratized mining further than the CUDA miner did, as it wasn't locked to a single vendor's proprietary framework.
This software also allowed for more sophisticated mining rig setups, as OpenCL could easily address multiple GPUs on a single motherboard. It laid the groundwork for the dedicated multi-GPU "mining rigs" that would soon fill basements and dorm rooms around the world. The OpenCL miner unlocked the superior hashing power of AMD architecture, determining the hardware trajectory of the mining industry for the next two years until the advent of ASICs.
Key Sources:
• Bitcointalk: OpenCL Miner Release Thread
• Bitcoin Wiki: OpenCL Miner
• TechSpot: A History of Crypto Mining