There's nothing special about this stuff really. The processors they are using at the moment are literally just standard SHA256 core designs slapped on a wafer. The ASICmimer gear is ridiculously inefficient, drawing something like 11W per gigahash of mining.

Other designs like the anonymous Bitfury's are hand routed and do a lot better, around 0.8w per gigahash, but although there's skills in doing so, it can't really be applied to anything except for Bitcoin mining.

They're pretty basic on the scheme of things, they're just very costly to get to a fabricator in the short timeframes the community wants.

So, this cooling is basically a ghetto monkey-copy of techniques Cray pioneered two or three decades ago--right down to the use of 3M Fluorinert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2).

I don't think that this technology is going to be readily adaptable to anything other than brute-forcing hashes. I don't know of any fundamentally useful engineering or research being generated that would have application elsewhere.

EDIT: Which isn't to say it isn't neat...I just don't think it'll bear fruit anywhere else.

"ghetto monkey"? Really?

Had I written "ghetto-monkey copy" your annoyance would be merited; note, however, that I did not.

It is a monkey-copy (of the ghetto variety).

You're correct about the existing hardware not being useful. I don't think the bitcoin ASIC research is generally applicable to other fields.

This came up on the bitcoin Stack Exchange:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10421/are-bitcoin...

Has any new technology been developed that's widely applicable? It seems like straightforward financial pressure being applied to existing technology. What problems exist that'd benefit from extremely high density hash calculation? That is, computing that only needs 32-bytes of input?

There's really nothing new at all here technologically. ASICs are old hat.