Computing Hardware — From von Neumann to CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC

Bitcoin mining and BOINC both mobilized integrated circuits around the world. Yet even when they shared CPUs and GPUs, heterogeneous scientific computing and a fixed SHA-256 proof-of-work contest demanded different machines, validation, and economics. This article reads computing as a history of circuits, instructions, data movement, parallelism, programmability, and manufacturing institutions—not as one simple speed race.