GPU mining for Primecoin

After a few notes on other threads, I’m curious as to what makes a coin a “GPU” coin and what makes one a “CPU” coin.
In the end, all coins are just doing some sort of calculation, right?

What makes Primecoin different? Is there any mechanism that stops GPU miners from computing prime chains in particular?

It’s my understanding that the main algorithm for Primecoin has many nested loop statements in order to check whether there is a probable chain that qualifies as one of the prime chain types. Whereas the other coins use algorithms that are very simple. I’m sure someone else will chime in here though with a much better description. In my opinion, there will never be a GPU miner for this coin; it is fundamentally different in its hashing algorithm.

There already is a proof-of-concept GPU primecoin miner. It’s just not very efficient.

Interesting. Do you know if the inefficiency is because of something in the miner software or because of the Primecoin algorithm?

Hi!

Anyone tried mine on computers with coprocessors Intel® Xeon Phi, Nvidia Tesla, ATI FirePro ?

An ATI FirePro is just a workstation grade graphics card. The Nvidia Tesla also has a similiar architecture to their GPUs. The Xeon Phi 3100 does 1 TFLOPS, while an Intel Core i7 4770K gets about 173 GFLOPS. The Intel Phi is about 6 times faster for 5 times the price. While I would love for the Xeon Phi to be a viable solution, I think it isn’t cost effective over just buying more processors. Especially when you take into the consideration they are geared for enterprise customers with enterprise prices.