Back to the Timeline
2010
Event
milestone
GPU mining begins — the arms race starts
What happened
ArtForz brought the first GPU mining farm online, using private OpenCL code to win blocks far faster than any CPU. By his own account he mined ~1,700 BTC in six days; within weeks GPU miners dominated the network.
Significance
The end of the CPU-mining era. GPU mining set off an arms race that pushed Bitcoin toward specialized hardware, pools and the modern, capital-intensive mining industry.