ASIC or Application Specific Integrated Circuit is a special optimized piece of hardware that is specifically designed to do a certain task. A type of ASIC that became very popular was an ASIC for mining perpuses. This piece of hardware could do the task many times faster than doing it on generic hardware.
a mining ASIC is not the be confused with a
GPU. While a GPU can do the job much faster than an ASIC, the ASIC will still beat the GPU in performance.
