From https://cryptonote.org/cns/cns008.txt
CryptoNight is a memory-hard hash function. It is designed to be inefficiently computable on GPU, FPGA and ASIC architectures. The CryptoNight algorithm's first step is initializing large scratchpad with pseudo-random data. The next step is numerous read/write operations at pseudo-random addresses contained in the scratchpad. The final step is hashing the entire scratchpad to produce the resulting value.
Not an easy task, for best performance a very custom architecture is needed and an fpga with a lot of on-chip memory to satisfy the algorithm need.
PS: DDR4 memory latency can hurt your performance, don't waste money on a board with things that will be unused. A deep study of the algorithm is recommended.
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