Mining technology has gone through a couple evolutionary phases. In the early days of crypto mining, people were using their general purpose computers to run these calculations and be rewarded. They were mainly using the CPU of the computer, and users would use their own 'networks' of computers. Then the calculations were switched to the much faster processing power found in the GPU, the graphical processing unit. Humans get creative of course, so this sort of setup went from using 1 gpu in a general purpose computer, to using specialized mining rigs in which the cpu was fairly simple and low power, used to connect to the web, but able to accept 6 GPUs running calculations.
Then of course there were data centers of mining rigs built by people to maximize calculation throughput, and hence the reward obtained from doing these calculations.
Read More Here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4134839-bitcoin-mining-hardware-valuation-exuberance
