There are four types of mining hardware, also known as mining rigs. First, there are the CPUs . Few mine with CPUs anymore. You have as much chance of your home computer beating a high-powered computer "rig" to solve a computation and earn Bitcoin as you do of finding a needle in a haystack.
There are also GPUs which are mainly the high-end gaming computers that have expensive graphics boards. The complex problems that need to be solved can be offloaded to the graphics board. The graphics board can perform the encryption or hashing calculations much faster than a CPU. GPUs is only use for mine other cryptocurrenct but not bitcoin
The next step in the mining technology progression is the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It is a semiconductor device that can be programmed after manufacturing. Just think of it as a chip that can be programmed. FPGAs are faster than CPUs and GPUs, but slower than our next type of mining hardware.
Mining Bitcoin today for the most part uses technology called an application specific computer chip (ASIC), which is specialized hardware that only does one thing: It mines cryptocurrencies. It is not use in any other programmes
With ASIC machines, you are not only mining Bitcoins. You can mine any each other cryptocurrencies that support the mining algorithm for that ASIC device.