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Sale closed.  Requesting refund.

I believe I heard that BTCFPGA was not going to work with seller to transfer preorders.  Otherwise, I'd be all over this.

I find it kinda funny that it went from 27 -> 54 -> and now 72 GH/s. Over 2.5x the hash rate you paid for.

Relatively simple explanation that I highly doubt will ever satisfy the conspiracy minded implications of your posting but here goes. Tom does numbers thinking on increasing sales and sees that going from the 27 to 54gh/s at 6 chips per module still makes him money. Engineers get back to him reminding him of the power of two principal in computers. The 2, 4, 8 ... way things for them work, now 6 don't work in this world you need 8 Tom realizes he cannot go back to lower speed as he has already sold at 54 so must go to 72 at 8 chips per module to correct for this reality.

Conspiracy? Hey man, I just said it was funny! And ya, I've been following the bASIC vs BFL drama for many months. I actually think Tom moved from 27 -> 54Gh/s because he wasn't selling very many. BFL had thousands of orders, and he had maybe a few hundred. Why not take a little less profit from each unit if you can sell 10x the number units, right? Then the move from 54 -> 72 sounds like it was an engineering oversight. They couldn't run the chips as fast as they thought they could (as opposed to BFL which has increased their speeds by 50%, and Avalon which has increased by 10%). But, they can't lower their advertised speed, as their customers would just bitch! And rightly so! So they decided to rework the board and throw an extra chip in per module to increase the speeds. Simple.

Your whole thing about having to use 8 chips and not 6...wtf? That doesn't make any sense. Of course they could use 6 chips in a package!

Nope that is the way it goes and what was said in the announcement in servers for instance you have 2, 4, 8 ... continuing on the same power of two for however many sockets they put on them there is no odd ball 7, 9, 11 socket machines. On the other was thinking you were BFL troll doing your bit for the cause...

@ Crazyates,
Umm yeah, powers of 2 has a lot to do with a lot. Just coming from someone who is a Computer Science major. Just sayin'

So you can't make a chip that only has 6 chips? Why not? That seems weird to me.

And if this is the case, and it is such a basic concept, why didn't Tom's development team pick up on this originally?

PM sent.

I don't think that it's impossible to run 6 chips on a board, I just think that when it came down to it they were like "Look Tom we tried to pull it off with 6 but because of this....we would be better off adding 2 more chips and then we could give you what you were initially seeking performance-wise."

Strange, i should own a couple of servers with a 12 core amd cpu. Also i remember having intel servers with 6 core.
To me, this multiple of 2 things doesn't sound really right.

They have only now arrived to a point where an eng suggested him this.

Any alternatives?

He's not saying multiples of 2, he's saying powers of 2. According to that, they should have gone from 2 cores to 4 cores, skipped 6 cores, and gone straight to 8 cores. Which is really odd cuz I just upgraded from an AMD X3 Tri-core. This is why I'm so confused by what SAC and Jack1 are saying.

The X3 is really a quad core with one core disabled.

Regardless, the argument was from an interfacing point of view. With x number of addressing lines, you can multiplex 2^x number of chips. One line can address two, two lines can address four chips, three can address eight chips, etc. The argument made is that from an interface complexity standpoint it's no more difficult to connect to eight chips vs six, so you might as well toss eight on there if you're getting them for a buck a piece.

Christ have you people never actually read anything about computers or done any work on them. I knew as soon as I said that some fool on here would be on about the cores on a die and not actually have enough of a brain in their head to know that a socket on a board is not a core on a die. Ah well this place and its stupidity never fail to deliver I should start taking bets on it I would make fortune..

Yes yes I know there's a difference. I'm just using that as an example. I actually have worked in computer shops for the past 5 years, but I don't have a Sparky degree, and I fix them, not design them.
You still havn't answered my question.

Then surely you have seen in the the memory modules that go in the 1, 2, 4, 8 ... sizes. If you are asking about the 3x cores well that is four core chip with one disabled in a true 4 core design. The intel design off the start with this was 2 x 2 put together on the chip with some fancy routing around/interconnections going on inside the die, this same idea applies to the 6 chips there are some workarounds inside the die that gets it all right for the chip to be able to be used in the machine this cannot be/is not done on a board level for the physical sockets.

How many mainboards with more than one socket out there which have a power of 2 number of sockets and how many which don't have?

Below 8 processors, I never saw a system without a power of 2 number of sockets. And even above it's still the norm.

BTW - I offer $2000.

LOL... That's fine. I have a very early preorder that didn't go through that I plan on reclaiming. It will probably ship around the same time as yours, so with the turnaround of shipping it to you it would probably get to me at the same time or later. It was only really worth it if I got yours below cost.

I just thought someone should get this back on track and get some bidding going.

You can reclaim orders that didnt process?

LETS NOT TURN THIS THREAD INTO A DISCUSSION ABOUT COMPUTING AND THE POWER OF TWO.
Its a fact. Deal with it.
Dont believe me? Goto wiki, THEN agrue, I'll be all ears THEN