Bitcoin Forum

Disclaimer: I don't know anything that hasn't been posted here in the forum, and I have been too busy to read more than 5-10% of that, I have no inside info, this is just speculation based on past chip design experience, yadda yadda.

It sounds like BFL is having some difficulties with their chips (a) running at ~25% of rated speed and (b) consuming 4-9x more power than they planned.  These numbers are vague since the info in the postings I've come across has always been patchy and has been presented very poorly (they'll quote an actual hashrate but decline to say what device it came from, or show a photo of a kill-a-watt but decline to say exactly what's plugged into it, etc).  I would welcome a simple and straightforward posting by BFL saying "we have the chips running at X% of advertised speed and consuming Y J/GH".

They've also mentioned that the wafer-probing tests (which I assume ran only a tiny portion of one chip at a time due to the fact that unpackaged chips overheat when run at full speed) produced the power results they expected, but the packaged chips consume way too much power.

I'm going to make a wild guess here and speculate that they ran all their pre-production SPICE simulations using the default 25 degree C temperature.

This is a pretty common mistake.  It would also explain everything I've seen so far.

Circuits always simulate ridiculously well if you run SPICE at 25 degrees.  The problem is that any circuit doing substantial amounts of computation will generate enough heat to raise the local temperature to at least 100 degrees C.  This in turn reduces the power efficiency even further (circuits running hot run slower and burn more power), an effect that feeds on itself.  Even the best packaging and heatsinking still leaves 3-4 degrees C per watt, and often those figures neglect to include the thermal resistivity of the CMOS bulk (another few degrees C per watt).  Multiply all of that by a 10-20W chip and the junction temperature is going to be a lot closer to 100-110 degrees than 25 degrees in any sort of reasonable ambient temperature.

Repeated disclaimer: this is just a wild guess, I have almost zero information, I have been way too busy with other urgent crap to read most of the forum threads, etc, etc.

The chips are ok....it's the board that is the problem....so they say.

They are doing a revision on the PCB & adding "power regulators" or something  ::)

Congrats on the "devil" post #666  :D

It's also entirely possible that they never simulated anything, that they're flying by the seat of their pants, and their first prototype is educating them on why you don't go whole hog and order the parts to mass produce a product before any testing is done.

Let's not forget this is their FIRST PHYSICAL PROTOTYPE. Yes, the results they are getting would be a problem if they were nearing mass production, but they are still in the very early stages with their FIRST PHYSICAL PROTOTYPE.

I'm not sure that this is their first prototype. If it is, they had more luck than they deserve.

I assume they made one or more runs that where not working at all. If they spend enough money they might be able to create a cooling that is able to cool down the chips. I assume they will not invest in a cooling solution with a price of several thousand dollars in order to cool down a single. At the moment they are in a trap. They promised too much and have no product they can afford to deliver. Trying another ASIC run and shift the shipment by another several months will hit them very hard with Avalon creating one batch after the other.

could someone explain to a noob how they could potentialy archive a cut in power this large?
Dissabling chips (hashing engines), Underclocking, Undervolting and more Regulators won't do the trick i think :D

Wild speculation....

The could still use existing boards and chips to make Jallys. 

Powered by unicorn blood generators :/ ....

Is there a way to speculate what one chip will use in power?

The jalapeno is powered by 2 x 2.5 watt USB plugs. It was originally intended to be 4.5GH/s and 4.5 watt, but if the chips are more than 12% out of spec, the jalapeno will not run at all at 4.5GH/s. You're right though, they're saying the problem isn't the chips, it's the regulator, blah blah blah, but the jalapeno boards were considerably less populated than the other boards. They lacked a lot of the power handling stuff, the capacitors and such, that the larger boards have. You would think if it was a board problem, not a chip problem, the jalapeno wouldn't be affected, and they would be flying out the door.

https://i.imgur.com/nqaKxHw.jpg

Could you please speculate wildly on why the idle power usage is so high?
The ratio of loaded/idle is unlike anything CMOS that I have ever seen. It reminds me of ECL or linear analog designs.

How can one get to such predicament? I've heard of latchup in CMOS circuits, but it becomes a short circuit and therefore completely prevents the normal operation until powered down.

Looking at the video and picture posted, I have a hard time believing the problem just lies outside the chips if the power meter in Luke's pictures is accurate at 180W. Even if it's only 150W DC, there just isn't anything else on the board that could handle dissipating that kind of heat with minimal airflow other than the big heat sink. Even with those little heat sinks on the power fets and under the board, there's no way even half of that 150W is being dissipated in the board. The chips themselves are almost definitely running at several times higher than their estimated efficiency, and it's unlikely they're going to be able to solve that just with board changes.

As originally designed yes.  But with an external power brick and the original regulators (though more of them) it should work fine.  It would need a heatsink as well, but again, they could still reuse those boards and components related to the original mini single SC.

AT that point you have a 40watt idle board powering a 4.5GH/s device.

The fact that only recently "discovered" the real power consumption of their ASICS shows that they never had a working prototype up until now.

What were those fuckers supposed to ship in October 2012 (their original shipping date) ???? They had nothing back then. Literally nothing! Stringing customers along for months ...

They already said they probably have to add an external power supply plus heatsink and fan to the Jalapeno.

That means they can throw away lots of existing Jalapeno casings and PCBs. And burnt lots of our pre order money for this "Lessons Learned".

Could it be that they had top change the specs of the chip (from 65 nm to 90nm or higher) while they switched to FCBGA?

If that was the case, v2 would be so incredibly superior to v1, the first buyers would be completely fucked over.

On the bright side, it doesn't seem true at all. They have this habit of over-promising and under-delivering.

No idea how many chips are running in the video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C4bgho5JSI

...or if the thing hashing 25GH/s in the photos is a FPGA Mini Rig or an ASIC...

...but assuming it's a 4 chip 30GH/s Little Single @ 160w/25GH/s...

1) 4.5GH/s Jalapeño is toast, needs complete board redesign. USB bricks are out. 160w / 4 = 40w/3.75GH/s

2) 60GH/s SC Single is toast, needs an redesign with enormous cooler, and more voltage regulators for 160w x 2 = 320w/50GH/s

3) 1500GH/s Mini Rig SC likewise is going to have cooling, power issues, and require a bigger case for the bigger coolers.
    (If they built it, it would blow your home mains fuses anyway!) 320w x 25 SC Singles = 8000w/1250GH/s

    1500Gh/s could be reached with 60x Little Singles but this would be 9600w!

I would really like someone to put up a bet on a date when they will have 5 mini rigs operating in paying customers hands in the USA (really want to see if any BFLers take the other side).   Mini Rig casings are all garbage at this point but if they do not figure this out and ship, they will basically be shipping fire starters and bitcoin will draw the wrath of the ignorant media when some idiot burns an apartment (or dorm) down "mining for millions".   I have ZERO faith they will send anything to UL which could have MO shut them down after they start shipping since most munis do not allow untested electrical devices in their municipalities for this very reason.

It would be a good bet to create, because nobody is going to be able to run a 1500GH/s (now 1250GH/s) Mini Rig SC in their home @ 8000w

120v x 20A USA You're kitchen might have a 2400w rated socket for your cooker, everywhere else will be 1800w.
230v x 13A UK might get up to 3000w max on the kitchen cooker socket. ;D

Many US homes have a 230v x 30A dryer plug.  I have similar plugs for servers though not the same physical configuration.   7200W derated to 80% gives you 5760.   That is about as high as you want to go and of course getting rid of that kind of heat is challenging. 

Ignoring your wiring problems you would have.   Look at the pretty box dimensions.   And look at the fans.   Why paint it black, this thing will be glowing red in a few hours.   It will set your wife's cat on fire.

Hmmm... I have 230V @ 16A and 400V @ 16A which is enough for a big welder but could be insufficient for a mining rig. That sucks.

Glowing red? That rig will be giving itself a rather realistic flame effect on the casing in just a few minutes with extra smoke fumes for a grande finale.

no they aren't - they are the new jalapeno cases!  :-*

Order your 15 minute fireworks show now*^{T # + =}


_{* Not an order, pre-order only
^T Units expected to ship March 2013
^# March means july
⁺ There are 30,000 orders before yours, don't expect aything before december.
⁼ We've never made fireworks before, nobody here knows how to make them}

lol

Similar to the OP, I have no inside information, only that which has been posted on the public forums.  I do have a few points of clarification - based on my limited understanding of BFL's situation.

1) None of the wafers have been wafer-probed and BFL does not have capability to do so.  I would hope and expect they will fix this in the future.  If the die do yield well (say > 95% good), then it is reasonable to skip wafer probe and do a "blind build".  This is what BFL gambled on.

2) Of the first 6 wafers, they choose to "burn" one by skipping the bumping process (because it was causing delays) and use wire bonding to a bare minimum number of the bump pads.  These test die could not be fully tested or run at full speed for the obvious reason that only a few of the power / ground pads were connected.  These die from wafer 1 had good power - at least within the expected range.  They did this while waiting for the other wafers to get bumped so they could verify functionality of the design.

3) Wafer 2 was bumped and packaged.  (Note that wafers 3 to 6 were bumped but NOT packaged at this time.  They should be packaged by now though.)  These are the chips that have been mounted to test boards and exhibit the high power levels. 

4) I have seen nothing posted about the current status of wafers 3 to 6.  It is POSSIBLE that BFL's power issues COULD be limited to wafer 2 and wafers 3 to 6 will have "good" power.  It is well know in the chip business that there can be (and often IS) a variation from wafer to wafer on parameters such as frequency and power.  Of course, the fab tries to minimize these variations, but they do occur.  Especially for the first wafers out. 

5) In addition, there is a variation of different die on the same wafer.  If BFL happened to pick poor die for their test boards, then other die from wafer 2 might be lower power.  However, I do not think this is likely in this instance.

6) BFL has said they will underclock devices to meet a reasonable power envelope and then ship more units to each customer so that they will still receive the GH/s that they ordered.  So if the SC Singles need to run at half speed (30GH/s) to not overload the power circuitry, then a customer that ordered one will actually receive two.  I do not expect there to be a fire problem.

7) BFL has said they are re-designing the boards to improve the power situation.  To me this is unclear what they are doing.  I think Josh said something about using 2 regulators instead of 1 - but I could have that wrong.

The above is true to the best of my understanding but of course could be partly (or completely) wrong since I can only interpret what I've seen on the forums.

Additional disclaimer: As stated earlier on this forum, I have ordered an SC Single.  Yes, I am biased but I try to minimize that bias in all my posts and state as much factual information as possible and remove my opinion from it.

It is pretty obvious now that they don't know what they are doing...  like the first season of Gold Rush

BFL probably filmed the past 10 months and will be on the next season of that show

It won't work unless there's an antagonist in each episode. Only if I had a clue as to whom that would be. Perhaps, if I had a quarter I could hunt one. One with a video camera that plays poker. But what are the odds of such an individual existing? I guess I could dream.

How BFL promised to begin shipping in late October or early November 2012 is beyond comprehension.  All the promises made to date regarding power use and performance have been based on simulations that now have proved to be wildly optimistic. 

I wonder how they intend to ship Jalapeno products.  An extra power supply will be required, along with a case redesign and fans.  They might as well refund customer orders now to avoid the hassle and months of extra delays.

They had to make wild promises in order to get pre-orders to fund the actual development.
Nobody would pre-order vaporware.

My guess is they had to keep making shipping promises they knew they couldn't keep so they could keep getting "preorder" money so they would have cash to fulfill the return requests. Even if they get an ASIC to work, I would be shocked if they have enough capital to fulfill all of the current orders.

Don't forget that they also needed to make wild promises to scare away the still budding at the time FPGA market and other potential ASIC suppliers.

If people had known mid last year that BFL would deliver in 12 months and not 3, I have no doubt there would currently be a healthy FPGA market out there.  

And we'll never know how many potential legit ASIC suppliers were scared away by BFL's promise, leaving only the failed cowboys and Avalon behind.  But I would bet that number is greater than zero.

I don't know if it's possible to quantify the damage BFL have done to the Bitcoin mining environment, but I have no doubt it's huge.

Minor nitpick:


Typical circuit spec for a residential electric stove is 240V @ 50A.  That works out to 12 kW.

(Not that you'd rip out the stove and plug in a mini-rig...what are you going to cook on? A campstove?  ;D )

If it netted me $10k a day I'd dynamite my stove out of the way for access to that circuit ;)

at least on gold rush they had god on their side.

Um, sounds like you can just use the mini-rig.

Hmmm.  Josh's most recent comments in shoutbox imply that the problem could be with the chips.

That's surprising. ::)

What a surprise.
Who could ever expect...

Wheres Josh and his rebuttals?  I miss Josh the troller.

I still can't believe how people fell for it after their previous history of over-promising. 1GH/s and 19.6W and $500, remember?

This, my friend, you are so right.  I'm crying thinks about it.

I will not accept they turn out being profitable while early investors get back a mere 25-50% of their investment in X many years.


There is only one solution a this time, Forget the shipment and mine however you can with this batch of failed chip,  Use liquid-nitrogen if so needed ! Get a rent neat a powerplant providing 150KW , And pay back customers what you can.

 :'(

There is an option for bfl that I implied before:

1. Post some delivering pics (a stunt like lukeJr)
2. Tell preorder upgrade people to send in their old FPGA singles and rigs
3. Wait till old gear arrives unpack it do some tests with it.
4. Switch old gear payed by customers online at a pool of choice
5. Evaporate from earth with preorder moneys, old already paid for FPGA gear, and a half finished ASIC in hand.
6. Be rewarded with a scammer tag in bitcointalk
7. No other harm will be done to you. Live on with your life mining happily ever after.....
8. Buy some Avalon ASIC or Asicminer shares.

They may have made the power lines on the PCBs too thin. Even a milliohm of resistance between the power supply and the chips causes problems when you try to run 60+ amps worth of chips.

Thing is if you're "losing" power somewhere, that must be converted into heat. If the device is pulling 190 Watts instead of 60, it should be fairly obvious exactly where that energy is being lost. You can't lose that much to resistance in traces, the whole thing would simply melt and break down after a second or 2 of running. What you do get is a voltage drop the more current you're trying to cram through, but most of that power has to be lost to leakage in the chip, the power circuitry and DC-DC converters are unable to dissipate that kind of heat.

Either BFL are stupid or they are playing stupid. Any engineer working on this would have known exactly where the power is going within 5 minutes of turning it on.

Reminds me of that GH/s vs power consumption of the BFL chip chart I saw posted once (not sure if it was authored by BFL)....it was LINEAR. I'm sorry but it doesn't work like that. There will be a sweet spot in terms of efficiency somewhere well below the maximum clock/hash rate, anything more than that will start to use exponentially more power (as anyone who uses GPUs knows).

(been lurking here a long time, just wasn't able to post)

I feel that first batch chips (June) going to generate the worst performed rigs and they might revise the design on later batch of chips to get better power/thermal performance

Sweet, so ten+ months of waiting and early BFL ASIC investors get partially functional pre-production prototypes. Nice.

The only difference between BFL and bASIC is that BFL has kept things together long enough to get to this point, where they have something to show.

How do you know this?

They could have an FPGA there working for all we know. Until someone can verify ASIC-like consumption and ASIC-like performance, we are just speculating.

Is there any truth to the rumor that you cannot use the BFL Single as a coffee warmer because it melts starbucks cups?    Someone said that this was the problem that most of the BFL engineers are focused on right now.   That person told me that the solution they came up with was to email Starbucks and ask them to change their cups to asbestos.   They are waiting for starbucks' decision before looking to other solutions.

Normally first generation hardware users will become lab rats  ;) Avalon team is awsome, so far not so much complains about their first batch units, very impressive!

For the awesome bank early BFL investors would've have gotten had BFL met nearly any of it's promises then that would've been fine. For them to ship half baked junk now on top of being 5+ months late is ridiculously scammy. Rewards are halved and difficulty is multiplied. This is the kind of stuff that keeps lawyers in new BMWs. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6d8eKvegLI

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSoM6h5Ywad8ea6t6nQwlXLpxeKXyoi6GzGpWNd6rB5321eRq0GdQ

Someone should necro all those threads from 6 months ago where the BFL fanbois where defending the power claims.

I hope they did not remove the miniRig just based on my analysis that the box would turn red and set people's cats on fire, because to be honest I am still unsure is 9000W in a one cubic foot space really will make a cat ignite.   I am still trying to find the data to back it up.   Please tell me their "engineers" actually figured it out before any felines were injured.

Google never ceases to amaze me.

http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/Chicken%20on%20fire%20image%20by%20kanada%20on%20Photobucket.jpg

Do not invoke his name. And if you are unwise enough to do so, quickly invoke the Lord and he will flee.

-----------------------

So an update for those that are like me and stopped following BFL for a while as a prospective vendor.

!) BFL has raised the price of their product from $1,399 to $2,495 (or thereabouts).

!) They haven't delivered any [finished] units yet.

!) They are wildly "way over" their power specification. Gladfully you don't see Josh trolling the forums about how power saving going "poof" means that they will be as "unprofitable" as Avalon per month. I am sure he will hide that face from his customers....or just not bring it up anymore as a selling point.

Of course "electrical efficiency", that was just a joke and no longer applies. ;)

!) Their devices are hotter than a potato it appears. Though I am not totally sure since Josh/BFL and physics are an estranged couple.

!) The new products are less than 60GH/s (now at 50 or less) but cost way more....did I mention they haven't yet shipped? (New capitol injection?)

!) Some more customers are bailing from way back in the day. New customers, are figuring out there are issues with the product...hopefully they are staying away.

!) Oh, the voucher program. BFL fucks it's users once again (I think?).

They gave early orders (from way back in June 2012) 25% off in a future voucher program that is only valid for 60 days after shipping products. (yet to be realized)

But...now that BFL has doubled their price...the voucher is seemingly useless. Hah. Very funny BFL.

!) Customers will seemingly be sent several units to comprise a high GH/s purchase. I am sure this will take a large notch out of BFL's profit margin.

Then again, who cares, they have new suckers...I mean customers to take up the slack at double the price.

!) The funniest punchline of the year....BFL downgrades their hardware offering through failed and over extended promises.

Avalon, continues to ship 66Gh/s through 80Gh/s systems to it's customers.

Will BFL ever catch up? Should you invest in their learning curve? I guess it's up to you!

it is entirely possible they did not even use a 65nm processor node, just something to think about.

...BUH...BUH...BUT...that would be dishonest!?! I'm sure Sonny V would never head up a company that would do such a thing. Just keep the lottery tickets away from him.

Anyway JZ says they're 65nm full custom unicorn blood superchips and we all know what *his* word is worth.

He sure liked to smack-talk Avalon. Now that Avalon has shipped quiet a few units, and BFL power usage has skyrocketed while performance has plummeted, Josh has sure been quiet. Come on, Josh. Make fun of all those Avalons cranking out 5 BTC/day.

LMAO!

he spend all day in his pied piper shout box...    very hopeless there, like cancer ward they sufferers try to smile in the pain

they wil turn into walking dead zombies soon

One of the few things that argues against the hypothesis that BFL is 100% scam (in my mind) is that they managed to fool the you guys.  It would be kinda funny if it turned out that the Avalon guys were in a foot-race against exactly zero other vendors this whole time.  Very sweet for Avalon customers though.

And I think icing on the scam cake is that BFL used many preorder $$$ to buy Avalons

Actually six wafers is the minimum order at every foundry I've worked with.

The only way to get less than six wafers worth of chips is to join an MPW, but those masks can't be reused (or even modified to fix bugs) so if your ultimate goal is to be in production rather than some sort of research project it just doesn't make sense.

I'm guessing "idle" means the clock is still running, so all the gates are still switching.  In other words, it isn't actually idle.  My Spartan-6 firmware is like this -- unless you stop the clock it consumes the same amount of power as when doing useful work.  Not much reason to put clock-enables on a mining chip.



I think we'll see current-mode logic (MCML) mining chips pretty soon.  If the device is going to be powered on and running full speed 24x7x365 anyways a lot of the power advantage of voltage-mode CMOS goes away.

No, I don't think BFL is using CML.

Whoever photoshops Josh's face onto Todd Hoffman's body is my hero.  Bonus points for goatee.

  -- elden "Dakota" tyrell

ftfy

If you mean that BFL scared away people who had products already in development, I find that hard to believe.  Committing the $1M or so to an ASIC design and mask etc is a huge sunk cost.  I find it to believe that anyone would sink that much work and investment and then walk away from it because someone else announced a competing product.

If you mean that there are others out there quietly toiling away building ASIC miners, who actually have the financial backing to not need to take preorders, as well as the integrity to not sell something until it's ready to ship, then I really, really hope so.

^ That is not what I meant.

I like this one.


Maybe we can call them "Josh's Kids" like a charity for the very sad, true believers.  Those that do not fret, but become more sedated as the BFL propaganda pathogen gnaws at their brain like a prion disease.

...i just had an idea about the power usage:

Remember how the jalapeño was introduced? Coffee-warmer! ..... Now instead of warming you can straight out boil your espresso on these:)