Bitcoin Forum

I've spoken with http://enterpoint.co.uk/ (http://enterpoint.co.uk/), and they have said they are thinking about developing a LTC FPGA miner. They mentioned that they won't start on it for another 2 or 3 months, but I suppose if the community were to give them input that there is indeed a market for this, they might start earlier. It would also be an advantage to have an established ASIC and FPGA producer with experience in developing a scrypt Miner.

So if you want a professional Litecoin FPGA (or perhaps even on day ASIC!) miner, drop their support a line to let them know the community will support them!

support@enterpoint.co.uk

way things are going I hope mining LTC will still be worth it:(

What do you mean? Prices change its not a problem, ltc has got so much more left in it

2-3 months for them to start thinking about making litecoin FPGA, then how long will it take for them to actually make a prototype? Soon as in BFL "soon"?

I don't know, probably not very long. They don't need to make a prototype, they already build FPGA modules and have lots of FPGA products. Nothing would need to be custom built for LTC, they would simply program it.

DO they have any modules that have high amounts of SRAM or QDR?  If not then its not going to happen.

it is not "just needs to be programmed". Scrypt FPGA are physically different from sha FPGAs (or else you wouldn't even need enterpoint, just a programmer).

Actually, crazy rabbit is correct you could use the same hardware, just needs to be programmed.  Several people have already produced some, but the hash rates achieved don't match a single GPU card.

But they build stuff like this already:
http://enterpoint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/MERRICK3_P2-1024x442.jpg

http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/merrick/MERRICK1_566x383.jpg

Yes that is 100 FPGA's on one board.

Im pretty confident in them!



As for the custom board thing. It probably would due to RAM interfacing, although one of their prototyping boards is probably ideal for this.

I don't think you understand what a FPGA is, FPGA's are reprogrammable logic arrays. They can be programmed to perform any particular task. They are like rewriteable ASICS.

Scrypt is just an algorithm, any general purpose computational device of sufficient power can be programmed to handle it. There are no "physical" requirements or differences between a FPGA that solves Scrypt or one that solves SHA.

As for additional ram, they have PCI-E mounted boards meaning you could just use the host machines memory. 

now we are getting into hyperbole.  can you make an FPGA for scrypt, yes.  Would you pay $300 for a unit that gets 100kHs, no.  It'sn not if it can but if anyone really woudl use them and if the cost to develop woudl return a profit.

Using system RAM is like flying to Idaho because you want french fries.  Or paris to buy a bottle of wine.  Why would you when there are places much closer that can get it for your faster and cheaper.  That is what GPUs were designed for.  They are built with ASICs that directly access high bandwidth DDR.  The demand for these boards is so high that they can make them in huge volume and keep costs down.  You wan tot reinvent the wheel.

Now it is possible to build an FPGA for scrypt mining.  But it wont use system RAM or DDR. I've seen the prototype in a demonstration with a scrypt like algorithm on an Altera board.  But the cost puts it on par with a GPU.  But it is an undertaking and to hire a team of developers and build them out makes the profit marginal.  Now with LTC less profitable than BTC to mine and with the low market cap of the market is it really worth it?

I'm not sure how many standard pinouts the FPGAs have, but I think they are all different. If one of the FPGAs that they use happens to be optimal for litecoin mining, and they really know their hardware design, then they can do it. You need the maximal memory to minimal logic to do scrypt. No FPGA has nearly enough memory bandwidth to do the algorithm (which is why GPUs are so good at the algorithm).

BTW, in general, companies that do a lot of FPGA design have no idea how to do ASICs, and vice-versa. This is my explanation for BFL. Looking at them, they just look like they are running into what all new ASIC design companies run into. They are in over their head, and we'll see how they get out. An ASIC for scrypt would be very easy to design, but I'm not sure the ROI is there to make up for the design and tapeout costs.

I did some back of the envelop calculations myself, and while I think that scrypt can be done in a FPGA are a 2:1 cost advantage over GPUs, I'm not sure what the power will be, so I'd have to do a prototype on a development board. Not sure I want to spend all that time without knowing that a lot of people would buy it.

So, how many people would pay $1500 for a 7MH/s scrypt miner, which ran in say 500 watts? The power is just a swag. I'm pretty sure I could outdo a GPU by 2:1, just not sure if I can get it to 10:1.

Oatmo

BTW: My backgroud, I've been designing bleeding edge chips for 20 years, including the CPUs (Intel), memory controller, networking routers and switches (which coincidentally included a SHA256 accelerator in 2001), and now I work for one of the major GPU vendors designing GPUs.

enterpoint.co.uk is a very respected company in UK, if they say they will do it ... they will sure will

^^^^^All of that - i was going to say someone has underestimated the Bandwidth issue.

so someone will have to keep dreaming of a way for the market to drive diff higher - probably when ASIC take over BTC driving its diff to retard levels. - but then, ah - that's a diff problem < you see what i did there ?   : D

and i'm sure they will have lots of fun,  generate lots of heat and maybe light - also a few K # and never sell a device,  when the ATI 8x series come out with DDROVER9000

and the new Quantum GPU they are working on. , that will sell at Walmart for $199 -

Pop, pop, pop.  :P

I love the fact that when you mention FPGA or ASIC chips for LTC, most members of the forum become Engineers, I wonder if I edit the content in Wikipedia to " FPGA uses the fuck bandwith to calculate salsa..."  what forum members would wirte? maybe the same words in wikipedia ? what do you think ?

 

If you really had something like that working ($1500 for 7MH), I'd buy a few dozen of them off you, after field testing one. I'm sure there would be a good sized line of similar individuals as well.

The big question you should be asking is... at $1500 a pop for 7MH, what would your profit margins be?

It will depend on there TPG, scrypt uses KH/s not MH/s.

7,000KH/s @ 500 watts

Profit         BTC           LTC             USD          Cost    Profit
Per Day    0.2013 BTC   9.6767 LTC    $20.56      $1.44     $19.12

By profit margins I was actually meaning more oatmo's margins for selling the devices (if that's what he did, rather than opensourcing the design from the start). For 7MH, you could sell it at 3K a pop and still have people line up, since you're still readily beating the price:performance of a GPU rig.

Sign me up for 100 units!!

My cost would be about $800-$850 a unit. With large numbers of units (>15000), it could maybe go to $600. It would probably take 500 units to make up my NRE costs. I can do the FPGA design with a $800 development board and figure out the performance and power. Working full time, I could do the design in about 6 weeks. Since I have a day job, I'll start messing around with it and see how long it takes. I'm pretty confident about providing the perf/$. I'm not at all confident about the power number, because I've spent 20 years doing full custom / ASIC design. I've never don'e FPGAs before, so I don't have a good feel for power consumption. I wouldn't do any system engineering until I proved to myself that it can be done.

I looked at Enterpoint's boards. If one of them had the FPGAs which fall in the sweet spot for scrypt, then they would be great, but none of them do. For them to be cost competitive, they will have to design a new product with a different line of FPGAs on the board. Looking at the product line, that product would fill a different niche for them, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did it anyways.

Oatmo

Is there some real, open source, project on FPGA scrypt mining?

Oh boy..  Here we go again (and again, and again, ad nauseum on a daily basis).  Can't we go one single day without someone armchair-engineering a hypothetical FPGA or ASIC-based scrypt miner based on a back-of-napkin calculation and immediately posting performance numbers and pricing before they've even tried to write an actual real Verilog implementation of scrypt+salsa?




The fastest way to spot someone who doesn't know what they're talking about is when they start claiming they're going to implement an FPGA scrypt miner with a cost/performance ratio exceeding GPU's, with any commercially available FPGA currently on the market (or in the process of coming onto the market).  At least you did admit that you've never done any FPGA work previously though.

Propagation times and clock fanout skew on FPGA's are extremely slow relative to ASIC clock fanout and signal routing, if that's your background.  You can achieve nowhere even close to the clock fanout and signal propagation performance on FPGA's than you may be expecting, if you're coming from an ASIC background.  If you do have an ASIC background, then pretend that you're working on a design and throwing in tens to hundreds of extra buffers or muxes (representing the switching fabric of the FPGA) on every one of your signals between logic elements, and you'll get the general idea of what you'll be dealing with performance-wise when getting info FPGA development.

A back-of-envelope calculation is not valid for making a performance claim and estimated pricing.  Your result is overoptimistic by almost an order of magnitude for any commercially available FPGA, if you're expecting a 2:1 cost/performance edge over, say, a Radeon 6xxx or 7xxx GPU.

There are only so many (known) ways to calculate scrypt+salsa(1024,1,1) between the two ends of the TMTO spectrum.  There isn't going to be something totally revolutionary unless someone devises a cryptographic attack against scrypt that significantly shortcuts the effort needed to calculate an scrypt hash.  And at that point, the same attack would be equally applicable to speeding up GPU scrypt implementations.

+1

Think what you want. I'm not trying to sell anything, and on lots of things I'm not qualified as an expert. I'm not a FPGA expert, but I've consulted with them (since a lot of my friends work for those companies). I am however a computer architecture and chip design expert, and I've assumed that a FPGA runs 10-20x slower than an ASIC. I was just trying to gage interest, and I think I have a good idea. I know the thousands of caveats that come with the calculation that I did, because I've done 100s of them before, and I know how those designs turned out. Twenty years designing everything in the computer business, and I've made some fantastic things, and totally screwed things up. Luckily I've not made any multi-million dollar mistakes yet, but I've seen plenty of them. I won't ask or pontificate again without some proof for my point of view.

I will add that I did a SHA256 hardware accelerator in an ASIC 10 years ago, so I have done a similar design, and put it into an ASIC.

Oatmo

where do i apply ?!!!


i've seen BitcoinExpress and the other guys work , so i know exactly what to do !

^^^

this is what i think a few people have been working on , i wonder who if any got it ?

That is not what we are working on actually.

ok cool , what are you working on ?

Increased efficiency against the hashrate:price. I doubt anyone on here is attempting to shortcut sha256/scrypt or other hashing algos. But if someone accomplishes it we will likely see them on the cover of some very nerdy magazines.

hows it turning out so far?

30% so I think its a good start.

FYI: 30% price to hash rate... I'm still interested. I'll save it in power costs over a year.  ;)

That is the goal :D

well correct me  if  i am  wrong, but  scrypt algorithm is  designed  to  prevent   such  hardware  from  being  used  by  creating  a   large  memory requirements, greater the speed, greater  the memory  requirements, FPGA's  would  also  require  in addition RAM chips  to  save  to memory, i guess  the  RAM  requirement  would  be  extraordinarily high.

You can buy a 5GH/s- 7GH/s BFL Jap for 288.00 and mine BTC, why would someone spend 3K on an FPGA @ 7MH/s. If it mines scrypt then it would be doing KH/s not MH/s. Just saying. . .  . :P

There certainly is a sweet spot we need to achieve before feeling comfortable selling the fpgas. What you are referencing is not the largest hurdle but I cannot go into details.

May I politely suggest at this efficiency , you should market and release,  you see I know more than anyone else about the free-market , (see previous add I applied for )  , at this efficiency your proclivity to tend towards natural inequity is low.

Plus in the open market you will then get the jump on the other., your dillema of courses protecting your investment, but unfortunately , I think that's as good as it gets .

By the time you hold , you take exponentially more risk.

I explained all this before , scrypt  lead time to roi is much longer , (unless hacked) .

That's the key parts to all your market equation. ! And it's going to make you :

1. Give up

Or

2. Be more "honest"/equitable because your risk is greater.


So thank you Colin Percival , you genius.

Or continue optimizing it to increase efficiency further as planned.

I have heard on the internet that some a very few have been able to mine scrypt with FPGA. There testing showed they could achieve about the same hash as GPUs with a decrease in TGP.

When you search Gooble for Scrypt FPGA you get http://blockburner.net/ (http://blockburner.net/) for the #1 search, not that actually means anything.

It is possible and has been done but in its current state no practical, just yet. Commence the pre- orders.   8)

oops I am a bit tipsy, anyways FPGA Scrypt algo machines will need to be on par with ASIC in terms of BTC mined since LTC needs BTC milk for lifeforce. Scrypt, memory intensive slower . . . . . . .

and take more risk, even if you planned to mine with these BFL style - its still very risky with sCrypt .

I wasn't suggesting that you would release i know you will do what you think is right , you have the numbers not me .

but i was suggesting that , the longer the lead time the larger the net risk. against the possible reward.

we will have to see what happens .   

It is only risky if we are not able to get the price per fpga down or unable to increase the hash rate. Both of which are in the works. They are not ready to go live, people will just need to keep their pants on.

You are correct, it just mean's the SEO on the site is doing what it is supposed to  :D

We're as far along as anyone else with a Scrypt optimized FPGA as far as I can tell.

The optimization will help though realistically won't produce any outrageous performance gains (but we will see with our first implementation), the real advantages to FPGAs over GPUs are in far less power usage and heat output, which translates into a better ROI over GPUs in the longer run and can be scaled up with much greater ease.

I actually talked to Enterpoint before I ever started the BlockBurner thread here, I was told basically they were so backed up on other projects they likely would have a lead time of 6 months or more for anything new. No idea if that changed since then (back in march I think?) however.

I just wrote them again to catch up. They had quoted me loosely at 30K GBP to design a Litecoin mining system, which is expensive no doubt. Although one wonders what it would be like to get a group of people together to raise the funds for that. Maybe jumping straight to building an ASIC would be expensive, but incredibly profitable potentially. (Potentially as is- can the Litecoin infrastructure survive currently at having mining becoming professional?)

Just wondering, are you working with them directly to hype their product?

For any company about to attempt a Salsa20 stream cipher hardware implementation is in for a lot of trial and error. By project completion I estimate we will have had a total of 12 redesigns.

What is the status of this? Is it possible to purchase one of these anywhere?

Most of the info is on the litecoin forum.

hows this project going, love to test these with our NR104 FPGA mining rigs https://nocroom.com/fpga