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Did anyone upgrade their 5GH BFL order to a 7GH and receive it?  Just wondering if anyone knows what the real difference is between the two.

Better ASIC chip?  New Firmware?  Better cooling? etc

2Ghs?

^ Lol.

Back on track apparently it's a firmware update...

Not because of different grade chips?

7's are one's that bin with more functional cores that yield 7gh, without the upgrade...no guarantee that it's above what you ordered. Just like GPU's are selected for faster parts and sorted.

I received a shipping notification this morning for one of my 7GH units ordered from BFL. I'm not sure how long it will take to reach me in Australia, but hopefully soon.

http://instantrimshot.com/index.php?sound=rimshot&play=true

It is because  BFL messed 'up'  when they designed their unit they opted for a single heat-sink... (seems reasonable)

Unfortunately they did not work out that one chip, like a unicycle is very difficult to balance on. ESP. if it is at a corner

so to fix this mess they did the only unreasonable thing....  added 2 chips.

But wait... oh shit. we are now loosing money because we did not calculate for 2 good chips.. (and to try an work out a binnable formula for 2 semi-defective chips is WAY too expensive..)

Attempt to 'recover' some money by selling 'upgrades'  I.E by paying more money for something you already have... you can upgrade what you already have...


The sad thing about all this... is that if any of the BFL staff were researched or understood what they were doing, they would realize you can purchase "C0's"

Or in other words an "Empty" chip case with leads.....



The issue with the heat-sink and the in-ability of the chips to 'self level' was pointed out to them last  november.....

Only when you have  many years in production can you see a pitfall before it hits you.... it's not magic... its experience.
They were looking for engineers in Asia and I still have not heard anything back since Nov 2012...

+1 Nice perspective.

Rather than this it's simple math, they do not have enough(any?) chips that could do 5(4.5 old spec) gh/s reliably so they were forced to use 2 chips to reach the performance goal. However most(or at least a majority) of their chips can probably handle 3,5 GH/s so there was no point in not offering this upgrade path.

Before someone goes bitching about that they should just have given out the upgrade for free, that would have fucked over the MR/S/LS customers since they cant offer the same kind of upgrade on those SKUs without using more chips.

?

bfl shipped an early jally with one working chip and one dead chip.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/hardware-discussion/1983-grnbrgs-unboxing-teardown-new-bitforce-5-gh-s-sc-miner.html

this was verified by josh and the fact that only 1 led on the jally lights up (2 working chip jallys light up 2 leds).

so they have an easy out on the "balance a heatsink" deal.

2 chip jallys are out because it seems most of their chips cant bin out at 5 ghs so they run 2 of them at lower speed.

I do agree that bfl are complete amateurs when it comes to electronics though.

Old spec was actually 7.5 GH/s.

They missed that by a mile. So 2x 2.5's made the difference.