Bitcoin Forum

I ordered a jalapeno in April-- what could be the ETA be, anyone know? I heard that they where being shipping a month ago, but still nothing for me. Did I get scammed?

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No keep holding you brought at just the right time !

You can see order status upgrade of shipping date on bfl website here : https://forums.butterflylabs.com/blogs/bfl_jody/

and guess what?
bv the time it arrives, the difficulty will be so high, you won't make back the money you gave them.

the recent move to selling chips and offering upgrades for cash are classic signs of a company with cashflow problems......................

BFL keeps saying next month and never deliverers

A friend of mine ordered a Single in the mid of March and he has not gotten his ASIC yet.

no one who ordered a single later than 23rd June 2012 has received one yet. (which was either the 1st or 2nd day they went on sale).

What kind of blunders has happened to them to make them cash starved? I had a quick read on them and it turns out that they had venture capital investing in them, next they got heaps of pre-orders. I understand that overheads are really high, but once developed, unit cost is low. Who would not lend a few bucks to a company with product shipping? They kind of have funding 3 ways.

Most of their issues have not been money, but QC issues.  Power consumption, form factor not being what they want, cooling, etc.  The original design of the Jalapeno is much different than the one they have shipped, as well as it has a higher power consumption than originally promised.  Constantly refining/changing their products.  That, and their units are not massed produced in a factory, they are hand made basically (so I believe, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

For once I managed to jump in early on something and have had my Jalapeno for almost a month now.  Wish I could have gotten a Single, but its better than nothing by a long shot.

If I had a preorder with them I would probably play the waiting game. I'd rather commit to my original purchase and get at least some hardware eventually than try and sell the preorder place, then attempt to enter the ASIC market again (as there are not many promising opportunities right for orders <$1000, in my opinion.)

Check this site out, bfl.ptz.ro

I ordered in March, Still waiting for some news about it.

Since you ordered that late, I would expect it to be sometime in 2014. Sorry man.

I was almost going to order a few weeks ago. But then I thought how awful it would be to have to wait so long.

By the time you get it, you won't be able to recoup your investment IMO.

August
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/3611-buttefly-company-still-work-not-post44788.html#post44788

You never know when BFL will deliver.....

strange they didn't even make the upgrade tempting though, same $ per GH as just buying a new unit.

I wonder if they delay so much until others starts to deliver cheap products such as knc miner, it might kill bfl once and for all. They get new money in only because people are so desperate to buy cheap asics, but no one really delivers except for asicminer, but they are overpriced.

have to wait a long time

I'm quite suspicious of what the upgrade path would mean to your actual ship date.
If the upgrade involves cherry-picking an ASIC with more working engines to get this better performance, adding the upgrade may further delay delivery until such ASIC was available for the build.

The upgrade option does not affect your place in queue.  They have stated that numerous times on their forums.  All it is, is a firmware flash that essentially overclocks your unit.  They just need to know before your unit goes into production so they know what version of firmware to flash onto your unit.

You should also read the section on "considerations":
https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage-subproducts/65nm-asic-bitcoin-mining-chip.html

The upgrade is from 5GHz->7GHz, that's 40% faster hash.  BFL states overclocks are possible only on high-grade ASICs from 250->294 MHz.  That's only a 17% overclock...no enough to get you 40% higher hashrate.
So the upgrade likely involves cherry-picking the better ASICs.  Getting one of the 60% of chips have all their engines working, and out of those, one that will also stably overclock to the higher frequency.

I'd say if >40% of the backlogged customers go for the upgrade, they could have issues keeping the order of the queue without injecting further shipping delays.

Josh has stated before that all it is is a firmware flash, basically tricking your Jala into thinking its a single.

With that being said, within the last couple hours of my last post here, I just flashed (well, Runlinux did while I watched) my firmware and went from ~5.8Gh/s, to ~8.5Gh/s. 

Zanatos, that's awesome news, and congrats on being able to apply such a FW upgrade.  I stand humbly corrected, I didn't consider BFL would leave 70% harshrate headroom.  Yet thinking these are first-production units, it actually makes sense for them to spec very conservatively.

Were you able to purchase the upgraded FW after receipt of your unit(s)?

What effect did this have on operating temps?

I didnt upgrade my unit before it shipped, so it was a ~5Gh/s unit, but BFL says it has an +/-10% variance level, obviously I was on the plus side as I was running about 5.8 at first.  Temps then were about 40C, but that was fully cased.  Everyone said to take the case off and flip the fan to blowing down and it would run cooler, I just didnt want to mess with it.  After the flash though it is now running case-less with the fan blowing down, and my temps are actually lower, around 33C.

Do you have a watt meter and could measure the power consumption after the overclock?

I do, but its in another location.  Will have to report back.

Well, my prediction on this issue turned out to be the eventual outcome. 

Read'em and weep:
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/blogs/bfl_jody/251-monday-july-22-2013-shipping-update.html

This is the classic risk behind offering a cherry-picked component for profit, and ending up with a huge share of customers ordering the tail of your distribution.

If the imbalance in share of upgraded orders vs. availability of faster ASICs persists through the queue (no reason to think otherwise), the difference in ship dates for regulars vs. upgrades units will increase non-linearly.

Silver-lining: if your Jala order date is beyond Dec'12, cancelling the upgrade and trying your luck overclocking yourself will surely help get your unit earlier.

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p. s. i like the first post in this thread.

Confirmed by BFL_Josh

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/4031-2gh-upgrade.html#post49429