Bitcoin Forum

Everybody is talking about FPGA miner for litecoin,  but I still didn't see any working proof. So I decided to ask my friend from Italy for help.
It's time to say: FPGA miner could be done. When? December 2013 -> prototype cost about 1000 (eur) So everyone could test online (see the miner room with some webcams)
First will be out 16 FPGA model. Later more powerfull.
I can probably more than 10 times faster than GPU mining. You could sleep with the miner and your parents will not ask you if you are growing weed in your room  ;D

Stay tunned

reserving this spot already :)

So it is a miner and also a sex toy?
Those crazy italians...  ;D

Interesting.

Interesting to see what 1000€ could provide.

Please pm me when you have more details.  Thanks!

Does not imply the 16 FPGA model will be 1000 (eur). Seems highly unlikely. Ten times faster than GPU too?

Of course you can build a 16 FPGA rig for less than 1000 eur that will perform 10 times faster than a GPU rig, but that's just semantics, it could be an ancient GPU just getting a few dozen khash/sec. So we want 10 times better performance than a current high-end GPU for 1000 eur (and with 16 FPGAs?).

Perhaps it is possible though. Pair each (low spec) FPGA with a SDRAM module, might just be doable at that cost? Would love to see some detailed spec on this. But having thought it through, I'm sceptical about the performance. A few 100 kHash/sec tops. Definitely not 10 times GPU performance (for any credible definition of GPU).

If i put a vibration module, it could be used as a sex toy  ;D

I'm going to be keeping track of this, very interesting, good luck! ;)

I want a couple of this...  8)

Thank to you and all other. I will keep you inform on everything.

watching.waiting.hoping.praying.

Ooo, I'll wait good times here.

People I need your help:
Miner name suggestion (for the entry level model)

Thanks in advance for your help.

i suggest name it BFL... :D

Watching this closely...

Maybe a word play on Scrypt... The Scryptonator?

To be honest, as someone who is soon launching an Scrypt based fpga I can say your claims are a bit over the top. 10 x GPU speed is of course doable, but at least 10 x the cost is needed. I think you'll find your memory bandwidth on most (non military grade) fpga's wont allow you to get the dollar/hash ratio you are after. Power saving, yes that is realistic. But no you will not be getting 10 times a gpu for £1000.

Why even announce anything?

You aren't able to sell anything yet. More hype and more pump? ::)

This means that any core inside the FPGA is able to do 100Moperation/sec, assuming that we can not arrive to this goal due to sync problem between cores we will have 50Moperation/sec.

It is resonable that we will have a result of 1000 operation for each hash (you know that the litecoin algorithm needs to be repeated more times).
Well if this is true we will have:
- 50Moperation/1000=50.000 hash/sec, now we should multiply it by 10 (10 cores inside the fpga) and we should have 50.000hash*10=100.000hash/sec, assuming that our assumption are still too optimistic we should have half, than 50.000hash/sec

When we put 16 fpgas the result should be 50KHash/sec will begin 50*16=800Khash/sec.
This is a really very worst estimation, the result is about 1Mhash/sec

Coming to cost:
- a low cost FPGA is around 50$ in sample, we will have 50*16=800usd, than we have to add the controller, PCB and chassis, this will have a cost of 500usd that added to the previous one will be 1.300usd.
Now, in production the cyclone fpga will have a cost of 20usd (than 20*16=320usd), pcb 100usd, chassis and controller 300usd. Totale 700usd

Company like altera have another option, you can go in altera and ask for fpga already programmed, normally we can save 50% cost, for the other part we need to define the complete project to define the minimum cost

If I'm understanding you correctly, then we're looking at approx $1,300 for ~800Kh/s? Please correct me if I have that wrong. But at current difficulty and current LTC/$ (and we can only assume that LTC and scrypt in general difficulty is going to rise over time), it will take almost 2 years for this to achieve ROI. Perhaps LTC will increase dramatically, but perhaps not. Please tell me where I'm going wrong here?

Yes, the price is right, where did you get 800kh/s I don't know.

See below... So you're saying 1 Mh/s?

Just keep in mind that the price of LTC can change and then things become even less clearer for the future. I suspect a price rise in the next year but that's just my personal guess.

I'm bullish on LTC price as well, the currency has a ton of room to grow I think.

But for me, when considering a mining investment, a possible future price increase doesn't factor into the equation very strongly. But that brings us back to the ROI argument that is all over the forum...   :)

"chassis and controller 300usd" ???

Who uses a chassis? Or maybe first, what do you even mean by a chassis? A milk crate? a shoe box? If it is expensive many would likely prefer to get just the guts of the device I suspect.

What do you mean by a controller? A Raspberry pi like people use to control many many USB devices and/or FPGA boards? With maybe some extra RAM because cgminer mining scrypt needs more RAM than when it mines SHA256?

How many boards can a controller control? 127 per USB port?

-MarkM-

This is a really very worst estimation, the result is about 1Mhash/sec > you have to read all the part not only from: the result is about 1Mh/s :)

HI,
chassis is the container of fpga board or boards, power suply, processor....
assuming half of pc tower
the controller is a processor, Rapsberry could be one, but there are other available
the litecoin requires RAM,but do not think that is a lot (you can consider 150KB for each miner)
I think we  could have 4 fpga module, for an amount of 64 fpga
may be more, but at that time is too early

Well then at $300 for something that miners could provide for themselves in the form of one or more milk-crates, a raspberry pi, an ATX power supply and maybe some extra RAM for the raspi, I suggest saving them not only that $300 but also gosh knows how much in shipping costs by leaving those things out...

-MarkM-

There's where you went wrong. You're off by a couple orders of magnitude.

A good whitepaper on the topic:
http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0241/1743/files/Alpha_Technology_-_Scrypt_Analysis_on_FPGA_proof_of_concept.pdf?709

Here is Znyq FPGA which has nothing in common with our FPGA, so you are not right.

It's not a question of the FPGA used. It's the definition of the Scrypt algorithm.

I'll take 4

I believe that a program running as sequential series of operations can not be comparared with fpga design, working in parallel the list of instructions included inside the doc can not be executed in series
I repeat, the fpga will work in different manner, it is not a processor, we can program to work in parallel the described asrchitecture is based on a xilinx fpga that is a soc system, and clearly the presence of processor inside force the architecture to work in this manner the soc are used to reduce the amount of hw developing a very comoact architecture
I am sorry compact architecture in that case instead of to use an fpga you can use a processor like arm or other working to 1GHz clock speed, in that the case the result could be 10 time faster