Bitcoin Forum

We are pleased to announce that the fabout and bumpout milestones have both been successfully completed for the initial GoldStrike™ I wafers, and that the next two steps – wafer sorting and packaging – are underway.

Full Engineering update and pictures here:
http://cointerra.com/engineering-update-goldstrike-fabout-bumpout-completed-sorting-packaging-underway/
 (http://cointerra.com/engineering-update-goldstrike-fabout-bumpout-completed-sorting-packaging-underway/)

http://cointerra.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/photo5.jpg



http://cointerra.com/engineering-update-goldstrike-fabout-bumpout-completed-sorting-packaging-underway/

Congrats!

This is fantastic news!!!! I love how open cointerra is. Something that can not be said for HASH FAST!!!

Awesome!!!  Looking forward to even more updates.  Though maybe its a Texas thing we don't screw around!  ;)

Props on the achievement- you guys also have a fantastic photographer

Well done.  :)

Someone estimate how long until chips are available for testing?

perhaps a week

It took KnC 13 days before they got samples back and it took HashFast 23 days. So 2-4 weeks probably.

I read that packaging has nothing to do with shipping, it's another chip manufacturing step, so is this still good news regarding possible delays? AFAIK, it's the only big news lately.

Correct,  packaging refers to the IC packaging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_packaging

So I'm guessing the earliest working units will be around mid-January at this point.  Guess we're hanging in there!

the hashfast problems with their substrates has been well reported... but what info do you have on knc?  i thought their process was much faster... and that they went smoothly and quickly through all the processes of production.  13 days sounds much too long for knc..!

i still reckon we've a chance to see working silicon demonstrated within a week - early jan.

I'm just looking for the option to purchase bare chips, so the DIY community has something reliable to work with for a change. Nice to see progress though.

if you bought bare chips would you have the know how and confidence to make them work?  these aren't as simple as avalon or bitfury chips...

-- Jez

It would depend on their documentation, but my day job is embedded system design for custom instrumentation, so yeah... I'm fairly confident I could make them work. I hadn't seen any indication they were considering chip sales though... Only complete systems.  There are a glut of chips coming out, but the transparency I've seen here makes me more confident in their product than many of the others.

when they first launched their web site I'm pretty sure they were offering both systems and bulk quantities of chips on the site, but they seem to have stopped offering bulk chips  - presumably due to lack of demand.

since it was their original intention (and it must be easier for them to sell chips instead of boxes) i suspect if you contact them directly they'd still consider selling the bulk chips..   however the support burden is quite high as they have to have pretty solid documentation and tech support to support the sale of chips.. and I'm pretty sure all their tech staff are super busy right now getting their systems ready to ship (they just showed their wafers are back so the next step (after packaging) is the board bring up, which hopefully happens in the coming week)

you sound like you have the right background to know what to do with the chips...  (they will require significant power and cooling compared to common or garden mining chips).  well, you can see from the photos what they did on their system... and its heavy duty stuff..!

my own personal opinion here.. but i think the electronics knowledge and skill required to wire up the avalon or bitfury chips (and any sub 100 GH chip) is at the hobbyist and tinkerer level.. whereas what knc, hashfast and even more so, what cointerra is doing is at the extremes of high performance computing.. and requires high end boards with high currents and serious cooling etc (as Sam from KnC always says 'Power IN, and Heat OUT' are the biggest challenges)...  this is wayy beyond what most of the amateur electronics people are doing in bitcoin mining with the low end chips.   that said, hopefully cointerra will make their board and system designs available as reference designs and allow other system designers to utilise them (either publicly on github or privately via nda)

-- Jez

The 4-chip system with liquid cooling is a nice touch. I guess it would be an advanced hobbiest level. And I thought I remembered direct chip sales on their site, but it was gone now, so I wasn't certain. At this point, it's probably in their best interest to keep things internal and focus on delivering this batch. If they're reading this thread though... There is an interest in DIY chip sales. It's a bit awkward and haphazard at the moment, usually taking the form of group buys and/or redistributors, but it's there. We just need to find a way to make it both accessible for us, as well as profitable and safe for them.

Either way, nice work guys and gals. Thanks for the update.

I think he means the packaging time from silicon complete at fab, across countries, packaged, more countries to chips in hand in Stockholm, which I believe was 10, or 11 days.

Looking into these units. Curious about the March pricing being the same as April pricing, as one would expect April pricing to be cheaper.

The wafers still need to be shipped to the different facilities which perform those tasks and the chips then need to be shipped back to CoinTerra.

From the KNC website (https://www.kncminer.com/news?page=5):


and


That's 13 days between wafer completion and getting sample chips back.

Either that or someone stepped in with a deal... 21e6? Who knows.

i don't know for sure but 21e6 is rumoured to have their own silicon... though not very advanced (not 28nm)

touché ;)

There ought to be a 21e6 thread, but it could rapidly descend into the most obscene troll/FUD fest the mining sub can serve up, if that's still possible when such a thread happens (we can't second guess the "bottom", this place redefines the concept of lowering the bar pretty regularly). So I'll revise that: there ought to be a 21e6 thread as close as possible to when someone's got some actual information  :D

Makes me question what the intended purpose of the rumours is (I seriously doubt that "genuine honest-to-goodness leak, total accident, stupid bigmouths..." is adequate, but that's just me)