Bitcoin Forum

We are launching a sripped down version of the existing product Merrick6 http://enterpoint.co.uk/products/spartan-6-development-boards/merrick-6/. We are cutting down the number of FPGAs in the working array from 6 to 2 to allow more power for the 2 remaining FPGAs. The PCIe hosting interface FPGA a XC6SLX150T will also remain. This will means that one of our twin 12A regulators will power one XC6SLX150T plus one XC6SLX150. The other 1.2V regulator will power a single XC6SLX150 FPGA. This board is offered at $1,000 (plus tax if applicable) or equivalent in GBP or Euros.

If there is enough demand we can also make a small design change to make Bitcoin special by retasking the 12A regulator, currently used for 1.5V, to being 1.2V. This would allow all 3 remaining FPGAs to have 12 Amps each.

Our X2 XC6SLX150 Coprocessor module can also be offered in a similar fashion cut down from 2 FPGAs to one that has  10A supply all to itself. price for this offering is $280 (plus tax if applicable).

What Mhash/sec can we expect from this board when priced at $1000 ? and what sort of power does it consume ?
I also assume it will need heatsinks ? will these be supplied or is it up to the buyer to cool it ?

Thanks.

Aw HELL YEAH maybe this would be the best thing to put in my rig (see signature).  You need heatsinks of course, are you going to make them fit within a single slot?

We still have work to do with a Bitcoin load but the 2 FPGAs in the main array should match Icarus performance if not better. If the third FPGA is used as well it can add to that especially if we make the modification to retask the third regulator. Running absolutely flat out in the current Bitcoin configuration it will take about 40W. Doing nothing about 1/10 of that. If we bring in the third regulator add 14W to that.

We will supply heatsinks and a fan board that mounts over the array and heatsinks. That will have a 8cm fan in it and we can trade heatsink size for height above board as necessary. It does do better than heatsink/fans combos and a lot less annoying. More exotic things can be done as well but that all adds to the cost.

There is also another cooling system that we are developing for general use and that could have a significant improvement over or with the standard approach and offers low noise as well. We are looking to add this to all Merrick family boards. I can say much more on that until we do some more work and officially announce it. I don't think that will add a lot to the cost but if it does as well as we hope it will be interesting to see what we can push these boards to in performance terms.

For the industrial motherboards with no fan directly above the board it would be possible to use every slot. That does need very good case fans then. Our solution in development will also allow every slot to be used.

How many spartan6 in one board, 4 or 2? power consumption?

Sweet. In my application, I need power density. Have you considered a design that will allow you to cram a larger number on a board? The reason I ask is because most boards with 2 Spartan 6 FPGAs are no more than $500, and having more of them on a board could lower the per-chip cost.

Interesting product. I'm going to follow the development of this one.

rjk,

they are spartan 6 not virtex, if I'm not wrong.

spiccioli

Sorry! That's what I meant. Edited post.

BTW,

4 to 6 weeks lead time... it reminds me of something... :)

http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/shop/en/106-merrick-6.html

spiccioli

A six FPGA unit a 1200 US$/950 EUR would be really sweet, you need to have a motherboard to use them, but they would replace GPUs in current rigs very nicely.

spiccioli.

If I understand correctly, the cut down Merrick6 would have 2 XC6SLX150 FPGAs for mining purposes and a XC6SLX150T for PCIe connectivity and some mining for $1000. If that is the case, that is damn expensive per MH/s but perhaps some people would pay for the form factor.


I'd be all over a $1.2k USD 6 FPGA board that fit in a 2 slot PCIe form-factor. For such a card I'd prefer the ability to feed it a PCIe cable to prevent from burning out a mobo. I'd basically swap out my GPUs for FPGAs. I doubt however, unless they want to re-engineer their product, that we will see such a thing.

At the moment the configuration is 2 + 1 although the native configuration is 6 + 1. Various people have looked at our boards aimed general applications and commented that for Bitcoin we have too small a power supply. By cutting the array we get the current per FPGA goes up. Until we get some real performance measurements it migh t be argued that it is more expensive than competing solutions but this a highly engineered board which will give back something in performance. That I don't want to promise until there are real numbers.

It terms of getting dense have a look at http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/merrick/merrick1.html.

Merrick6 is a 10 layer board and that is part of the cost. It is possible for us designs more targetted at Bitcoin and reduce cost but to do that it needs enough demand to justify the cost of doing that design. There is a cost trade between just using a standard-ish board and doing a fully targeted designs.

Merrick6 is indeed a Spartan-6 board. Not really for Bitcoin our Broaddown3 board has 5 Virtex-6 if that takes your interest.

On the power Merrick6 uses a disk drive connector for higher power applications so it won't burn out the PCIe connector.

At the moment the full product is a build to order and the reason for that is cost of silicon sitting on the shelf. That's already being considered to become a stocking board and a cut down would be easier to justify stocking especially if we get steady orders. The 4-6 weeks is a standard time we quote and usually if we have parts, which is usual on Spartan-6 based boards, it can be a lot less. It's more a case of not disrupting our assembly line schedule for say 1 board. If we have a 6 week window we can make a nice slot and maybe build a proper batch size at one time. These are all to do with the economics of building boards.

Merrick6 can run stand alone if needed and there are some communication options here if you are not using the PCIe.

If there is a serious interest we could do designs based on our Raggedstone2 and Lamachan2 boards to offer a PCIe board with 4 or 8 XC6SLX150 FPGAs that would come in cheaper per FPGA. That would need some numbers to make this a worthwhile project.

I think u should build a board with at least 4 FPGAs. Two Spartans seem to be mainstream now :)  Look at Ztex shiny new 1.15y Board (850MH/s @ ca. 1188€ with tax).

And please try not to do something like BFL to us. 4-6 Weeks BTO is ok if u can hold that promise :P


BTW where its the company located ?

The UK -> http://enterpoint.co.uk/contact-us/

I'm just a guy interested in FPGAs, I don't have the knowledge to understand what chips would be ideal and what not. What I do know is that there are a number of FPGA mining device manufacturers. While they might not be interested in sharing their sales numbers but a few hours of searching on just this forum could give you an idea of a fraction of sales they are achieving. I'm fairly certain the majority of miners have seen the light and realize that FPGAs will eventually price GPUs out of the mining industry. Someone who could deliver a hashing dense FPGA device with an appropriate turn around time could swoop in and snap up orders from the likes of BFL and LargeCoin. I'm not sure what the setup/design costs would be for you guys to design a PCIe card pushing 1-2 GH/s but I'd be thrilled to see another competitor in the manufacturing market.

We are based in the UK but we already ship more or less worldwide with a few exceptions. Principally the exceptions are places where we are not allowed to sell due to export restrictions. For most of Europe and N America delivery is usually 24-48 hrs for anything in stock. Other places can take a bit longer.

In terms of deliveries we running this as a professional business and it's rare for us not to meet our delivery promises. Usually if we are out it's because one of our suppliers let us down and beyond our control. We have been in business for 23 years and building FPGA boards for the last 9 years so we have this pretty hooked. We are  building boards every week and this is a normal task for us so I hope we know what we doing by now.

Do have a look at our 101 FPGA board Merrick1. Current FPGAs might be a little small for Bitcoiners but they could be Spartan-6 LX150 if we did the design again. Current Merrick3 is our biggest S6 board launched with a total of 26 S6 on board. It's only got 72 amps for those and would need a haircut, or more power supply, to make a better balance for Bitcoin.

I saw the Merrick1. At that price point you are competing with the BFL Mini-rig and LargeCoin C200. Those are custom turnkey solutions with the space to dissipate the heat. A Merrick1 with 100 Spartan6 LX150s would dissipate around 1 kW and generate around 20 GH/s @ maybe $25k USD given the performance/price of other Spartan6 LX150 based devices. Impressive, but I think you'd sell larger overall volume with a slightly smaller device. Perhaps create a poll to see what gaps there are in the market? We've got a lot of 1-2 FPGA devices. ZTEX just launched a 4 FPGA device. Lancelot is expected to be a 4 FPGA device. The next step is the BFL Mini-rig and that's a massive jump

disclaimer: I'm eagerly waiting for someone to release something in the 1-2 GH/s range with competitive MH/$ and MH/w ratios. So, I'm biased when I talk about what the market needs  :D

I wasn't suggesting Merrick1 for Bitcoin for those reasons. The cut down Merrick6 is a better board initially to talk about. Doing a derivate design for Bitcoin it could be possible to up the power supplies to support all devices by simply say removing DDR chips to make space. The 12A regulator circuit we use could fit into the space taken by 2 DDR chips and we could end up with 6/7 FPGAs each with 12A of core voltage.

That's all viable to do and that sort of design change could be done in a few days maybe a week. A prototype could be turned in about another week if we pushed although that fast gets expensive.

That would be an interesting option. If possible, a 4-pin Molex or SATA power connector might be more useful. I know a lot of my PSUs have 1 floppy power connector but a dozen SATA and 4-pin connectors.

Have you looked at other board offerings?

Various 2x Spartan 150 boards are available for ~$500
One 4x Spartan 150 board is available for ~$1000

Your price point is roughly double and the other Spartan boards face stiff competition from BFL which acheives roughly double the performance (MH/$).  Your board would be in the ballpark of ~450 MH/s for $1000 vs BFL Single ~820 MH/s for $600.

A dual Spartan board for $1000 isn't going to fly. 

Or PCIe 6 pin connector.  Most ATX PSU group all the MOLEX, SATA, and floppy connectors to a single rail because they are generally low current.   Even single rail designs will use current limiting circuit for safety.  So connecting a large number of boards to MOLEX connectors may be problematic.  A 1000W PSU may have 980W of 12VDC but it may only have <200W on the rail powering MOLEX connectors.  Even a single rail design will have some over current circuit on each "virtual rail" limiting the usable power on MOLEX connectors.

When I say disk connector that's hard disk i.e. Molex. Not always manufactured by Molex they are usually rated at 5 to 7A but can deliver a lot more under stress. We have see wires melt before these connectors fail and that's 10's if not 100's of amps.

On Merrick6 we usually fit either a 7A or 10A fuse on the disk drive connector which is way more than needed for the Bitcoin version. Similarly the 12V from the PCIe has a 2.6A fuse which is a reasonable limit for PCIe operation. If customers want this latter fuse can simply not fitted when we build boards forcing all the current through the DD connector.

That likely is optimal.  While 30W on PCIe board is within the spec someone building a rig with 8 board likely will overload the PCIe bus. We have seen this w/ GPUs.  The solution is to use powered PCIe extenders to reduce the load on motherboard VRMs.  Having a board draw no 12VDC from the PCIe connector bypasses that entire issue.

The optimal board would be
PCIe 1x (allows max # of boards per rig)
PCIe 6 pin power connector
at least 4 (preferrably 6) Spartan-6 150 FPGAs
"beefy" 12VDC power supply.

A 6 Spartan board using current bitstreams could acheive ~1.2 GH/s per board @ ~50 - 60W.
Using the hand placed 3 loop bitstream (will need to be purchased) a 6 spartan board could achieve ~1.5 GH/s (possibly up to 1.8 GH/s with improvements) @ ~60W to 70W.

I think there may be a lot of people interested in Mini-rig like hardware but would not trust BFL with this much money.

The delay of supposedly 3 month is also a big drawback.

If you can solve the later and have a reasonable price I'm in.

These would be great drop-in replacements/upgrades for GPUs. If a slim enough heatsink could be attached to keep the cards as a single slot design I'd happily dump all my GPUs for these. Hell, even a double slot design or bigger would work on PCIe extenders, which I already use to cram more GPUs per board.

Is defenetly would consider a board with 5 to 6 spartans for my gpu miner.

Slim aka single slot cooling would be great.

U could implement an USB interface or something else, so that we could use the board without that pice interface.

We can actually do a USB interface slightly indirectly on this board. There is a debug port on the board that we have FT232 adaptor for and that can plug into a PC as a serial port. We were going to do it directly on the board but we ran out of board area for the chip + connector.

I don't see a problem with the PCIe interface.

If they can fit 6+ (or seeing some of their others, 24+) fpgas on a board, and find a way to power and cool them. A doublewide 24x FPGA board on a pcie which draws 250watt over a pair of 8pin PCIe power connectors. You can put 2 in a standard motherboard, allowing for 48FPGAs per rig. With current bitstreams that's just under 10GHash/s per rig.

Also consider, PCIe allows for MUCH more bandwidth to the card (which is not important at all for bitcoin). But it's the standard right now for FPGA based HPC accelerators. Meaning if you have a PCIe card which works both for bitcoin, and for doing crypto acceleration, or other HPC applications, you now have decent resale value. Current bitcoin mining solutions aren't really good for much else (maybe as a "play" development board, but not for any real serious applications) because of the low IO count, and poor throughput (and lack of available RAM)

I would love to see a 4chip, 8chip and 24chip card lineup, all PCIe, with decent cooling/power arrangements. and offering pricing under $1/MHash (preferably closer to $0.75/MHash or lower, at least on the higher density cards) Even more appealing would be a doublewide card, that has the comm/control chips on the PCIe card, and power supply connectors enough for 24 FPGAs, and can take up to 4 daughter cards, each holding 6 FPGAs. That would allow for high density, and a nice scalability path, to start with a single module on a card for cheap, and add modules over time. Much more approachable than jumping from smaller modules to a $15K purchase for a mini-rig.

The problem is, if you design for bitcoin then the product instantly becomes pretty much worthless for other computations. Bitcoin is all about density, and it can achieve good density because it has no requirement for high speed (and therefore carefully routed) communications. Nor does it need memory. Other applications want lots of high speed, high bandwidth communications and lots of memory, which is more difficult to design for and tends to decrease density.

I think this single slot x1 formfactor is great, and I don't see any reason to use USB when you already have PCIe. Of course it would be nice to have more devices on a card, but very careful attention must be paid to power design.

I agree, my point was that the guys from Enterpoint seem to already have the design under control with the high bandwidth. If they were to modify it slightly (no major overhaul) to get the price point down, they could hit a sweet spot where it's applicable (and cost effective) for bitcoin, while still carrying over much of the value for application in other spaces too.

The main thing I want to see is smooth scalability. Something that allows very high density, but without the "choppy" growth offered with solutions like the Mini-Rig. Something allowing more granular growth. But still offers close to their cost/performance ratio would trash the competition (especially if they can provide more consistant customer service, and meet their estimated deadlines reliably).

if you can sale this at 1k EUR , i'll take 2 : -> A 6 Spartan board using current bitstreams could acheive ~1.2 GH/s per board @ ~50 - 60W.

In addition to this product see my new post on quad XC6SLX150 board.

out of curiosity, how much in USD is that 24 x Spartan6 card?

Merrick3 sells for $10K. It's a complete different product level than needed for Bitcoin so there lot of work in this design. There 15K via holes in this board and roughly 7.5K connections that are all hand routed for quality of result. Just try imaging how you would arrange chips and make this number of wire connections. It's not easy.

I'd definitely consider buying the 6 Spartan version.