Bitcoin Forum

I'm sorry, I know the silliness factor is already pretty high with the claimed 5600% improvement in efficiency (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=87934.msg966947#msg966947):

  http://news.yahoo.com/butterfly-labs-announces-next-generation-asic-lineup-054626776.html (http://news.yahoo.com/butterfly-labs-announces-next-generation-asic-lineup-054626776.html)

So I couldn't resist:

  http://news.yahoo.com/leading-sha256-hardware-manufacturer-acquires-venture-capital-funding-081026668.html (http://news.yahoo.com/leading-sha256-hardware-manufacturer-acquires-venture-capital-funding-081026668.html)

Please forgive me :)

LOL THE Butterfly Swatter XL WILL TOTALLY DESTROY THOSE BFL ASIC PRODUCTS.

CAN I PREORDER NOW AND PAY YOU ALL THE MONEY UPFRONT UNTIL YOU CAN MAYBE DELIVER SOMEWHERE IN 2018?

Hrm, I dunno…. there's a waiting list to get on our waiting list.

But if you buy my dilapidated, rusted-out old Kia from me for $20,000 I promise I'll let you trade it back in and give you full credit towards a Butterfly Swatter XL (*)

  - e

(*) if it materializes

Think I'll sit this one out and just slowly buy btc every week rather than giving them money for months :)

Dollar cost averaging ftw.

Why is that silly? Its completely in line with academic papers and even a SHA256 research chip which promised ~40x efficiency improvement for SHA256 hashing from 65nm FPGA to 130nm ASIC.

Honestly, of all people, I am surprised you would not believe this.

How much does this announcement cost ?

Just wondering ...

I will announce my new mining bond with it ;D

http://service.prweb.com/pricing/
Get Started $499 per press release  ;)

PREMIUM FEATURES PLUS:
Your news will appear on top business and financial sites including Yahoo! Finance, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and more.
Publicly-traded companies can reach the investors, analysts and financial journalists important to their business.

No way the OP paid THAT much.

He must be filthy rich to afford paying $500 for a prank like this. LOL.

Ball hard brother ! Trolling at its finest ... :D

I still have yet to see any conclusive proof that BFL products exist at all, anywhere.

You can't be serious...

There are hundreds of BFL singles in the wild

I have 6 in my basement  :)

They only exist in the simulated reality that is the Matrix.

Take the Blue pill you get BFL = government organisation ( invalid business license, delays with shipping products and announcements, out of the blue 10 year experience but sells only to BTC users )

Take the Red pill you get Bitcoin = freedom.

I sell tinfoil hats ! ;D

Isn't everyone that buys one a venture capitalist?

 ;D

Is this a thread to prove that anyone can BS a PRweb?

Yep. This elden tyrell guy got big game.

He spent $500 just for this. Could have used that to buy 3 Jalapeno coffee warmers for 10.5 GHash/s in the future presumably.

Guy must be mad BFL ASIC screwed over his bitstream licensing plans.

Don't jump off the bridge mate ! There is still hope :D

Why do you keep claiming he spent $500 on this?

Proof?

post #8

Sorry it looks like it actually is $89 which makes A LOT more sense.

http://service.prweb.com/pricing/

See some idiot above saying it took 499 LOL. Should have verified the info sorry !

It's only 80$ for a PRWeb release. It says it on the page you linked to. This service, in my experience, is highly used by scam artists and penny stock promoters because it is cheap. It certainly does not brighten my impression of BFL. Why is a non-publicly traded company in a niche industry issuing press releases?

I can't begin to speculate on the next product BFL will develop, but what we do know is that it will be exchangable 1:1 with past pre-orders.

Hey, atleast they did not post it to a penis enlargement site this time. ;p

Did this happen?  :o

yea, it would take a fair bit of digging through the old bfl threads to find it though.. ;p

Nope.  look at the url where the press release was found.  $89 gets you a static press release on prweb.com only.  For distribution to off site news feeds is more.

I am not so sure.

http://service.prweb.com/pricing/package/basic/

"Major online news sites like Yahoo! News and Topix"

First you claim not to believe that anything exists, and then you start talking about what's coming next. Make up your fucking mind.

LMFAO

E.T. will you allow me to upgrade my current fly swatter for the butterfly swatter?

You're absolutely right. I should have said "claimed next product."

BFL Biological Computer? BFL Optical Computer? BFL Quantum Computer? BFL Antimatter Computer?

Tears in my eyes. Laugh of the week, thanks E.T.

http://www.swatterchina.com/swatters/SWATTER.JPG

Does the button activate some kind of overclocking mode?

Looks like you are right, reading fail on my part.

$500 is not really anything when you're an adult.

fixed that for you. age and maturity don't guarantee financial status.

edited for horrid, horrid spelling.

Being able to spell doesnt even guarantee it. Sure does help.
 :o

doh! fixed.

Seems that some guys are crying because they betted too much on their mining rigs.

Just look at the FPGA developers : yohan and OP.

They really mad at this point.

FYI most miners with GPUs paid off their rigs a long time ago like me ;)

Citation, please.  Preferably from someplace serious like ISSCC.  You're probably wildly misinterpreting whatever it is you're reading.


Spartans are 45nm FPGA, not 65nm.

I couldn't help but notice that the same label applies to the people on the forum that spend the most amount of time promoting BFL.

http://rijndael.ece.vt.edu/sha3/publications/DSD11SHA3.pdf
http://filebox.vt.edu/users/xuguo/homepage/publications/CESCA_Seminar_SHA3.pdf

and read it before saying its about SHA3..


So what? Do you know what node BFL used?

And they are still waiting to get them, while we can happily miner :)

No, and I don't care.  They're claiming 5600% improvement over the current best MH/J, which is Spartan-6.  Spartan-6 is 45nm.

If you had read the papers I linked, you would have seen how that kind of power efficiency is more than plausible with a 130nm asic, nevermind a 90 or 65nm one.

I honestly wouldnt have thought someone with your background would even need to see such papers to believe that though, so Im gonna assume you are just pretending.

WTF?  What part of "not peer reviewed" do you not understand?  This is some powerpoint slide deck thrown together by a student.  About as academically credible as my press release.



Right there on the front page almost in <blink> tags:


They didn't optimize the FPGA design at all.  Notice that their performance section only compares the ASIC implementations against each other (which was the whole point of the paper), not against the FPGA implementation.

I read those papers but could not find where almost 100% utilization of the chips they were using would provide such effciency. I saw the low mW usage listed for each participants section but no indication of the actual utilization of the silicon in those sections to indicate whether the MHz they were running at was maxed out, etc. And we have no clue at this point what Freq BFL will be running theirs at.

Damn, dude, you expect me to read them in 9 minutes? (see timestamps above)  Anyways, please refer to the ginormous red text two posts back; it answers your concern.  I made it big and huge and glaring and red so you wouldn't miss it this time.

To be fair, the paper from Virginia Tech is also using 0.13 standard cell. If BFL isn't lying about the ASIC being full custom, there could be optimizations on the ASIC side as well.

Great, so you (mis)read the first paragraph,  now scroll down to the last page and see the power and performance results for the reference 130nm asic implementation.  
::)

Highly unlikely they used anything other than standard cell. But their published performance is completely believable for a 130nm standard cell implementation (particularly if its optimized for bitcoin only) and no one has said its 130nm, it could even be a smaller node.

Some skepticism regarding BFLs claims and in particular, the timetable is warranted, but its ridiculous to pretend these numbers are somehow completely impossible.

If you want to see what a 90nm asic could do:
http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-1500.pdf
Table 3
5.5 Gbps @ 3.1mW

Would a core throughput of 5.5Gbps translate to a single through hashrate of 10MH/s, and a double SHA2 hashrate of ~5MH/s?

5.5 Gbps is at a core frequency of 735 Mhz, and the 3.1mW power number has this note by it: "The power consumption is estimated for the frequency of 100 MHz". Furthermore, all the numbers are synthesized. They say they plan to tape out all the different implementations for comparison, but I don't think that's actually been done yet.

Maybe if you render the entire paper in that same big red font you can actually read it and understand that the FPGA was used for prototyping and therefore FPGA specific optimizations where not used. Now read about the ASIC, will you?

Oh well, I guess you are just trolling. You can lead a horse a water...

Still stuck on page 1 I see.
Here I was thinking you were smart. ::)

Let me try big fonts.

BECAUSE THEIR GOAL IS BUILDING AN ASIC

WTF do you want them to optimize for an FPGA? Go read the ASIC results.

Oh, I dunno, maybe because you posted the paper in defense of this comment?


BTW, I can post that paragraph from the first page again in blue if you like!

You realize they are different documents right?  If you had read my posts or read beyond page 1 of the paper you keep quoting, you might have noticed at the end it has actual performance and power numbers for the asic implementation. You can compare that to whatever  uber optimized fpga you want, so who the fuck cares about that quote of yours about what they did during prototyping. Their ASIC numbers are NOT relative to the FPGA prototype, those arent even published.

The other document, the powerpoint, is a head on comparison between FPGA and ASIC implementations.

But who cares, clearly you are not interested in reading or finding out what you dont want to know.

See this is the stage where all the geeks on the forum argue until they basically come up with a plausible design for BFL's products given their vaguely specified performance claims.

And, if BFL is a dishonest actor, they could use this information to continue being dishonest.

You're mem, aren't you?  +1 for the ignore list just in case.  Furthermore, these guys aren't geeks;  they're educated individuals.  You've obviously got nothing to add, it'd be my suggestion to shut-up and maybe you'll learn something.

Sure, they are estimates  based on pre-layout synthesis, and afaik the 90nm chip hasnt been built, but at this point the same probably goes for the BFL chip, so its not an unfair comparison ;). The 130nm chip was build. In fact, you can request a free sample if you want.

ITs also worth pointing out these chips are not optimized for bitcoin, but general purpose sha2 hashers. The 130nm chip isnt even optimized for SHA2 the whole paper describes all the trade offs they made to get those 5 or whatever competing SHA3 algorithms implemented. Whatever you want to read in to the results, they are not the highest possible, most definitely not for bitcoin.

The forum basically designed the single for BFL.

And, after the forum did all the extensive research, a pcb carrying the EP3SL150F780 chip ended up getting shipped to ngzhang.

It was claimed to be "broken." From the sound of it ngzhang had to hack the shit out of the board to probe the chip.

We'll never be sure if this was simply an altera chip on a pcb or an actual functioning product.

About the only thing I'd believe at this point, with the situation being so strange, is if someone like eldentyrell or ngzhang got their hands on a functioning BFL single.

Don't do these people's research for them. Don't post plausible designs the the forum. You're only making it more difficult to find out if this is a legitimate company by discussing their "products" in such depth.

Oh god you are so completely retarded. If you came up with that bullshit after reading all the info available to you on this forum, then I would have to say that your reading comprehension is, at best, not up to snuff.

I'll answer each point just once because you need some help in the research department:

The forum did NOT design the Single for BFL. Where you heard this, I don't know. Citation please? They (BFL) suddenly appeared with a website and a promise of extraordinary performance, including a finished design. The performance claims were ripped to shit by the forum, and they eventually got around to building their design and found out that the cooling and power were insufficient. At no time did they even solicit design suggestions from the forum; all decisions were theirs alone.

During this design process, some high resolution photographs of the PCB and the chip were uploaded, and the folks here guessed based on those that the chips were EP3SL150 devices. This is before any of them shipped.

After that, they finally started shipping, and one of the units made their way into the hands of ngzhang. He did not have to "hack the shit out of it", he simply had to solder on a single resistor or jumper in order to reconnect the JTAG pins. After that it was as simple as hooking it up and reading the IDCODEs. There is no possible way that the chip on the board would have been something else; that would have required a board level redesign which would have been nothing more than a waste of time and a diversion. Replacing the chip on the board and retaining a functional or partially functional device without a board level redesign is highly unlikely to the point of being absurd.

And finally, even if ET or ngzhang were to verify the authenticity of a Single by saying they have one, you would just be there saying they don't exist either. Why shouldn't anyone be informed about what they are getting? It requires professionals that know what they are doing to identify much of this stuff, it isn't something that 99% of the consumers can do.

Please shut up and stop bullshitting. You are only making yourself look more stupid.

You don't know that they had a finished design. This is an assumption on your part.

It's entirely possible that a student could approach the R&D engineers at a local university's EE department for help in laying out the PCB after he knows what plausible components to specify. He would only have to tell them it was for a school project. If I were investigating this I would begin by calling all the universities in the KC, MO area. I would ask them to look at the picture of "ninja lady" and if she was on their payroll.

This same student could not however approach the department and ask them to design a board and specify components that would achieve a certain number of SHA-256 hashes per second.

Additionally, this student wouldn't have the experience necessary to implement the SHA-256 algorithm and spend the months necessary to unroll and route and debug the implementation.

Every manufacturer of FPGA devices, except BFL, followed the same formula: They announce exact specifications with pricing. And then they deliver in a reasonable timeframe.

BFL is not following this formula. Use your imagination as to why. (PRE-)BUYER BEWARE.

By "finished design" I meant "a design that the forum has had no input into" but I didn't expect you to catch that. They also had a design that never shipped, but that was mining at reduced speed due to poor design choices.

Again, you have no idea what design they had at any particular point in time. This is your personal assumption.

Yeah, just because photos of a finished PCB don't constitute a design. Right. Uh huh.

First reference to EP3SL150 (by ngzhang) 12-1-2011
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48863.msg637417#msg637417

First picture of PCB 1-20-2012
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53530.msg705354#msg705354

That's a 2 months difference.

And no, photos of a finished PCB do not constitute a design, either. We have no way to tell if the PCB has errors simply by looking at it. These things do not always come back correctly the first time, especially if the designer is inexperienced.

That's not the first picture. And that is the second redesign. You weren't here that long ago, otherwise you would have seen other things. This for instance: http://butterflylabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1817.jpg

And maybe this: https://eclipsemc.com/bfl/bfl-8.jpg <-- 25 Nov 2011, and it hashes! More here: http://eclipsemc.com/bfl/

It was at the point that they discovered that the power subsystem was insufficient, requiring a redesign.

I apologize. To be honest, I hadn't realized how many people had now received their BFL single. However, the circumstances around this company still warrants a high degree of skepticism.

fixed that for you [2]