Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone, I would like to know your opinions on the FPGA miners for altcoins. My partner and I have been working on a FPGA miner project for an altcoin(sorry i can't reveal now, but not a very popular one), after being fully optimized we believe the fpga miner should be able to achieve the same level of hash power as of a mid-range graphic card with only 1/10 of the power consumption. It would essentially look like one of those early day bitcoin FPGA miners, with 2 or more FPGA "chips" on a PCB board (depending on the demand), like the one in this link
http://fpgamining.com/. The other beauty of FPGA miners is that a cheap raspberry pi can be used as the host to drive all FPGA miners connected to it via USB cables, there is no GPU -like rigs needed.
Due to the development, custom board design and manufacture the final price might end up in the $500 range. Do you think someone would buy such a product for mining nowadays? Just want to hear your general opinions on it, as both of us are relatively new to the crytocurrency and didn't experience the fpag miner era of bitcoin.

Any suggestion is appreciated!

So 2.50 a day profit or so, almost no power draw for $500 bucks.. at a ROI of more than 6 months, I would pass. At least I can reuse and sell gpus easily. A fpga that can lose its value quick due to competition would be a poor choice. Someone will use a cheaper board and make a faster one. I know a few programmers here that have made fpga miners. They could potentially make a better version pretty easily. Maybe if price was lower I would go for it..

Way too expensive for zero resale value later on.

Depending on that what coins can be mined with your fpga, but i think there will be buyers for this, if this 1/10 of power is true it will be tempting for countries with high electricity prices. People were skeptical about bitcoin fpgas but ended buying them at loads until the ASICs came.
Will be interesting to post more info about this development!

What about selling it at lower price like 350 and getting a percentage from mining like the miners devs do? Of course there will be a problem with people trying to avoid your devfee :)

You can reprogram it to mine other coins. But it depends on the developer.

With new nvidia cards coming out, this FPGA will be making less and less money. And at some point it won`t be worthwhile any more. At least gpu`s can be sold to gamers.

thank you for your valuable inputs. I am a GPU miner myself and it would also be my no.1 concern of no resale value when buying those dedicated fpga/asic miners.
so what would make you buy a fpga miner? you mentioned the price, currently there are two designs in my mind but i don't know which one customers would prefer:

1. a "big" fpga board with 2 or 4 cores on it, the hash power can beat a graphic card, with only a quarter of its power consumption. priced around $400-$800 (depending on the number of cores), most efficient hash/power and better hash/cost perhaps.
2. a "tiny" fpga mining usb stick. It would look a usb flash drive with heatsink on it (as showed in the link below). it has only one fpga core on it, maybe only a quarter of the GPU miner hash power, but power consumption is tiny as well, as it is powered solely from the USB. priced around $100 (i haven't run through all the numbers yet, just rough one). potentially you can connect multiple of those sticks on a usb hub with good power source. you can also take it with you and plug in your laptop and mine anywhere you want! this would be less efficient in hash/power and hash/cost if you compare to the big one though.
https://www.amazon.com/GekkoScience-2-Pac-Compac-Bitcoin-BM1384x2/dp/B06XBWK2W5/

I agree with you there are so many talented fpga/asic programmers here, but the design, manufacture and validation cycles may cost time and money. during which time we can constantly improve our design to make it more competitive.

HI thank you for your interest, I will definitely keep you updated when rubber hits the road! right now we are still working on prototyping our miner design on development boards from different fpga vendors. the fpga devices nowadays are made very power efficient, if a typical gpu takes 150W when mining, i think it is very likely to achieve the same level of hashrate with only 15W power intake.
the price is just a rough number as we haven't run through all the numbers with our suppliers.. technically it would be little tricky to implement a dev fee, and morally i am against it  ;) (no offense) I wouldn't sleep well to take a percentage of miners' hard mined coins...

Yes please take a look at the big and tiny designs i proposed in another reply i would like to know what miners want the most, time has changed since bitcoin fpga era, we should consider changing the design if the is demand from miner community. thanks.

you are right, but technically, from the hash/power efficiency perspective, the gpu can never beat fpga, just like fpga can never be faster than ASIC (which also requires millions $ investment). but like you said gpu is generic and has resale potential. but fpga is versatile, we can custom build the product the way miners want. what would make you to buy a fpga miner? does any of the designs i proposed appeal to you? thanks.

For me personally price is key factor. I would not pay whopping 500$ for it.

good point, nobody wants to invest in that much $$$ for a miner which has low resale value. the reason i said $500 is that price range i can manage to compete with the GPU miner at 1/10 of its power consumption. but maybe that's not what miners want? you would prefer $100 fpga miner with only 1/4 of GPU hash rate?

Thanks.

Hi man, i am trying to msg you but you set no msg from new_bie, which i am here.  ;D

do you mind send me a private message? i am here with an oppty for you. ;D

email also works. mine can be find in my profile.
thank you!
Rochester

Consider making of non-standard (incompatible to NOMP etc) pool for these miners to not disclose the algorithm's name. Just disclosing the name of algo will ruin your business immediately. FPGA developers will build their miners for that altcoin, and altcoin developers may wish to change POW algorithm.  Please think about it.

Also your pool solves the problem of devfees.

"Mid-range"?

If I assume that is an RX 570... That card can get 600-800 H/s on Cryptonight and 28-30 MH/s on ETH...

On both of those with electricity you would make $0.80 to $1.50 per day.

That is almost a 1 year break even...

with the reduced power it is almost the same as buying a mid-range cpu. I'd probably buy the GPU... Now $250, different story...

Cheaper, just as fast or faster, and less power sells.

it is not about the resale value from my perspective. all about the efficiency and profitbility of mining and flexibility of switch on altcoin to another, no?

As far as I understand, the payback of such equipment is at the level of 6+ months. Now it seems to me, given the unstable market it is very risky.

it is a valuable advice, thanks! just see what happened to monero when antminer x3 is introduced to market...

I hear you . the price of those dedicated miners are outrageously high nowadays. we will be working hard to control the price to below $200, and performance as good as RX 570 type of GPU.

what is the reasonably ideal payback period in your mind?

sorry man i haven't logged in for a while and missed your post, would you mind sending me a pm with your email address? because i don't see that from your profile, probably because i am also a newbie?
thanks.

I would consider it, if it was well supported.  Xilinx or Alterra?

Thank you for the interest. we are now custom designing pcb board for xilinx fpga.

FPGA miners sound cool and scary for me at the same time (being a GPU miner). I know you can use FPGA to mine almost anything when you know how to generate a bitstream (?) for the algo you want to mine.
FPGA seems the way to go if the:

Price is normal (everyone is able to buy, not like ASICs. Keeps the network decentralized)
Hashrate is high
Power usage is really low

the power consumption is almost guaranteed to be low due to the advancement of fpga hardware technology in recent years. between hashrate and price you need to strike a balance, however, but to me i think to make it cheap and accessible to people is more important.

the usb one sounds fun as hell imo

I think the board should have a PCI Express interface, at least x1. This makes easy integration with ccminer and others.
Also VCCINT's current should be at least 10A per 10000 slices, and strong decoupling.

thank you for the good advice on power supply. we are currently considering a 10A power supply to VCCINT and VCCBRAM. based on our initial power estimate the total fpga power consumption should be below 10w. for PCIE i am not sure it would fit on the miner-on-a-stick product? admittedly both of us has limited hw design experience, so we are trying to keep thing simple(and cheap)as possible  ;D

I would prefer a narrow and short PCI Express board. It is scalable and standard solution.

Also I have built some miners on generic development boards by Xilinx. But all of these boards never reach the performance of the professional level device. The dev kit  fails to cool and to withstand the ripple of the core's supply. It was very sad to see a good FPGA soldered to such restricted PCB.

I would start from XC7K160T device. Some coins would fit in it pretty well.

we observed the same thing that the PMIC on those commercial development board is not capable of providing enough power to the FPGA with a fully unrolled pipeline design. that's one reason why we want our own custom pcb design with a beefy power supply.
thanks for the suggestion on pcie, we will consider adding it to the design.
btw, you said some coins may fit in fpga miner, can you give me some names? maybe we can expand our product to be more generic and available to support various mining algorithms.

Thanks!

I am taking algorithms from the Tpruvot's ccminer. All algorithms that are using from 1 to 5 hashes are profitable in practice, like nist5 or groestle.

this is valuable comment. there will be great potential if we can make it compatible working with ccminer and hw resource capable of supporting multiple algorithms.
Thanks.

what do you think of having a on-board 4GB DDR4 SRAM? would it be useful for mining memory intensive algorithms? what other components could be useful addition to the fpga board?

The 4 GB DDR4 SRAM would be great, the right component for equihash and cryptonight. Also please consider the temperature monitoring or cooling of hottest parts.

The throttling mode is required at the high temperature of the FPGA's core. So consider the usage of System monitor in firmware.

Any progress on the fpga design? Also which fpga chips are you considering using? I personally think you are the right track and fgpas for altcoins will be a big market soon . Ive been trying to find any info i could on fgpas to build my own for the past couple weeks. which is how i ran across this thread. Keep us updated

I am one of the supporter to make FPGA mining comes alive again.
Owned bunch of Xilinx leftover from projects and really need to make a good use out of it  ;D
If you need hand for testing or helping you out with debugging purposes do not hesitate to PMed me. I will be happy to give some hands ;-)

I think this is a cool idea and I'm glad this got bumped.  Just like any new invention, the cost of entry will be expensive at first and the results won't be as high as they could be, but you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelette.  I see a lot of people referencing AMD GPUs here.  I'm sure the FPGA idea would be a pipe dream if there was an overabundant supply of RX 580s for $200 each.  Live by the GPU, Die by the GPU.  Smart miners look for ways to diversify.  I would definitely buy one of these.  An idea for OP would be to offer some kind of incentive in the form of future discounts and pre-releases to early adopters.

Hello Everyone, sorry for lack of updates. we have been busy working all the time and paid little(no) attention to the public relationship and marketing aspects.  ;)

We have made major breakthrough in both the HW and SW development. it has been found that the power supply circuit on any of the off-the-shelf FPGA development boards is way insufficient to support any crypto mining algorithm running at a decent speed. we made a board modification to use different power supply chip which can deliver up to 25A of current to FPGA device. with this mighty power circuit mod, we managed to achieve the following fpga design goals on our development board:

4/21 - Developed and verified two Altcoin mining algorithms, both can run at 2/3 hashrate of a mid-class GPU (use RX470 as a reference), with only 1/10 of power consumption. The whole board power consumption is measured at 12W. But this is my big hack-up board. Our final slimmed down version board would consume even less power.

Currently, we have been testing on a development board with early Engineering Sample FPGA device. This specific FPGA device is scheduled to be in full production in second half of 2018. We are actively negotiating with the sales and distributors trying to get this chip sooner and at an affordable price for customers.

Remember our design goals are:
1. Affordable(cheap) and accessible to EVERYONE, not the selected few. We'd like to contribute to the decentralization of the crypto, not the other way. because we believe crypto belongs to the people not big mining farms.
2. Active after-launch development to continuously add support for multiple Altcoin mining algorithms based on the crowd demand.
3. Home mining friendly. not an excessive heat radiator or noise generator.. like those antminers (i used to have a few in my basement and traumatized by that experience ::))
4. Light wight and mobility. plug in and mine anywhere with your laptop.

Most importantly, I'd like to hear what you want, give us some ideas from your pipe dream and we will try our best to design it in.  ;) Thanks.

Talking about ASIC's and FPGA's - not sure what SAMSUNGis producing and for whom, but INTEL, just announced they got FASTEST IN THE WORLD FPGA:
https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-chip-performs-10-trillion-calculations-per-second/

- get those properly programmed and stacked up in 1 miner and i bet it will beat anything thats out there right now. Interesting point that we may be seeing high end FPGA based miners to come out soon, which can be adopted to forks. BEWARE Wink

Very good progress.
It would be nice to implement PCI Express x1 at least, and allow the development of third-party firmware.

Exactly :

- PCIe like HPC accelerator card but without network port at affordable price : $300-$400
- And with OpenCL support too.

I hear you. PCIE is on our todo list.

we will release more info on pre-order once we have the prototype board ready. thanks

Please do!  I've been daydreaming about fpga for alts all week and finally decided to look up whether anyone was actually working on it.  Really excited about this. I have a lot of friends mining with asics and gpus and we HATE giving Bitmain our money.

If you get this product up and running, you'll buy a new house with what we'll order!

I'm also working on this and will shortly be releasing free bitstreams with a 4% mining fee, supporting Xilinx VCU1525, Bittware XUPP3R, and Avnet KU040.  ROI is around 90-200 days depending on the algorithm.  I have constructed a GPU-style rig with 8 x VCU1525, I will post some pictures soon.

awesome,what do i need to prepare?  ;) ;) ;)

I am anxiously awaiting this FPGA mining boom as well  :)

what algo?

please, do. Very interested in fpga miners too.

very interesting .
It is very demanding for programming.
How much the power consumption?
Did they take 5x advantage compared to GTX 1080 ?

This sounds pretty cool, keeping a close eye on this.

Also very interested.

I believe ROI is the most important factor in general. People rush in when ROI<6 months (GPUs), consider the possible resale value of GPUs, shorter ROI might be anticipated for your miner.

If you continue to support it and make it possible to be adapted to diff algorithms, that will be a huge plus.

Mining with FPGAs sounds like the best thing that has happened with mining. Everybody is happy: Miners give back GPU stock to gamers/everyday-users and also pay less for electricity/ get less heat and quicker ROI.

Thank you for the good comment.
for the algorithm support, we do plan to continue supporting it, but what i really hope is to build this platform upon which the community can spontaneously kick start their own projects supporting different coins interest them.

Until everyone got a FPGA and the difficulty will explode, it will be only profitable for the first who have tons of money.

If it consume less power, that means miners will buy more of them.

If you are interested I created a separate thread on the DIY FPGA mining rig with pics & video of the 8 x VCU1525 rig:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3459858


Eric

That's very impressive fpga mining rig you have there! but you see this is the problem, not everyone can afford $4000 for a fpga accelerator, we are trying to make a product accessible to everyone at low price with decent performance.

how much price target you are planing?  ;) ;) ;)

the cheapest one should be in $300 price range. with performance close to a gpu but 1/5 to 1/10 power consumption.

Eagerly waiting for a release ;)

I read earlier about a Raspberry Pi version. Something like this?
https://www.crowdsupply.com/alphamax/netv2

i have custom FPGA usb
i need miner for altcoins.

I'm also looking for altcoin miner, any progress? xilinx kit

Hi, which algos are avaiable for Avnet KU040?

Hi! have you released the bitstreams?

regards!

Hi guys, we don't make or release bitstream files for other platforms.
we are trying to build our own FPGA HW platform with mining bitstream. please see my other post for latest progress update. thanks

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4493669.0

If later on FPGA mining happens, it will be a nightmare for GPU and ASIC miners. Because the price is more cheap and anybody can buy and high hashrate. Not to mention has now begin to be developed for mine all altcoin algorithm. I am waiting to happen soon.

There are already a handful of people mining altcoins with fpga´s, and they are getting insane hashrates. Only downside is that they don´t release their bitstreams to the public.

No, FPGAs are several times more expensive than ASICs for the same computational power; their only advantage over ASICs is that they can be reprogrammed (within limits) if a coin forks. They are not nearly as flexible in this regard as GPUs, however. You can sort of think of FPGA miners as halfway between the flexibility of a GPU and the high efficiency of an ASIC.

While this is true for now, it may not be for long. With all the individuals and companies now investing on FPGA development, I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see the price of profitable FPGAs diluted down to the cost of GPUs. It is part of the inevitable evolution of technology.

Exciting to imagine we will soon have badass looking mining rigs instead of the toy-like GPUs which were designed for young gamers.

Why should they release their bitstreams to the public ? They become nothing for it !

Psst... "become" doesn't mean bekommen.

They do receive something. A nice and beefy dev fee. Look at the total ETH hashpower for example, assume 80% of it is mined using Claymore's miner and take 2% thereof (his fee).

Do the math.

Claymore doesn´t build the algorithm´s, he only made a front end and small improvements.

In case of monero / cryptonight, the algo was build by w0lf.
Claymore only use the algo from w0lf, and receive so much. w0lf only receice the bounty for this job.

Let me calculate  ??? no bounty ... nothing for the bitstream-dev.

So. Is the miner ready yet to try?

Any truth to this? I'd appreciate if you could post a reference link maybe to show maybe how this happened?

This is why dev fees are now preferred over the bounty and one-time fixed costs. Look at all the mining software out there, the best ones are those that have a small dev fee embedded in them. Without dev fees, developers are less motivated to work on improving the software.

https://forum.getmonero.org/7/open-tasks/2400/open-source-amd-miner-by-wolf0 (https://forum.getmonero.org/7/open-tasks/2400/open-source-amd-miner-by-wolf0)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656841.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656841.0)
He receive 7550 XMR for the job.
XMRStack, SRBMiner, GateLessGate... all are using his opencl-code...and w0lf get no dev-fee.
The software on the PC is controlling the FPGA and the dev-fee. The bitstream on the FPGA only do the algo.

I would burn the encryted algo on an FPGA for an one-off payment ... maybe  ;).
Or maybe i will sell the cards with the included algo  ;D.

Can someone here explain to me, is it better to use FPGA-based board for altcoin mining or something based on Tegra X1 chips?
Link: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-x1-processor.html

The reason I am asking is because I was thinking about ETH miner based on FPGA chips, but then thought that memory issue they got (which makes them kinda asic proof) can be solved better if memory is placed within the same chip where all processing power is located.
There is OpenGL support for these chips, which makes the job easier.
1 teraflop is not much though, but then you have faster performing memory.

Little SOCs like the Tegra X1, are all memory bandwidth limited, so you can never get optimal use out of all the cores at once. You get out only 30 h/s cryptonight (I don´t know the ethash speed).
FPGA´s are better, if you have the right environment.

Bitstreams don't work that way.  Right now there is no way to capture a developer fee, since software on the PC still has to talk to the FPGA to connect the hashpower to a pool.  Given all the folks who will happily recompile and distribute mining programs after disabling the fee to the unwashed masses, there is no upside.  Someone will 'improve' the miner and remove the dev fee, and once the bitstream is out, there is no way to fix that.

The Allmine shell will fix that, so developers can release encrypted streams and capture a fee off of the hashrate, but today, as it exists, nobody in their right mind would do it.  Until then, FPGA's will mine in big farms where they can pay for the development costs.

Thank you!
Which algorithm would you target first with FPGA-based miner?
It can surely be ethash and such.

I was interested in this subject , coming from a hardware side of engineering and not software I did want to learn how to write bitstreams for these as I have a few developer boards lying around.

My issue was I did not have a starting point to piece together the required information. If someone could point me in the right direction that would be great. Can you not use the C code from example source files for miners, as this contains the logic for the algo.

CHeers

Try cryptonight v1 (monero) ... it´s possible. ;D

Thank you for suggestion. And why choose that over ethash? Easier/cheaper to do?

ETASH requires an awfull lot of memory and is quite a power hungry algo, so an expensive FPGA with a 225W power limit is not the best fit at all.

My idea was to get cheaper and little older hardware and build a cheap miner. Tasks can be divided between several chips...
Yes, that will consume more power, but I think if we make calculations based on what industrial miners are paying (up to 5 cents per kwh), then there may be a niche for such product.

There's a project, the idea is to lower the keccak burden on the GPU.
Thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4391318.msg39871063

how cheap is cheap? we plan to price the fpga miner at $400 price range (depending on the final order number), about 20W power consumption. i don't really think you can get reasonably sized fpga device below that price

we have tested keccak algo, our proposed fpga miner should be able to achieve 1GH/s at 20w. the PCIe can be added so you can use it as an accelerator type of device.

Excellent! Thank you! Please share as much as you are willing to, at this point I am just gathering as much information as possible.

Cheap is something that pays off within 6 months :) Even if it's $40,000 but has a short breakeven period I will (and many others) consider it a great deal.
--
Your power consumption rate is amazing, good job! Hope you will succeed at making good profit with this project!

how cheap is cheap? we plan to price the fpga miner at $400 price range (depending on the final order number), about 20W power consumption. i don't really think you can get reasonably sized fpga device below that price


400 US isn't cheap expecially with ETH( and the market) at current price level.

I do think that there are some reasonably sized FPGA but limited to only few algos that may be sold around 200 bucks.

ANd then we have to pay attention to the bitstream. If your bitstream follow the same algos of what will be available on the other platform ie allmineinc, the risk of overlapping is high.

A fpga that mine Allium, Arto CNvariant, or skein will be more safe to purchase than one that mine Etash,CN monero and Tribus.

 

Thanks. if our single fpga design is proven to be successful. we consider to design a multi-fpga platform focusing on the ROI and performance.

if you want to sell at 200, your total cost needs to be lower than 100, for that price i really doubt you can find any good sized fpga. it is no longer bitcoin time, the algo of altcoins nowadays are made wickedly complex, requiring a much larger fpga to reach reasonable hash performance

Are you interested in some kind of cooperation?

sure, we are open to any cooperation opportunities.

Could be any price, as long as it pays back within half a year.

Is it possible to meet in person?

we all have full time job, and busy on this project on the side, so i can't guarantee any time. but if you have something interesting, we can arrange meeting. thanks.

If you’re still using 28nm, should be able to have the biggest...

I just ordered two from fpgavcu1525.com they only got 25 pcs and long delivery time :( Could only get one per customer but ordered two times one to my fathers address ;)

Really need help to set it up I am brand new to FPGA mining, please can some one help out?

Thank you very much.

Brand new account with the name FPGAmining posting a link to a shady looking site selling the 1525. That's not suspicious at all  ::)

That is not a legitimate site..

dwarfminer = scam
fpga mining (this product) = scam
Acorn m.2 = not scam
fpgaland = not scam

Xilinx just drastically increased their prices for the lastest dev board