Bitcoin Forum

With this quote BITMAIN has silently announced the new antminer s2, what do you expect from the bitmain second generation?

If the S2 is under 1W/GH, is available for immediate delivery (no pre-orders), and is priced as competitively as the S1 I'll be a happy repeat customer.

Yeah, me too
Personally i don't expect 1w/gh in a very near future from bitmain

I'll speculate.

They've made a new control board and it's going to be 3-5 "slices" in a new unit. I think this is likely.

It's also possible that they've made boards that utilize more than 32 chips; maybe the same 2x "slice" units, but with 40 chips instead of 32. I don't know how likely this is, but it would only make sense if there would be a net decrease in watts consumed.

The basis of my speculation is that they do not have a new chip. It is my understanding that the chips they use in their existing hardware is of their own design. I don't see any indication that they are in the wave of A1 clones that are making their way to users.

Secondary to this is that there is a loss of wattage to components other than chips, and that they have found a way to make the current design more efficient. I've seen a lot of concern that some hardware out there draws more power than the average consumer has per circuit in their residence. Their existing hardware is not as efficient, and is roughly 1.9w/GH. Other manufactures have released hardware that is near 1w/GH, but this is with next generation ASIC technology.

Have they found a way to make their current hardware more efficient, or do they have new technology?

We should start a poll.

Gmaxwell may know S2 specifications now but he will not disclose for us. Anyway, I'am eager for S2 from Bitmain and bored with pre-orders from other ASIC companies.

I am hoping it is a newer chip design. alternatively, maybe more chips on an undervolted PCB to get a slightly higher efficiency?

There are too many other vendors starting to crowd into the 900W/1TH range, if it is not a new chip offering better hash to watts then they will not be selling many.

1.2W/GH
500GH/S
2.4BTC

Anyone who has closely look at their Antminers and did a raw calculation on the production costs plus shipping costs and salaries will come to a conclusion that it will be very tight to sell it under 0.2 BTC at curent BTC price.
They are not using Foxconn to assembling their stuff.
This is not mass production, the miners world is still small compared with normal electronics.
I think they already have their next gen ready or before their Antminers S1 reach the point of 0.5 BTC plus free shipping.

Anyone who has more knowledge and are willing to tear down the S1 for exact production costs is welcome to share his/her opinion.
I only did a quick raw calculation

would be great, but at least for me we need to wait another month

holy f**k sounds crazily low at me, 120/150 USD are enough to produce an ant?

Let's take an educated guess based on the 500 GH, 1.2 W/GH figure, and assume that they don't have new chips. Please keep in mind that I'm not even close to an engineer.

Seems like it would be doable in roughly double the footprint of S1's, if they stuff a ton of chips in and under clock them. I can't think of any other way that they'd be able to fit more chips in the same space without limiting the wattage. The math is confusing me, but I really feel like they're going to use existing S1 boards and just putting more of them into a unit. I could easily see a 5-6 board machine with the chips tuned for efficiency. Detune an S1 to 180 and fit 3 of them together with 1 control board.

Would make sense, right?

Stands to reason it could be a 360GHs unit ?

Either way, will probably be buying several. I <3 Bitmain !

I want the Antminer S2 to be a re-branded one of these Bitmine A1 based Dragon Miners!
http://www.lketc.com/goods/show-197.aspx
1TH / 880W = 19999 Yuan = $3255 USD! :o
I see a lot of people selling clones but they ask too much. Bitmain do us a good deal.

Damn, I wish I could buy a 1TH Dragon for $3255 plus shipping right now! I would buy several at that price.

Look at Asicminer when they announced they will stop production of their first and second generation blades because it won't be profitable to produce them anymore.
You will be surprised how much profit there was for Asicminer.
Friedcat is really smart in doing business.

 Ditto.

The difference between the S1 and S2 could be similar to the difference between the U1 and U2.  Same chip but with hardware and software based optimizations to improve performance.

Same chip... But there's 64 of them in a S1 and only 1 in an U1.

Anyone know how much power is lost to components besides the chip?

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1-TH-s-SHA256-Bitcoin-miner_1682627228.html

Yeah thats what Im willin to bet on. Same chip, optimized hardware around them and perhaps more chips.... =)

Would be nice if VRM's were beefier and voltage control could be done easily =)

i dont care for  performance i have 3 x 25 A x 240 V free include in rent price.
i want antminer S1/s2 who care 180 gh for 100-300$ pcs ;D

My guess is that sushi will come to your house and configure the S2 so it will actually produce physical bitcoins  :o BITMAIN has the POWER

The S2 will be better than the S1 and I already want one. That's my speculation.

for S2
0.5W/Ghs
750 Ghs
price about 3.5btc/pcs

 ;D ;D

Speaking to a supplier in China who buys from Bitmain local production facility said it's top secret project but has been hinted that there will be 2 models released 1Th/s and a 2Th/s model.

As always this is speculation but I can imagine this will be the case due to keep up with difficulty and other competitors.

If going by the other results of the U2 Bitmain will release details  a week today and following sales that week for dispatch on the 31st to go in line with the U2

Will be great if they'll be able to keep the power consumption below 1w/ghash

Know something do you?  ;D

My Company is in talks with Bitmain about S2  ;D So far is sounding very good  ;D

Give it some time Bitmain will release the good news and sexy design  :P

wowowowow

The S2 will be 1000 GH/s, will use 55nm tech, and will be released in April.

In June, they will start implementing 28nm tech in their next products.

Hmmmm parts are right but from what I am been speaking to Bitmain they are  not using 55nm in next batch... 28nm I have been told

Ah, was just going off what I had been told directly by BITMAIN in regards to their product release (and closing) timeline for products. In particular:

"Our company's new product is ANTMINER  S2 , 1000GH/S in april"
"S1 will  stop sell  in may"
"S1 and S2  is  55nm tech .  we will use  28nm in june"

and so on..

Bitmain may be bluffing us  ;D But I am sure S2 is 1Th/s and also improved cooling system and power I have been told :) and yeah start in April.

S3 must be 28nm what they were talking to me about.

All will be reviled soon :)

Can we expect like 2 kW of power consumption (cuz they are using same s1 55nm chips, correct)?

So everyone guessing here with the release of S2... If it is 1TH, that number sounds great however if it going to use 55nm, then as mentioned before power consumption will be roughly 2kW... technically they will be putting a machine with 178 chips on the board for S2 (5.55 S1's).

28nm sounds much better as the difficulty is getting hard and harder, lowering the electricity bill will be appreciated.

Seems to me regardless of what process node they use they will need to use a chip with improved power consumption in the S2.  In the original U1 the chip was always under clocked.  The U2+ just took the same chip added a bigger heat sink and changed the default clock rate.  Since the S1 was already operating at close to the maximum clock rate they will almost certainly have to use an improved chip in the S2.

top !

The Bitfury2 is the most efficient 55nm Bitcoin chip on the planet. http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/product/bitfury-55nm-rev2-samples/

Technobit just showed 16x of them running today at 61GH (3.8GH per chip).
No official wattage yet but the old ones were about 1.5W/GH and I'm estimating power at 1.24W/GH.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=307897.msg5640531#msg5640531

If you built an Antminer out of these things it would be around 243GH/301W 8) I'd buy that, it's as good as my 28nm A1 modules!

Next questions how cheap could you make it?

€5 a chip = $7 so it's $448 in 64x chip cost. Double that for other costs/profit and it could be under $900. Again in the 28nm A1 ballpark.

So it is do-able with 55nm.

Why?  Just do the reverse of what they did going from U1 -> U2 and increase the chip count.

When the Bitmain -- Antminer 1Th and 2 Th are avaible we should do a group buy>  :D

I hope it wont draw 2k. If not and if it's priced well I will probably buy at least one, hopefully more. If priced at BTC3,5 probably a small farm  :D

no, no rebranded chinese 1T please!

i never seen a bigger waste of space

Because Bitmain still needs to turn a profit and adding more chips would increase their production costs.

My understanding is that bare chip costs are quite marginal.

chip costs are minimal but the initial R&D can be several million dollars

I can envision having an antminer where a pair of big waterblocks measuring about 10"x10"x2" (about the size of two of the current heatsinks stacked vertically) could have 4 blades bolted to each it and would only require about the same amount of space as 2 antminers

      {[]} {[]}
      {[]} {[]}       {,} represent hashing boards    [] represents waterblock
        |\   /|
      [radiator]

     <-~12"->

Bitmain could probably achieve this via chinese manufactures pretty cheaply, maybe at a 5% premium considering the overall metal mass would be similar to 8 heatsinks and the rad could run with 2 fans instead of 4 fans (save $5-10 per fan).

The only issue is that the board design or orientation may need slight tweaking in order to accomodate the back-side chips near the requlator as well as allowing connections for power and ethernet still. (In theory, a single control board could probably be used, further reducing costs - but might require a slightly faster processor)

That's the point.  We're operating on the assumption that S2 still utilizes their 55nm chips, so decreasing Vcc/Clk and increasing the chip count could provide a more efficient miner at greater speeds (overall) with marginal increases in production cost(s).

^if re-designing the board like that, a water block would be particularly good. putting 500GH+ on a single block with a radiator would make cooling a lot easier and reduce the noise and costs of air cooling.

I was checking on any S1 Firmware updates and noticed this little tidbit in README.md regarding future software updates,

https://github.com/AntMiner/AntGen1/tree/master/PCB

"Future: We are designing a type of new control board based on ARM A8. When it is ready, the chain number can be up to 16, and the chip number can be up to 256 per chain."

same chip, modular 19" design

Comparing the gains from U1 to U2 should be reasonable. Considering that according to there website, the only difference is a extra 400 mh/s from U1 to U2 (or 20% increase) with no change to power consumption, and slightly bigger footprint, proabbly to accommodate the different heatsink, I think a reasonable speculation/assumption would be the S2 having the same power consumption (360w Im hearing from forums) and having 20% increase in hash ( or 216 gh/s) with out OC. This may be flawed, but Bitmain is selling the U1 for 18 BTC while u2 is 13.9 BTC per 500 units. This may be the preorder, but if that scales as well, we could expect a 33% discount in price or .77BTC. Just my thoughts.

the u2 is the same design as U1 i think, except that its now hard-coded to run at 2.0GH rather then needing the bmsc-options variable in cgminer

Official announcement from Bitmain:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=515448.0

How close was this to your guesses?

Spot on, we had pics of the prototype unnamed on our facebook page since the Texas Bitcoin Conference =), well with Bitmain stuff in the background.

That thing is huge!!!

Speculation ends, Production Starts, Preorder available https://112bit.com

Juan