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Title: Is FPGA mining board easily to be sold outside the bitcoin community? Post by: HorseRider on March 24, 2012, 06:18:58 PM If one day Some miners want to quit the FPGA mining, is it easy for him to sell the board to a non-bitcoiner?
Title: Re: Is FPGA mining board easily to be sold outside the bitcoin community? Post by: notawake on March 24, 2012, 06:42:52 PM I would say it depends on the board itself. Some boards have development connectors that allow new code to be put on them while other boards do not have these and can therefore only run the mining programs. Boards that can only run mining programs won't be as valuable as boards that come with development connectors.
Title: Re: Is FPGA mining board easily to be sold outside the bitcoin community? Post by: Wandering Albatross on March 24, 2012, 09:14:38 PM By any measure I'm no FPGA expert. But from what I've learned it really depends on the board. Icarus seems to have possibilities beyond btc mining. But the issue really becomes one of expertise in FPGA design too. BFL is a one-trick pony (apparently not reprogrammable except by BFL)
Same for X6500 (can be reprogrammed), not sure about ztex (can be reprogrammed). "easily" might be relative to your skills. The goal is to recoup your expenditure by mining. Then once the board's paid for itself and turned a profit who cares if it's useful. Well some of us do care and if you can use the board as a dev board you can learn something too. Title: Re: Is FPGA mining board easily to be sold outside the bitcoin community? Post by: lame.duck on March 24, 2012, 09:44:16 PM 'Easy' is relative and a question of price. As wandering albatross said, the icarus board could be easily used for other purposes as well, a plus besides the many IO-lines that could be userd there is also documentation avaiable. But even the just a FPGA on the board type boards will find a buyer, skilled people could pull the FPGA from the board or use it for password-cracking like those guys from NSA@home.
As a drawback to all spartan6 -150 boards is that creating a bitstream requieres a full ISE which is priced @$3600 or so. Title: Re: Is FPGA mining board easily to be sold outside the bitcoin community? Post by: dropt on March 24, 2012, 10:42:15 PM As a drawback to all spartan6 -150 boards is that creating a bitstream requieres a full ISE which is priced @$3600 or so. That may or may not change once the chip goes legacy. Title: Re: Is FPGA mining board easily to be sold outside the bitcoin community? Post by: lame.duck on March 24, 2012, 11:53:33 PM As a drawback to all spartan6 -150 boards is that creating a bitstream requieres a full ISE which is priced @$3600 or so. That may or may not change once the chip goes legacy. You never tried to get a toolchain for an out of date FPGA or CPLD.before. There was a discussion in the news groups with Peter Alfke about this topic, http://www.edaboard.co.uk/xc2000-t335484.html Title: Re: Is FPGA mining board easily to be sold outside the bitcoin community? Post by: stevegee58 on March 24, 2012, 11:56:30 PM To answer OP's question: no
GPUs can at least be sold back into the secondary gamer market. These FPGA boards are single purpose, so once you're done mining with them they're little better than expensive paper weights. I suppose you could harvest the actual FPGA off the board and sell that into some kind of grey market for used legacy parts. Sounds like a pain in the ass to me. |