Go live this week, inc. Crypto.

The biggest gain is a software undervolt...

And none of those mods are necessary to see better than GPU performance per $ spent, at significantly less power. Some people just like to take it to extreme tuning as well.

- does anyone determine profitability including power for GPUs without any mods? The % you achieve without mods is about the same here.

First - Absolutely no one was suggesting you buy these to mine Keccak. Those who understand and take the time to read will profit, those who don’t won’t. Simple as that. Whitefire is providing a great service to the community in exposing all this publically - it has been working in private for a long time. He only stands to lose money sharing, yet he is sharing. I applaud that alone.

Second - You do realize no one has any incentive to provide you this bitstream and they have every incentive to keep it private, right? Also wasn’t developed for the VCU1525, just the same chip, so some modification is always needed.

At a certain point in life “bragging rights” have no value.

The people who do this understand the value of the Keccak test. It proves numerous things on this card - hardware limitations, power and thermals, achievable fabric speed at logic level, and performance of components. Take a look at the Keccak speeds on little baby precious classes of mining FPGAs. 100MH. Sometimes less.

FPGAs are not GPUs. Repeat that a few dozen times. The complexity of a best in class implementation on a large, complicated FPGA like this is very large. So are the gains when it is done right. So is the difference between the trivial implementation and the efficient implementation.

I can say that  all this functionality will be available in the cards come delivery in August. With proper protections. If the community has any say I’m sure open bitstreams will exist before then, we will see if they achieve the marks.

The open source implementation of Keccak are quite poor and see no where near this performance, and FPGAs operate < 1Ghz, where the graph slope is much narrower. You’re missing that this is more than 25x performance of a GPU in Keccak for 10x cost of that GPU. Keccak may not be profitable now on either (hint - it was very very recently), but the principle applies across the algorithm space.

You never got an answer in that - these are VCU1525s, not a custom design. Just specialized crypto pricing and some options to preconfigured voltage levels.

Mid to Late June for all orders and information. First batch ship a few weeks after.

It’s posisble some of the Acorn designs could be repurposed for users in x16 slots with these, but it’s less common to have and likely not worth the efforts when you can do so many other things with them.

All Mine is senseless’ company, but yes my company is a real company, it has been around a long time, and we do plenty of business with many multi-billion dollar companies internationally every day. I guess you didn’t look very far (such as my Acorn post), but that’s fine. I understand the concerns. I apologize if an attempt at humor came off snooty. It can get frustrating the number of people on here who don’t bother to read the posted information and then make accusations or imply that nefarious things are afoot. You can find my company and our public products at www.airsquirrels.com, as well as references to our non-public and confidential hardware activity.

I still wouldn’t make a post to this form saying “Hey $20M worth of FPGAs are in this warehouse in Canton, Ohio at this address.” That’s just unnecessary security exposure.

Perhaps Senseless can update on this board on the group buy, since it has morphed a bit. The main reason the final details haven’t been posted is we can’t legally until next week.  No one is asking for funding. I, personally, have taken a “not cheap” amount of my, personal money and secured a production run and large order of cards at very good prices specifically so this community wouldn’t get screwed over by the markup in this industry and low volume pricing, and to support FPGA participation in this market and options other than ASICs.

Also, insurance is great - but no insurance is going to help losing al your inventory and customers orders and having to replace parts with a multi-month lead time.

Can you clarify what you’re offering?

Higher end CPUs can be interesting, but system memory matters more if you’re trying to use the accelerator with CPU***

What url/ browser?

Risers are fine but less gain. All algorithms in general can run on it, it is as flexible as a GPU as far as programming, but of course not all are profitable and FPGAs have different strengths.

Sorry that’s vague, if I specify one algorithm as good profit but don’t post all the info suddenly people are parroting the information incorrectly and people get confused. I’m not taking anyone’s money so patience is the name of the game. Most of the algorithm details are in the first post anyway.

Detailed performance numbers by configuration, GPU, and part are coming - it’s a lot of testing and people are already confused without adding partial information to the mix.

Shoot me a pm with your contact info. This is already setup

Not to jump in, but I’m handling the physical side. This volume of goods is cheap in the big world tbh. Also kind of funny to imply physical security is a risk and then ask for the address of the warehouse holding the cards in a public forum.

You clearly didn’t read the blob of text.

It is better to use fewer GPUs, as long as your PCIe bandwidth andsupports it. You must be able to have at least 4x PCIe 2.0 lanes of bandwidth to the GPUs you are accelerating. That is 8 GPUs in 1x, which is not the ideal.

The maximum lift total per accelerator is around 30MH normally, as stated in post. There are some algorithms where there is 60. In all non-standalone cases the PCIe bandwidth becomes bottleneck before accelerator performance.

Unfortunately if you don’t have any place with at least 4x PCIe 2.0 it will be difficult to use in the GPU hybrid role. You would be limited to standalone algorithms.

That’s correct.

The big FPGAs are capable 19+ sustained KH (dwarfminer actually confirmed such a close accurate number earlier I believe they’ve done it..

Based on Snow White, you need ~ 250 GB/s to achieve, maybe less because you have some onboard SRAM. 4 chips GDDR sized, maybe dual ported QDR. Let’s give you 128 bit interfwce, at 7Gbps (GDDR). You have 112 Gbps, let’s assume good in-chip SRAM. You have more than enough AES. You need 4W for the ram minimum, maybe other chip is efficient AES chip? so just housekeeping in FPGA?

It is reasonable. 50% markup on BOM.

One Acorn can help multiple GPUs depending on algorithm, you can use two in two M.2 slots.

This information all existed in the discord but I wanted to share it with everyone.

So we’ve developed an FPGA accelerator over the past few months in M.2 (same as nVME drives) form factor designed to operate both standalone and in conjunction with GPUs.

The first version to be released has 4x high speed PCIe lanes to communicate between the system/GPUs as well as 512MB or 1GB of onboard DDR3 along with a 100k+ LE or 200k+ LE FPGA of high speed grade. We’ve named it the Acorn, and the three models are the CLE-101, CLE-215, and CLE-215+

General expectation is it will provide performance roughly scaled with price/performance of the VCU1525, but it has a unique role and is not applicable to all of the same algorithms. Its performance in this role is dominated by its interconnect bandwidth and not its processing power.

It is capable of providing up to 30MH of lift to a mining system with GPUs on a hand full of algorithms or operate independently at higher-than-GPU level hashrates for other non-memory intensive algorithms (Keccak, etc). I will be releasing it alongside our mining software and bitstreams to support hybrid GPU acceleration. This project was not developed commercially, it was developed out of a product for my day job for internal use in our own mining systems to give an edge to traditional PCs and gaming systems turned miners.

The accelerator works by streaming high bandwidth hash state between GPUs and the FPGA over PCIe., allowing each piece of hardware to handle the portion of the algorithm it is best at. In general this means memory bandwidth or area heavy portions of the algorithm may be handled by the GPU, and hash algorithms designed for hardware implementations are handled by the FPGA. This approach works for any algorithm whose internal state is 256 bit (60Mh gains) or 512 bit (x16r, Lyra2Rev2, etc.) or smaller. The accelerator supports rapidly reconfiguring its algorithms from on-board DDR to enable handling of per-block or period (TimeTravel10) re-sequencing. It was designed originally to provide performance gains (especially for older GPUs with poor cores) and power savings for ETH by way of offloading the opening and closing Keccak calculations, as well as hash-selection to improve locality of reference for early ETH rounds.

Given the anticipated path of ETH itself regarding POS and other fork possibilities please consider all those things if ETH is your target. It may be the most popular coin for GPUs, that does not mean it is the best use of FPGA or hybrid tech.

I’ve decided to make this hardware available to community at near cost, given all the FPGA interest lately, alongside my belief that broadly available general purpose acceleration hardware at its true market cost (not low volume industry specific dev boards) is the best defense against complete ASIC centralization. You will see this philosophy reflected in my activity around the VCU1525 board as well.

Anticipated pre-order prices of $199 for the CLE-101 512MB variant and $329 on the high end highest speed grade CLE-215+ 1GB DRAM version. On-board power consumption is nominally 15W. It will include a heatsink adequate for this dissipation level with reasonable airflow. It is important to note that to fit the FPGA this adapter is slightly outside of the 2280 M.2 specification, weighing in at 2380. The vast majority of M.2 slots should not have an issue with this.

I am also pursuing making available well priced options for individual PCIe x4 to M.2 M-key host boards (these are broadly available for $10-15), as well as Quad-M.2 PCIe switched and Bifurcated x16 host boards for those who do not have the available M.2 M-Key slots or require up to 240MH of acceleration.

I won’t post exact per algorithm stats or performance until I can do final testing of the actual boards to be shipped with the release hardware/heatsink/thermal management pieces in place, at which point I’ll accept pre-orders. This device requires quite a bit of testing to cover the list of common GPUs, PCIe configurations, and supported algorithms. I have no desire to sell anyone anything not useful to them, or to push a board at all, let alone one based on 3D renders, prototype parts pictures, or choppy YouTube videos, so I believe this full set of data along with final product pictures and overview must be published before I will take any preorders. I am sorry if that tests your patience.

Prototypes exist and I’ve already secured most of the hardware for a first batch so lead time will only be PCB + assembly.

At the time of shipping I will be releasing our internal miner software in closed source form for Windows and Linux that supports GPU only as well as Hybrid acceleration. You’re also welcome to develop your own bitstreams for the accelerator, and will have all the specifications necessary to do so.

I will also be publishing the interface for the bitstreams so that open source miners that wish to can use the FPGA directly.

We are handling all CE, FCC, RoHS, and other certifications as well as ITAR and export compliance, so we will be able to ship to all non-US embargo’d countries. Taxes and import duties will fall on the purchaser. We will be offering at least a 90 day warranty.

All feedback is welcome. This is not my source of income, nor that of the rest of my team, and we don’t want anyone’s money unless they are happy with what we’re offering. I’m also happy to continue conversations I am already having with coin devs and miner developers on how or if FPGAs fit into their plans for their coin and/or ASIC Resistance strategies. This community is about choice, and I will respect the choices of those teams.

So all I would like from all of you beyond the feedback, is for anyone interested to hit our pre-order registration survey at http://www.squirrelsresearch.com to help us ensure we’re covering your needs and wants and have all the appropriate hardware secured. Based on that info very detailed performance information and full device photos (spoiler - it looks like an SSD with a heatsink on it!) will be published at the time preorders open, expected in mid-June.

- David