ok i m in also

but do you have  an idea of when?

and if you have a wholesale price ,i would be interested in more than one


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We won't talk about the detail until we are ready. It's really market evaluation at the moment and whilst the base technology is in Cairnsmore2 we still have a little jump to what would be Cairnsmore3. That timeline is stretchy as this is one of many projects that we are doing and it isn't our most important project commercially. We also have a very major product launch coming so everyone here will involved in that for the next 2 months and that will hit everything that we do. So rather than promise timescales, as certain of competitors would do and then fail badly to keep them, I won't fix a timescale that could easily get broken. I know that will be a pain to people making decisions but just talking about what we are doing it is the best I can offer currently.

Most of them are. There may be an odd one we don't know about but failure rate is very much less than 1% over the very large build. I think it's fair to say that the cooling solution has done very well. Looks like we are building several hundred more in the nxt few weeks to keep up with current demand as well.

what is the difference between goliath and cairnsmore?

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Goliath the family name for our really big computing systems and encompasses a range of our technologies and is for a much wide range of applications. Basically it's our twist on a supercomputer.

Cairnsmore family is specifically Bitcoin targeted technology and generally much smaller thing than the overall Goliath concept. The Cairnsmore3 we are talking about here would be considered a "small" processing element or even a co-processor within a Goliath to put it in context. When used outside these systems but it can be a "small" system in it's own right.

We are still playing with the Cairnsmore2 design that is our current testbed design and that is looking good. Out of that work we think a base module of about 1TH/s is practical size for us to build overall units out of and that is what we are working on next. Please don't bombard us with emails or PMs asking about the price as at this point we won't say and it isn't even totally set. I can say it will be set generally by a combination market forces and manufacture costs so you can make a reasonable zone guess from existing competitiion pricing what that might be. However if that market price doesn't meet our expectations we probably won't launch the product and just feed the design into our internal Goliath systems. Assuming we do go for public launch (we are still examining IP issues as well) pricing will be available at formal product launch.

Anyway point of this post is to get a straw poll of how many people might be interested in products at this sort level of hardware investment?

The cooling solution is actually very good although it won't be easy to high density stack the units as the 2 big sides will need clearance for air to flow. It's a very simple solution to taking out 800W out of a box. As to the ASICs inside well someone needs to lay hands on one to check it out. It is likely to be either a lower technology ASIC like Avalon or a FPGA solution.

If they were as well funded as they say they are then they won't need to be so desperate to hang on to orders which they clearly are to anyone above the age of 5. They could have simply developed the product quitely and without the forum bashing they have had. So in my view you can take the choice of stupid (to pre-announce when unnecessary) or lying (they needed the pre-order money).

At the moment this is a test board but if we are going to make it a board for sale we will probably do a tidy up. The performance we get out of the technology is more of interest to us than anything. We can simulate and do all sorts of calculations to gauge the new chip operation and performance but nothing to beat having a chip on the bench working. We knew how good the CM1 cooling solution was so we just reused that for this test board and the main reason for using the CM1 format. It won't be long until we have the performance gauge and we will decide then our development path for CM2 and the Goliath systems.

As you all keep asking this is what what we are doing as regards Bitcoin mining. It is intended only as a test board for Goliath technology and yes it does look strangely familiar but you never know we might spin it as a product. It doesn't have the full Goliath functionality which is why we might sell it but it does have enough to be a competative Bitcoin solution. Please don't ask on the emails for more info or pricing as we are very busy currently. None will be forecoming until we are ready to talk more about what we are doing. Meanwhile enjoy!

Yohan

If you want to do it properly better add a microscope and a chip/board drying cabinet to all of that.

The logical approach for a manufacturer is a split between mining operations and selling units. That pretty much the best way for everyone as well. That covers capital and startup costs and reduces financial risk.  I wouldn't believe any manufacturer that said they were not going to mine or have a sister company/associate mine. Normal business sense would determine that as the path but maybe logic business sense doesn't apply here.

If you stuck for resistors and capacitors I would suggest buying from Digikey. Whilst not quite as far to go as as a China shipment we get ours here in the UK in about 36hrs. It's an excellent service and we buy millions of parts that way.

For the moment we not releasing what we have. This is a background project for us and our time is mainly being spent elsewhere. Basically we don't want any pressure of releasing, building, shipping and supporting a product at this time. I think we will continue that way for a while with Goliath going into test at a pace that suits us.

Well done. I'm looking forward to seeing the working unit results.

Cairnsmore1 schematics are now available on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/CAIRNSMORE1_ISSUE_1_1.pdf for those of you that want to do other things with your board.

Yohan

The big problem is that we don't any exchanges with a UK bank account access (at least as far as I know). Intersango used to work well when they had a UK bank account but they have lost their UK bank account and you might speculate why. MTgox had a strange setup where you could pay in but transfers out where like normal international transfers. However they too have lost their UK bank account.

One option which is a possibility is to open a UK bank account denominated in Euros (make sure it is SEPA compatible as this usually means cheap transfers) and use one of the exchanges using Euros/SEPA like bitcoin.de to do an interchange. This isn't totally simple but often in these accounts you can pay sterling in by normal transfer and the bank converts to Euros. A variation of this to have paired bank accounts of GBP and Euros at a bank. This might all be too much effort but is an option at least until such times as we have a working UK exchange/interface again.

Basically the value of the reclaimed chips is very low except under very special circumstances that they can't sourced any other way for legacy projects or you find a hobby engineer that wants one. To reclaim a chip also takes time and money as they have to be re-balled. The resultant chip is also less reliable that a nice new part.

Spartan-6 is likely to be in production for a further 10 years and they probably won't get scarce for a further 5 years after that. so wait 15 years and there might be a very small market.

Another issue is that business users are aware of clone/fake chips in the market and they will be resistant to buy anything not direct from an official distributor.

Our Cairnsmore1 is still available as a grade-B. Don't be put off by the grade-B as most of these are 760-840MH/s running a Glasswalker build. It's here http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/shop/en/107-cairnsmore-1-grade-b.html. I will say that we won't ship anything now until 3rd January as we are effectively shut down now for Christmas and New Year.

If you just want to tinker with FPGAs most bitcoin mining boards are not very good boards to learn FPGA design and programming. Many use XC6SLX150 FPGAs and these need a full expensive toolset to build a design. If you want to do some basic learning have a look at boards like our Polmaddie range which are aimed at teaching and learning and basically fairly cheap and simple to use.

The team at Enterpoint are having a break for Christmas and New Year and we will have a very minimal email support over the holiday period from 21st Dec to 7th Jan. After a year where the team have worked extremely hard they are having and deserve a big break from work. On behalf of all the team I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and particularly to thank all of you that purchased the many thousands of Cairnsmore1 we produced this year making the project a huge success.

We did some projections and believe that Cairnsmore1, as a Bitcoin mining board, will remain profitable for some time to come even though return has already halved and ASICs will further reduce profit if they actually appear. As with all these things we could be wrong and once we fire up Goliath we hope to put a little time into examining the viability of Litecoin mining on Cairnsmore1 as a possible alternative. That won't automatically mean that bitstream will be generated but that will be a consideration. It may be too expensive a task for us to justify doing it now so I don't want to promise it happening.

Yohan

This thread is now defunct. See newer threads on Goliath, Cairnsmore2, Cairnsmore3, Cairnsmore4 and Cairnsmore5.

Surprise will be the name of the game. I said that before if we were going to release anything it would be ready to ship before we announced it.